Preparing for a dictator down under?

In Australia, laws restricting the right to strike have proved very effective in curbing worker activism. Strikes are legal but only if trade union leaders jump through procedural hoops. As long as trade unions follow the law, workers are kept in check.

Then there are activists, for example animal liberationists and climate campaigners. Laws against protest can help, but just as valuable are laws that hamstring facilitators of protest: non-government organisations with charitable status that intervene in social issues by making public comments rather than restricting themselves to welfare tasks.

Enemies

Fourth, it is essential to condition the population to think in terms of us and them, with "them" being some out-group that can be stigmatised and scapegoated. Dictators need to have enemies, external or internal. The traditional out-group has been foreign enemies, preferably ones that are far away and look different. Perhaps more effective is to find out-groups closer to home. There are lots of choices: terrorists, criminals, paedophiles and asylum seekers. Usually, the weaker they are, the safer it is to paint them as dangerous threats to "our" way of life and justify strong measures to penalise them. The point of this is to encourage people to look downwards and definitely not to turn against the rich and powerful.

Outrage needs continual reinforcement. So it can help to find new targets for fear-mongering, ones that can be positioned as being "them" and not "us."

Acquiescence

Fifth, to prepare for a dictator, people need to be accustomed to acquiescing. They need to feel it is their duty to obey those in command, and even to serve the powerful without being asked. They need to acquiesce to surveillance, to gross economic inequality, to corruption and to cutting back on human rights.

This is one area where too many Australians are pushing back. Despite laws discouraging protest, there are thousands of groups and initiatives. Numerous issues are triggering resistance, most notably climate change, but also sexual assault and treatment of Indigenous people and refugees. Creating out-groups doesn't always work all that well, as some of them fight back and build broad alliances.

For a while, it looked like Covid provided the ideal opportunity to foster acquiescence. Those who opposed control measures provided a convenient new out-group. Rulers around the world have used Covid as a pretext for repressive control. But in Australia, the initial acquiescence began cracking, with protests in the streets and lots of individual discontent.

Conclusion

Australian leaders have done what they can to prepare the country for a much more authoritarian government, one that will trample civil liberties and crush sources of resistance. Governments have taken the lead in this process by setting up systems to monitor the population, ensure the impunity of state agents, pacify protest and get people to think of the world in us-them terms, with "them" being relatively powerless groups.

So far, though, widespread acquiescence has not been achieved. Activist-minded Australians have learned from people-power movements around the world, and contributed to them. The proud tradition of worker activism includes the Australian innovation of green bans, while climate activism has been a continual thorn in the side of one of the world's most highly entrenched fossil-fuel lobbies. A dictatorship may not be around the corner, but you can't blame the government for not doing its best to lay the groundwork.