Here is Clive Hamilton:
ASIO, Australia’s premier domestic spy agency, has had its resources expanded enormously over the past decade. Its surveillance and interrogation powers have also been extended, to the point where in the view of some legal experts, such as University of New South Wales professor George Williams, they approach those of a police state.
Savvy campaigners now assume that their communications are being routinely monitored. Greenpeace activists, for example, are in the habit of turning off their mobile phones when discussing campaigns.
Sounds terrible – why would the authorities monitor law-abiding individuals? Oh, wait …
It’s time to act. A people’s revolution is required. Democracy is failing us. So far, smugness and stupidity seem a more likely sinkhole for the democratic experiment than the bloodshed and tyranny that George Washington predicted, but if climate change really gets going it could still come to that.
(HT: Tim Blair)