LISA Chesters has just crossed the floor to join Tony Abbott in passing one of the most draconian bills ever conceived.
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Thanks to Ms Chesters and the rest of the ALP ministers who support the bill, every Australian will now have "metadata" - details about their online communications, their searches, places they take their phones, websites they visit and all of the most personal details about what they do and where they go online - stored for the government to search through at a whim.
All while forcing private Australian companies to bear the huge costs of retaining trillions of data points about their customers' most intimate personal details.
Do these politicians understand what they're even demanding these companies do, or the security risks involved?
Is it going to take someone leaking their metadata to their constituents before they comprehend the chilling damage they've done to freedom in Australia?
Has Ms Chesters even read the bill?
We've heard from independent MPs that they were literally not even given enough time to read the amendments before the Liberal/Labor coalition held their kangaroo vote.
We now live in a country where everything we ever do - and a lot of what we even think - will be recorded so that the government can have it "just in case" they ever want to charge someone with a crime.
If the government's rhetoric about it "only" being metadata wasn't entirely based on their own ignorance and was actually a meaningful argument, it would nullify the entire point of collecting it because it would be - as they claim - worthless.
The unfortunate truth is that Ms Chesters and the other MPs who voted for this bill just took a giant step towards making Australia an Orwellian dystopia.
The ALP and LNP have conspired to sell out the freedom and privacy of their constituents by forcing all of their most personal and intimate details to be recorded for the government to rummage through whenever they desire.
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