‘History, and not only ancient history, shows that in countries where democratic institutions have been unconstitutionally superseded, it has been done not seldom by those holding the executive power. Forms of government may need protection from dangers likely to arise from within the institutions to be protected. In point of constitutional theory, the power to legislate for the protection of an existing form of government ought not to be based on a conception that the Constitution intends to protect itself or guard its own continuance by making a place for a particular law. It should rest simply upon the view that the defence of the country is not limited to resistance to external attack but extends to the protection of the body politic from internal subversion, whether instigated from without or not. But in such matters to leave the limits of power to the judgment of the legislature or of the executive is to abandon the Constitution to the supremacy of the political discretion of those whose duty it is to obey and maintain it.’

 – Australian Communist Party v Commonwealth (1951) 83 CLR 1 at 187 (Dixon J).

‘Pact for the Future’ sounds harmless.

Last September at the UN’s Summit of the Future, member states adopted the pact and annexed a Global Digital Compact (GDC) promising universal connectivity, interoperable standards, ‘safer’ online spaces, and guardrails for AI.

The communiqué language is warm, anodyne – and easy to agree to.

But the practical effect is to align national laws, platforms, and payments infrastructure with a single set of digital ‘norms’ enforced – not by world police – but by standards, funding conditions, platform rules, and regulatory muscle often blindly adhered to by all institutions (as we seen during Covid).

That’s how good intentions become an operating system for control, surveillance, and oppression.

Australia publicly joined the consensus on the pact; CANZ (Canada-Australia–New Zealand) had already filed joint comments endorsing a ‘practical, action-oriented’ outcome.

The direction of travel across the Anglosphere is the same: translate the pact’s aspirations into domestic levers, whether it involved public consultation or not.

Indeed, many Western democracies have become parodies of dystopian democracies, shielded in concealment and supported by subservient institutions, who merely act as loyal praetorian guards and gatekeepers.3

The pitch vs the plumbing

On paper, the GDC is a motherhood statement: universal internet access, human rights online, data governance, interoperability, and – note the euphemism – ‘information integrity’.

It’s non-binding, but that misses the point.

Norms and standards drive procurement, grants, trade conditions, multilateral ‘best practice’, and, crucially, platform rules. That’s where ‘co-operation’ becomes governability – of citizens, businesses, and speech.

Look at the plumbing already going in…

Digital identity. Australia’s Digital ID Act 2024 commenced in December 2024, expanding an accreditation regime and the Commonwealth’s ID system under statutory privacy and assurance settings. New Zealand legislated a Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Act in 2023. The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) gives Ofcom sweeping enforcement powers via binding codes and investigations that are now underway. Canada’s Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) mapped broad platform duties before lapsing at the September 2025 prorogation. Each instrument is distinct; together they snap to the GDC’s calls for interoperability, ‘safety’ and data governance.

Programmable money. Central banks are building capacity. The Reserve Bank of Australia (with Treasury and the DFCRC) is mid-way through Project Acacia, a multi-year program exploring tokenised settlement rails (wholesale first; retail only if a future polity decides).

The Bank of England has moved the digital pound into a formal design phase – no issuance decision yet. Safety → moderation → censorship. The UK’s OSA imposes legal duties with fines up to £18 million or 10 per cent of global revenue; Ofcom has opened multiple formal investigations and active enforcement programs. The policy instinct is clear: regulators set expectations; platforms translate them into terms of service; citizens feel the end result as access throttles.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand says the earliest a retail ‘digital cash’ would be launched is 2030.

The Bank of Canada continues design and privacy research for a potential retail CBDC. No conspiracy – just steady capability build.

The Covid stress test: fear, QR codes and coercion

The last five years showed how quickly a liberal society can normalise fear and blind compliance.

QR check-ins became mandatory across NSW businesses in July 2021; movement and gathering orders were rolled out by executive decree; and the Service NSW check-in system persisted through reopening phases.

You could not go to place of worship for fear of breaching social distancing rules, but you could go to a brothel. You could sit but not stand in the same establishment. You could not see loved ones in hospital, however you could attend alcohol stores to purchase alcohol.

New South Wales implemented emergency protocols, but never declared an emergency. Yes… And the institutional deference was palpable and senseless.

Policing escalated from public-health enforcement to suppression of dissent. A pregnant Ballarat woman was arrested for a Facebook post promoting a protest; two years later, the incitement charge was dropped. In Melbourne, police fired projectiles and pepper spray at protesters around the Shrine of Remembrance, with mainstream outlets describing ‘rubber bullets’ or hard-foam baton rounds.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has now tabled Collateral Damage – a national report finding Australia’s pandemic response did not adequately consider or protect people’s human rights, echoing criticisms also levelled by international NGOs.

Amnesty International similarly documented undue restrictions on protest in NSW and the punitive use of Covid fines. These are not fringe views; they are formal assessments.

Timing mattered. While small firms like ours ran principle-of-legality challenges in real time (without institutional support), described the gene injections as damaging therapies, the national watchdogs mostly sat it out – issuing retrospective commentary instead of timely intervention, institutions duty-bound to balance executive power became turnstiles allowing anything and everything through. Even now the response is anaemic: recommendations without enforcement, press releases without follow-through.

Australians needed watchdogs, not historians.

We raised the hard issues when it counted: civil conscription (s 51(xxiiiA) of the Constitution) and the coercive edge of mandates; the Nuremberg Code’s bedrock of informed consent; the ICCPR guarantees against degrading treatment and for bodily autonomy; and the Siracusa Principles – necessity, legality, proportionality, least-restrictive means, and strict time limits.

We put forward evidence from injured and deceased persons, backed by coronial material, while institutions chose caution over courage a palpable level of deference that persists in a bubble of legal positivism devoid of natural concepts and confounding reality. They stayed in the trenches until the shelling stopped – then fixed bayonets and charged across no-man’s-land as if the guns were still blazing (years later), performing outrage after the damage was done.

This is an appeal, not for vengeance, but for accountability with spine: oversight that moves when rights are on the line – not years later when the headlines are safe and they can pretend they stood when it counted. QR codes and apps dominated the privileges given to citizens because constitutional rights were eroded.

This matters because the method – fear signals, risk inflation, compliance-by-app, and the squeeze of police and platform rules – has become a reusable template.

As Ulrich Beck argued in Risk Society, late-modern politics is organised around managing manufactured risks, spawning ‘organised irresponsibility’ in which power disperses across standards bodies, regulators, and platforms.

Under that logic, ‘safety’ is operationalised through code, procurement and terms of service; reflexive modernisation then re-engineers society to mitigate hazards that institutions themselves helped create, normalising precautionary controls.

The rhetoric is interoperability and integrity; the reality is governance by infrastructure – Digital ID, integrity programs, and programmable payments that shift rights into permissions. Intellectual inquiry yields to technocratic management; accountability is outsourced; dissent is administratively inconvenient.

Call it ‘mass formation’, ‘groupthink’, or simple deference to authority – the effect is the same: fear and insecurity are leveraged to justify compliance-by-app while police and platform rules provide the squeeze.

The architecture outlives the emergency; the template remains on the shelf, ready for redeployment.

Define the end-state plainly: social credit

A social credit system ties identity to a persistent, data-driven reputation and uses it to condition access to services, mobility, finance, or opportunities – rewarding ‘good’ behaviour and punishing ‘bad’.

China’s system is often caricatured as a single nationwide score (it isn’t), but credible research documents blacklists, redlists, and data-sharing that produce very real penalties such as travel restrictions and access limits. The form varies; the function is consistent: behavioural compliance via data-linked incentives and sanctions. That is what liberal democracies must avoid.

Now map the stack: Digital ID (who you are) + interoperable data (what you do) + platform duties (what you may say) + programmable payments (what you may buy).

Add administrative enthusiasm for ‘information integrity’ pumped out by bureaucrats and state-run media and you have the tooling to score citizens without ever legislating a ‘score’. Access becomes conditional; dissent becomes risky; compliance becomes the path of least resistance as institutional deference is entrenched.

So what happened to the passport, driver’s licenses and national ID cards? It is clear that identity is not the true reason here!

Quotas for travel and food? Don’t scoff – read the literature

For years, academics and policy shops have proposed Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs): per-person carbon budgets with deductions at point of purchase (fuel, electricity, flights), tradable in a market and ratcheted down over time. This isn’t enacted law – but it is a detailed, administrative blueprint that becomes trivially implementable once identity, payments and data are integrated – it’s like laying pipes in the trench. The papers are explicit about per-transaction deductions and coverage expansions. That’s a quota system – policed by the checkout.16

The Digital ID Act 2024 (Cth) (Australia) doesn’t hand out carbon rations – but that’s precisely the point. By itself, it’s just plumbing: the pipes and valves of a national identity system. What it doesn’t do is stop Parliament from turning that plumbing into a tap for quotas. With one stroke of enabling legislation in energy, tax or climate law (etc), the same digital rails could be used to deduct carbon credits at the checkout, ratchet down personal budgets, sanction citizens for attending public gatherings as was the case during Covid and enforce a rationing regime dressed up as ‘sustainability’.

The danger is not what’s written in the Act, but how effortlessly it can be repurposed by future governments into the machinery of control.

Pair PCAs with a retail CBDC or programmable intermediated rails that allow policy-based rules (even if only ‘temporarily’ in emergencies) and you’ve built a turnkey rationing mechanism.

Central banks emphasise privacy and deny intentions to surveil spending; they also design systems with programmability features and compliance hooks – features the Bank of England is openly exploring in its design work, and which the RBA’s pilots have demonstrated in wholesale contexts. The capability is what counts in constitutional design. Prohibit value-based restrictions in statute up-front or expect them in the next ‘crisis’. Although no decision has been made to finalise this process, there are concerns that former State figures and their families will benefit greatly from this process.

The constitutional and philosophical bottom line

A free society runs on the principle of legality: if the state will coerce, it must do so clearly, proportionately and under reviewable authority. The modern trend is the opposite – delegate to regulators, outsource to platforms, and enforce through private terms and programmable rails. Formally, rights remain. Functionally, life becomes permissioned.

The antidote is not nihilism; it’s hard law:

Digital ID: Express statutory bans on linking Digital ID to access for essential private services (banking, utilities, retail payments). Bar de facto compulsion via licensing or procurement. Outlaw any scoring/ranking of natural persons by government or regulated entities for access to lawful services. (Australia’s Digital ID is presently described as voluntary – keep it that way, in law and in practice.). However, if it is anything like the voluntarily involuntary Covid gene therapies thrust on the population, it is clear that the government may incentivise private businesses to carry the burden while they lay the plumbing.

Speech rules: Limit ‘information integrity’ programs to unlawful content with transparent, narrow definitions and strict due process. No back-door mandates through ‘voluntary’ codes enforced by the threat of platform penalties. (Ofcom’s OSA playbook shows how quickly guidance becomes enforcement.)

CBDCs/digital cash: If adopted, legislate cash-equivalence – including offline capacity, strict caps on metadata retention, and an absolute prohibition on policy-based spending controls. The RBA’s current stance – no strong case for a retail CBDC now – should not lull Parliament into ignoring design choices being made in the UK, NZ, and Canada.

Lessons from Covid: vigilance, not vengeance

From QR check-ins and movement orders to heavy-handed policing of social media posts and street protests, the means of control are now proven. Australia’s own Human Rights Commission has recorded the human cost. We should be honest: it wasn’t the virus we failed to understand, it was the level of regulatory capture and bureaucratic overreach we were willing to tolerate – compounded by institutional incentives to conceal, not to contest.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. As Dixon J cautioned in the Communist Party Case, history shows it is often those already holding executive power who dismantle democratic institutions under the guise of protecting them. That warning rings louder today, when the real battleground lies not only in Parliament but in the standards rooms, the platform rulebooks, community guidelines (a euphemism for censorship) and the algorithms that now move our money, with or without your consent, but allegedly for your own good.

The drift will only end when Parliament imposes hard statutory red lines, before ‘norms’, pilots, and ‘best practice’ ossify into a scored society. Restoring real bicameralism is not nostalgia – it is a necessity. A contest of ideas must replace the cartel of parties; scrutiny must be rebooted; the executive must once again answer to two Houses worthy of the name.

In the end, one test remains: will Australians choose duty to country over loyalty to power structures that have already failed them and seek to oppress them further?

A true patriot rises regardless of the abuser – whether power is overreached by government itself or imposed from external quarters. The duty remains the same: to defend liberty with courage, clarity, and resolve.