[Letter to the editor] Security Services - then and now

The current international debate relating to press freedom, while seemingly a surprise to the mainstream media, is no surprise to those of us who have been watching the slow erosion of liberties over the last couple of decades, as our governments move us down the path to the totalitarian Right, déjà vu the 1930s. With a new mega department taking over the duties of security agencies, as well as immigration and border security, the Australian government has created a large bureaucracy with competing aims and objectives and a Minister in Peter Dutton who seems impervious to the concerns for empathy and compassion, and has no understanding of the separation of powers or our obligations as signatories to dozens of UN conventions. But it has always been so. Few will remember the censorship during WW1 and the news blackout of the bombing of Darwin in WW2, not to mention the outrageous lies from Vietnam and our following endeavours in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.