I like Australia. It is warm (and that is always attractive in a Southern winter) than New Zealand, richer than New Zealand, and they made Aussie Rules. You have to give them credit for that.

But their regulators are the most micro managing, brain dead group of zealots in the world. They have no understanding of limits of power. From deciding that driving at 51 km/h is a serious crime to trying to stop strong encryption, they are reliably stupid.

Their journos are no better.

Taken together, it appears the Australian government is proposing one of the following: That providers of encrypted messaging services create a backdoor for themselves to allow decryption to occur whenever the cops or spies demand it, or the service providers are forced to man-in-the-middle their own protocols; as for handset makers, they have been warned they will need to co-operate with law enforcement and may entail having to push compromised operating systems or messaging applications onto suspects, or inform the government when they are notified of a 0-day bug, and give the government time to compromise their targets; or all of the above.

The core issue is that all these schemes boil down to putting a genie back in the bottle, and to mix analogies, not only has the encrypted messaging horse bolted, but it is three paddocks over and never coming back to the stable.

Australia has decided it is the jurisdiction that will jump into a legal quagmire with both feet, and it is a brave call for a nation that is nowhere near being called a superpower and has little leverage on the predominately US-based corporations it wishes to bring to heel.

If Apple was willing to stand up to the US Justice Department and the FBI in 2016, what makes the brains trust in Canberra think it hasn’t just signed up to years and years of legal wrangling?

Australia is a rounding error on Apple’s financials, and if Cupertino wanted to make an example of the country, it could pull up stumps and force Australians to import its devices themselves — and probably increase its market share in the process.

As governments become more attuned to the threats posed in the IT space, the first reaction is to reflexively clamp down on them.

Were roles reversed and it was the United States pushing for the nebulous changes Australia is after, perhaps something would be done to satisfy the wants of lawmakers.

Australian culture has a particularly awful “love it or leave it” saying, and in the instance of Canberra trying to dictate to multinationals how their products should work, and what features they have, or demanding a new compromised update system, the “leave it” option could always be used.

It would be no less than we deserve for allowing our leaders to prosecute ridiculous claims in the past, and letting them get away with it.

The state of the metadata retention scheme is a good example of this, where it was eventually settled that access would be reduced to 21 agencies, yet the department responsible for overseeing the scheme was advising agencies without access to use other means of gaining the data if they could.

In the recent debate surrounding the collection of GST by online vendors such as eBay and Alibaba, the Australian Taxation Office said it was leaving the prospect of blocking auction sites that did not collect the tax on the table, while eBay said it might end up blocking Australians first.

Australian leadership is caught between the lofty goals of a AU$1.1 billion innovation agenda and potentially a new space agency, and always managing to have a knee-jerk and Luddite reaction to anything new online.

In a world where Canberra is successful and wins every argument it makes, will our Prime Minister be happy when Moscow or Beijing have their own warrants demanding Apple and Google use the their Australian-inspired processes to compromise a device?

At the present time, it might be best if we were sent to our room with no dinner to think about what we did and intend to do. Because if Australia is successful, the internet will be a less safe place for everyone, not just the “bad guys” the government wishes to track.

Please ignore us, hopefully it is a phase that we will grow out of.

New Zealand has a space agency. We have a functional software industry. And we accept that strong encryption exists.

But then, we have no illusions about being a large nation. We know that we are merely a rounding error for all multinationals.

We also know that immigration will not solve this.

Can I add to this comment: Auckland is no longer New Zealand, as Sydney and Melbourne are not Australia. The parallels are there: NZ also has had a marked increase in immigration to the point where two of the parties in parliament (Labour and NZ First) have anti immigration policies in their manifestos for the coming election.

I will state it for the record that Melbourne and Sydney are not Australia. They are some sort of hybrid futuristic nightmare landscapes, completely detached from the Australian culture that exists outside their boundaries. But these multicultural megalopolises suck in the wealth of the nation as governments frantically attempt to patch over the ever widening cracks that these gigantic disasters are beginning to fall through.

Now the property bubble is starting to affect regional towns as well, as native Australians begin fleeing from Sydney and Melbourne. And all the while the city of Canberra, capital of the nation and home to the public service, sits serene and content in its exclusivity and wealth that is built on the back of the engorged salaries that bureaucrats now enjoy as opposed to those suffering in the private sector.

The great horror for Australian politicians of the last 10 years has been a potential downturn in China and the complete end of the mining boom in the West. To that end they have actively engineered a false messiah, equating the wealth of the nation to a continually rising population. But as native Australians are forced to watch their adult children trading in suburban backyards for tiny apartments in Chinese designed high rise apartment towers, slowly the penny is dropping for sections of the media as well.

The question is not whether the conversation will begin but if it is already far too late to have it.

It is not too late. The progressive time is ending. This is the time of the next beginning.