Recently, though, Australia’s decline has accelerated with remarkably little opposition. The Sydney Morning Herald even ran a piece headlined: “‘Missing in action’: What happened to the civil liberties movement?” about the tepid pushback against pandemic restrictions.

“We don’t have much of a human rights culture, unlike, for example, Canada and America and Europe,” Sarah Joseph, a professor of human rights law at Griffith University, told the newspaper in explanation.

“Australia also has no tradition of liberty in a sense Americans might understand, and appeals to freedom are looked at suspiciously,” confirms Morrow.

One problem is that Australia has no Bill of Rights to which a liberty-concerned minority can turn when politicians push restrictions on freedom that enjoy at least temporary popular support, as they have in the United States as well as Australia. Some Australians even boast about that absence.