Is anyone else concerned about the direction our once laid-back, freedom-loving nation is headed?

Thanks to serious errors in government policy, the high-trust social environment of Australia has been torn apart by violent crime and a wave of petty theft so severe that it is changing the culture of Australia.

No more unlocked doors or kids playing outside on their own.

No more leaving a bag at the table while paying for coffee or unattended possessions on the sand while going for a swim. These are seen as invitations to thieves instead of the ordinary privilege of a first-world nation.

This is not the country most of us were born into and instead of repairing the situation through a strict code of punishment and eviction toward those who offend, it is the Australian people who are being punished.

The punishment takes many forms, including tax rises and insurance hikes.

In Western Australia, they are trialling a different punishment under the dubious headline of ‘public safety’.

Some have argued this project risks turning Western Australia into a Chinese-style surveillance state.

The government’s Live Facial Recognition Technology trial began on June 22 and finished earlier this week.

No, no one voted for it. No, no one signed off to have their privacy invaded in public spaces.

In typical Labor style, it happened regardless.

Just as social media censorship is sold as ‘child protection’, so too is the new era in surveillance technology, described by the government as, ‘A powerful tool for the prevention and detection of crime, finding missing persons, and the protection of the public.’

They also added it was ‘…rolled out to prevent and detect crime, find wanted and dangerous criminals, safeguard vulnerable people, such as children, and to protect people from harm, keeping the community safe.’

The technology works through cameras that detect faces in real time and ‘compares them against strictly controlled alert lists consisting only of lawfully held police images’.

‘Images of community members who were not on the alert list were automatically pixelated in real time and were not saved. There was no record-keeping of this data.’

Something can be true and also be a poor or unsuitable solution for the problem at hand. We know from experience that it is not only possible but preferable to run a safe law-abiding society in this country without heavy-handed surveillance. We’ve done it for generations.

Now, instead of correcting whatever might have gone wrong in justice, policing, education, and migration policies, the Labor state government has followed its dictatorial peers in Europe and China and decided to set us down a path where the government has eyes on everyone, everywhere.

What could possibly go wrong?

Following the conclusion of the trial, the government proudly announced that 1.3 million people had their faces scanned.

From this, 122 people were arrested.

146 registered sex offenders were identified.

A further 10 people were identified to ‘ascertain their welfare’.

As we know from Victoria, police can arrest as many people as they want but if those individuals are released on bail or given repeated wrist-slaps, they become empowered to escalate their offences. It is not the catching that’s the problem, it is the punishment.

At the end of the trial, it was confirmed that there were 9 incorrect alerts issued. This implies that 9 completely innocent people were temporarily caught up in the police system.

The question is not how many extra criminals we can tag (and presumably immediately release back into the wild, because that appears to be how the justice system is run these days), but what kind of society we want to create for the vast majority of ordinary Australians.

Privacy and anonymity from the government was once considered a point of pride and hallmark of a civilised nation. We used to look on the billion-plus masses of China under the thumb of Beijing’s communist dictatorship and ‘tut’ at the horror.

How suffocating it must be, we said, to have the state scan your face every time you step outside the house. Why are we suddenly begging for the same treatment?

WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch said: ‘This evaluation will help us understand the technology’s potential role in frontline policing.’

One human rights lawyer observed that the technology ‘is going to catch more Aboriginal people’ because ‘[the program] is looking for people with outstanding warrants’ and that ‘we know Aboriginal people are over-represented here’.

In my view, this kind of logic is nonsense. It is like complaining that more men are incarcerated than women when the answer is not biased policing, but rather a statistical truth behind offending.

The problem with the technology is not what kind of offenders it catches. It is the imposition on law-abiding citizens.

Should the people of Western Australia be asked if they want AI facial recognition surveillance?

It seems like a major escalation of technology in an age where all biometric information is entering the digital world.

Consent over biometric data was raised, but never resolved, just prior to the Covid pandemic when stores were scanning the faces of customers for known shoplifters. Why? Because of policing failures. Instead of resolving the policing and justice issues, commercial retailers were starting to take the protection of their business into their own hands.

Then, when customer backlash emerged, the Covid pandemic normalised facial scanning and vaccination certificates as entry requirements.

After those additional features were removed, the public sort of ‘forgot’ about the (comparatively) lower burden of facial recognition even though it represented a severe change from retail conditions prior to the year 2000.

We never had the necessary discussion about biometric data.

In other words, Covid boiled the frog on biometric surveillance technology and now the scalded frogs are sitting on the plate, cooling off, unaware of how damaged they really are.

While police have been clear that the system does not save data related to people who are not on a watchlist (perhaps, unless they are identified in error?), this does not mean that the technology is immune from hacking.

With cybercrime from malicious foreign governments and dangerous anti-democratic activists causing havoc around the world (see the ongoing freezer war in Europe), how can police and government guarantee that a technology spying on people in real time won’t (and can’t) be co-opted by nefarious players?

It is widely reported by members of the Australian Chinese community that the CCP attempts to gather intelligence on them while inside Australia. ASIO’s Director-General, Mike Burgess, has repeatedly warned that foreign interference is a principal security concern. The Australian Financial Review reported: ‘The ASIO boss in November [2025] said Chinese cyber groups had been caught trying to access critical infrastructure networks.’

And while there is no suggestion that malicious intent is a part of the system, its potential for misuse at the hands of uninvited third parties is something we must consider with utmost urgency in a world increasingly governed by digital crime.

After all, it is unlikely European supermarkets thought the convenience of internet-connected freezers for ease of maintenance would become the front-line in a war against democracy. Yet that is what they are dealing with today.

When police and the Western Australian government review this technology, let us hope that they include not only its efficiency catching criminals, but also its scope for potential harm.

Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.

The post Behold, Western Australia’s march toward a Chinese-style surveillance state appeared first on The Spectator Australia.