Here’s the response I couldn’t give:

“One of the reasons I left Victoria decades ago was my perception that that state was not just losing personal freedoms but that Victorians actually wanted things that way. Is this a crack in that “groupthink” mentality?

Regardless Victorians are not alone with these sorts of restrictions. Geoff mentions Uluru, let me tell you a little story about that place, whose “Ulurules” are more akin to North Korea than outback Australia.

I run a media production and service company in Alice Springs and can verify that more than 80% of all filming permits are refused at Uluru/Kata Tjuta National Park due to a mind-numbing bureaucracy . Recent filming refusals include the Royal Ballet, BBC Natural History Unit and BBC Science. One of their Lawyers sent me a threatening letter to remove an image of Kata Tjuta “place of many heads” from my website as I “wasn’t showing more than 3 heads” and this was “offensive”. All this despite the fact that Google Earth can take you anywhere in the Park you like (including sacred sites) and that 300,000 visitors a year photograph what they like from any angle and post it for all to see on the internet. We have even had a Park Ranger explain to us that they don’t want to promote the Park for tourism and that the “purpose of World heritage areas is to exclude human beings, not to include them”.

What will get you a criminal record there? (I’m not kidding!)”rolling a stone”, “hindering a Ranger”,”paint an artwork or record sound without a permit”, “break a speed limit”,”give wrong name and address to Ranger” and just to ensure there are no protests allowed “display a sign”. Don’t believe me do you? Download the Maoist-sounding PDF “Uluru Kata-Tjuta knowledge handbook.”

to date I have found that it appears to be an Australia-wide problem of people being quite comfortable giving up their civil liberties. The bizarre nature of this became only too clear in an incident where some German friends of our were accosted by AFP officers at Brisbane airport for drinking alcohol outside a designated area. The way in which they were treated was incomprehensible to Germans, who are unused to being treated with such disrespect by police, and who also do not have the same pathological relationship to alcohol, which many Australians have.
Another bizarre example is in the “move on” laws which exist across Australia. I have not seen anything so arbitrary or totalitarian since growing up in apartheid South Africa, where the police were very unambiguously an instrument of enforcing the will of the regime.