THE Abbott Government is a regime with a taste for authoritarianism the like of which we have not seen in Australia since World War II.

It is using the pretext of a terrorist group called ISIS, operating thousands of miles from this island continent, to strip freedoms and empower security and police agencies in a way that is frightening, so frightening in fact that the venerable Washington Post last week described Australia as a “national security state”.

The authoritarianism of the Abbott Government also manifests itself in seeking to suborn the ABC and turn it into a tame propagandist for the reactive conservatism of Mr Abbott and thuggish lieutenants like Immigration Minister Scott Morrison and Attorney-General George Brandis. Sounding more like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Russia’s Vladimir Putin than the leader of a democratic country, Mr Abbott once complained that the ABC is too often not on the side of Australia. A troubling comment and symptomatic of the intolerance of dissent and critical commentary that is part and parcel of the modus operandi of the Abbott Government.

Last week, the ABC looked as though it was buying into Mr Abbott’s implicit desire to make the ABC a loyal servant of his regime. The ABC Lateline program carried an interview last Wednesday with Wassim Doureihi, a spokesman for a radical group called Hizb ut-Tahrir. Lateline’s interviewer Emma Alberici blew up because Doureihi, taking a leaf out of Mr Morrison’s book, refused to directly answer questions.

Mr Abbott wants to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir — so much for freedom of speech. So the PM lavished praise on Ms Alberici.

“She’s a feisty interviewer ... good on her for having a go and I think she spoke for our country last night,” Mr Abbott said.

Note the last part of that quote —“she spoke for our country”. It is not the job of any ABC interviewer to speak for anyone’s country. It is not the job of the ABC to attack groups and individuals Mr Abbott wants to ban. And the ABC is not meant to be a propagandist.

Instead of telling the Prime Minister that Ms Alberici is not a propagandist or a tool of the Abbott Government’s dangerously xenophobic, racist and anti-Islamic “Team Australia” concept, the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott simply tweeted the interview and its transcript. But Mr Abbott’s ploy of seeking to turn the ABC into his propaganda tool by praising journalists who agree with his view of the world was not the only example last week of the Federal Government’s sinister authoritarianism.

Mr Morrison, in an act of bullying and such hypocrisy that the term needs to be spelt with a capital H, has referred workers from the Save the Children Fund to the Australian Federal Police for allegedly misusing privileged information, which is an offence under Commonwealth law. Mr Morrison is seeking to censor individuals who work in the gulags on Nauru and Manus Island from speaking out against the serial abuse of men, women and children that occurs courtesy of the minister’s policies.

What makes Mr Morrison’s action so distasteful is not just that he is seeking to stop the truth of human rights abuse emerging, but that he quite obviously leaked to a journalist recently a report that was critical of aid workers in detention centres. As noted above, capital H hypocrisy.

All this — anti terror laws, Abbott’s patting the ABC on the back for being loyal and Mr Morrison’s legal bullying — in only a month. But look at the pattern. This is a government obsessed with secrecy and pumping taxpayers’ dollars into police, spies and the military. It is a government that berates its critics in a way that makes former Liberal prime minister John Howard look positively tolerant.

Australia suffers from having no real check on an authoritarian leader like Mr Abbott. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper shares many of the unfortunate undemocratic traits of Mr Abbott, but he is fortunately constrained by a cultural and legal commitment in that country to citizens having enforceable protections via a human rights charter. Even in the US, citizens have more protection against authoritarian actions than is the case in Australia.

Maybe Australians don’t care. After all, this country started its European days by wiping out indigenous Australians and as a jail for the UK. It is a country that has never had to struggle to maintain democracy. It is a lazy democracy as a result and easily scared by mythical invaders from elsewhere.

It would be a pity if the Abbott Government were allowed to continue along the authoritarian path it is taking this country down. But it will only stop if Australians realise that the democracy they think exists is being dismantled by a bunch of thugs running Canberra, and a weak opposition in the form of an unprincipled ALP.

Greg Barns is a Hobart-based human rights lawyer.