Instead of stepping up as a party of opposition, Labor has thrown Tony Abbott a mass surveillance lifeline and indicated it will support his attack on our freedoms, writes Scott Ludlam.

This earnest and reasonably accurate tweet from Labor Party headquarters caught my eye this morning, and momentarily seemed to capture everything that is broken about Australian politics:

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The worst Prime Minister in Australian history, mortally damaged from a series of self-inflicted political disasters, gropes towards the only thing he thinks can save him: fear. To terrify the Australian people into putting up with him until the 2016 election.

To this end, he is clutching at laws to force Australian telecommunications providers to entrench passive electronic surveillance across everyone in the country: a two-year mandatory data retention regime.

Condemned by the Australian technical community, media organisations, the legal fraternity, privacy and civil liberties organisations from across the political spectrum - and described in 2012 by Liberal MP Steve Ciobo as "akin to tactics that we would have seen utilised by the Gestapo" and by the Victorian Privacy Commissioner as "characteristic of a police state" - there is no doubt that this is bad policy pulled into the service of bad politics.

So what does the Labor Party propose to do when the "worst Prime Minister in Australian history" demands we all submit to mass surveillance in the hope he can squeeze a few points out of the next Newspoll?

You saw this coming, didn't you: Labor proposes to cave in. Tough talk about protection of journalists and their sources has come to nothing; evidence tendered by everyone from the Law Council to the Communications Alliance has gone unheard. Instead of stepping up as a party of opposition, Labor has thrown Tony Abbott a mass surveillance lifeline.

The argument that we have to continually sacrifice rights and freedoms in order to maintain security will carry us to a very dark place indeed. By this logic, people living under martial law in authoritarian states would be the safest of all.

For many decades, democracies have resolved this tension by ensuring that state intrusion into the lives of citizens was done only under judicial warrant; that surveillance was targeted and levelled only at people under suspicion of corruption or serious criminal activity. This began to break down with the large-scale signals-intelligence-gathering activities of the United States and its 'Five Eyes' allies after World War II, and was sharply accelerated post-9/11 when the NSA's unofficial doctrine of "collect it all" went into full effect.

The results of these efforts to roll a digital x-ray machine across every aspect of our lives were vividly illustrated by the revelations of the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Mass-surveillance tools are weapons, developed to fight wars. Should they ever be turned in anger on civilian populations, as Snowden has said, they could not be meaningfully opposed.

Access to private communications records is already out of control in Australia, with telecommunications regulator the ACMA reporting 580,000 warrantless demands in the last financial year. Mandatory data retention simply adds warehouses full of new private information to this broken access regime.

I am not one who believes that if this bill passes into law, we will wake up on the following day in an authoritarian dystopia. Things are rarely that simple. But in the few years I've been working up close to Government, I've learned one important lesson: Governments cannot be trusted. This Government, the one before it, the one that will come after it.

There is a reason democracies have painfully evolved shield laws, ombudsmen, parliamentary oversight committees, an independent judiciary, freedom of information laws, anti-corruption commissions, and all these other checks and balances: to protect themselves from unhealthy concentrations of power. No side of politics owns these checks and balances; all political parties can point to their proudest contributions.

That's why Labor needs to rethink its boneless capitulation to a Prime Minister who richly deserves an opposition.

#StopDataRetention. RT if you agree, @billshortenmp.

Scott Ludlam is a Federal Senator for Western Australia and the Australian Greens communications spokesperson.