While Australia took merciless advantage of the fabricated Covid emergency to broaden their abuse, they were already on a fast-track to totalitarianism well before then.

A prime example was the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment act they passed in 2018.
It provisioned powers to compel a company to provide encryption backdoors or vulnerabilities for police access. While incredibly stupid, so far that's nothing too new.

But it also contained "individual developer compulsion" provisions to force employees to add such backdoors/vulnerabilities without informing their employers or colleagues.

Don't comply? Sure. Companies face fines of up to 10 million dollarydoos. Harsh, but not quite draconian.
However, as an individual, if you don't comply you face up to 10 years in prison.

Add to how they treated their residents during Covid, a lot of suffering we saw in person, and we left the country in a hurry once the borders reopened.

We lived in a border city across two states where families are spread across either side of the border.
Closing the border became a power play as the one state was ruled by the opposing party from the other. It was frequently used for the minister on one side to "sharpen their image."
All while families were not allowed to see each other for months, losing their jobs because it was on the wrong side of the border, and people camping out in camper vans in the industrial areas (no work happening in industry due to lockdowns and/or border closures) in vain hope the border may open up soon again (spoiler: it did not, they were there for months.)

What Aussie politicians did to their people was an atrocity. They should all go to prison for that.