Labor has created the ultimate police state of Western Australia. Earlier this year law-abiding citizens were disarmed, their guns trashed or sold in another state. Why is socialist Labor afraid of its citizenry? After One Nation resoundingly trounced the Marxists at Secret Harbour by-election on Saturday we predict Premier Roger-the-dodger has a lot to be worried about. By the end of the week this story will have been read in more than 100 countries around the world.
By George Christensen
What if walking down your own street was enough to put you through a police identity check?
That is not a far-off worry anymore. In Western Australia, police are trialling live facial-recognition cameras in public places.
Yet NSW police disbanded a similar operation last year because facial recognition was too inaccurate for policing, according to NSW officers.
https://cairnsnews.org/2025/05/19/nsw-police-end-use-of-facial-recognition-to-solve-crime/]
These cameras scan people going about their ordinary day. They capture faces, turn them into biometric data, and check them against police watchlists.
You may have done nothing wrong. You may not be wanted. You may not be under investigation.
You are just there.
That should bother every Australian who still believes there is a line between a free citizen and a suspect.
Police describe this as overt, limited, and about public safety. Of course they do. That is how these powers are always sold at the beginning.
A short trial. A narrow purpose. A calm press release. A few official assurances.
Then the technology stays.
Once police can scan faces in public, a street is no longer just a street. A train station, a stadium, a shopping centre, a festival, even a lawful protest, can become a place where the state quietly checks who you are.
The real danger is the precedent. If WA gets away with this, other police forces will be watching. What starts with one trial in one state can very quickly become the model for the rest of the country.
The people pushing this want Australians to get used to it. Police bureaucracies want the power. Technology companies want the contracts. Ministers want the issue to pass quietly without a fight.
We cannot let that happen.
Innocent Australians should not be treated like suspects for walking down the street, catching a train, going shopping, attending a festival, or joining a lawful protest.
This is urgent because WA has already moved from theory to practice. This is not a debate about what might happen one day. It has started.
If there is no backlash, Ministers will take the silence as permission. A trial becomes a policy. A policy becomes infrastructure. Then we are told it is too late to unwind.
The moment to stop this is now, before the contracts are bedded down, before other states copy it, and before Australians are slowly trained to accept biometric surveillance as part of public life.
This technology must be banned because it does not just scan suspects. It scans everyone who walks past the camera.
That is the whole problem.
A face is not ordinary data. You can change a password. You can cancel a bank card. You cannot change your face.
Public places should not become police checkpoints. You should be able to move through streets, stations, shops, events, and public gatherings without being silently matched against a watchlist.
And let’s be honest about “consent”. A sign on a police van is not meaningful consent. Most people cannot simply avoid a train station, a shopping precinct, or a city street because police have decided to set up a camera there.
The technology can also get it wrong. A false match can get an innocent person stopped, questioned, searched, embarrassed in public, or quietly treated as suspicious because a machine made a mistake.
Imagine that happening outside a station, in front of your kids, or while someone nearby is filming it on their phone.
Supporters call it a trial, as if that should make us relax. It does the opposite for me. Trials are often how permanent surveillance systems get their foot in the door.
First come the cameras. Then the contracts. Then the internal rules. Then the expansion.
This also threatens lawful protest. People behave differently when they know police may be scanning faces in a crowd. Some will stay home. Some will avoid controversial causes. Some will decide it is not worth the risk.
That is how freedom gets chilled without a single rally being banned.
Internal police rules are not enough. Police should not be left to police themselves on a power this intrusive.
And “public safety” cannot become a blank cheque. A free country does not treat the whole public as a searchable suspect pool.
The state should need a reason to investigate you. It should not be able to point a camera at a crowd and check everyone by default.
We can win this, but only if Ministers see that defending this technology will cost them more than stopping it.
That is the pressure point.
This issue cannot be buried under soft official language about “capability”, “innovation”, or “public safety”. Strip all that away and the matter is simple: innocent Australians are being scanned by police for walking through public places.
Ministers need to be made to answer for that.
They have a choice. They can protect Australians from public face-scanning, or they can be remembered as the Ministers who let police turn ordinary places into surveillance checkpoints.
If we win, Australia draws a line before this becomes normal policing. We protect privacy, freedom of movement, lawful protest, and the basic principle that citizens are not suspects by default.
If we do nothing, the WA trial becomes the precedent others were waiting for. Cameras spread to stations, stadiums, festivals, shopping centres, protests, and public streets.
Every innocent face becomes searchable by default. Parents wonder whether their children are being scanned in public. People think twice before going to a protest. Australians slowly get used to the idea that privacy ends when they leave the house.
That future is not locked in yet.
But the window is closing. Once the cameras, contracts, and police habits are in place, these systems become much harder to remove.
We need as many signatures as possible to make this impossible for Ministers to ignore.
