Oh, there have certainly been problems in Australia recently - especially in my state of Victoria where the state government has gone very dictatorial.
But there is a huge difference between what a state government has been doing and what the country as a whole is like.
Australia is not any sort of dictatorship - Victoria, specifically, arguably could be said to be flirting along those lines.
As for why there have been large protests in Australia - that's a lot more complicated than you probably know.
Yes, there have been some issues in my state of Victoria - the state government imposed ridiculous restrictions that violated people's basic human rights for months at a time.
That problem though is largely confined to Victoria and is an artifact of some very specific issues that don't apply in other states.
But from outside Australia, those distinctions seem beyond people understanding, and so people have been applying a specific problem in one state to events in other states which are driven by completely different situations, and to Australia as a whole which really doesn't make much sense at all.
And even though we've had real problems here, they've often been grossly exaggerated and lied about and still are being exaggerated and lied about overseas - including here on Freerepublic.
I'm talking about claims about Australia being under martial law - totally untrue. I'm talking about claims about concentration camps in Australia - grossly exaggerated misrepresentations with a seed of truth - but the most effective propaganda always includes a seed of truth. Claims people have been killed by police that just aren't true. Claims there are mobile vaccination squads hunting people down and forcibly vaccinating them - utter bull. All of this, I've seen here, and in US media. It's garbage, it's nonsense, it's propaganda.
And goes well beyond 'a whiff of dictatorship'.
There have been some real serious issues here, and some of them are still having some effect. But it's been turned into something it's not, and that's a huge problem, and I don't believe it's happening accidentally. It's being done deliberately to mislead and create non-existent problems on top of the real ones.