There is, perhaps, this one extenuating circumstance to explain our craven submission to authority, and particularly Victoria’s, that Australia was founded as a penal colony, so there may remain an overlay of a marshal-law mentality that lies very near the surface within Australian governments, with a matching tendency to submit to this authority within the community. But we were also an English colony with a legal foundation built on the English common law, so that one can still hope there is still somewhere within our national DNA a love of freedom and a hatred of dictatorial restraint.