Is Australia the most authoritarian country in the world?

I'm going to break from what I would normally write about to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart aside from the news being the steaming pile of poo poo that it is. I cannot stand government overreach especially when the rules that they design are quite obviously just another tax on the poor.

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I truly believe that if a "crime" has a penalty of only a financial fine, that this is a tax on the poor. I once knew a guy who lived in a metro area that would intentionally park illegally every time we would go to a bar or restaurant because he made so much money that the $100 fine meant nothing to him. His convenience of being able to park anywhere that he wanted to overruled what he considered a pittance of a fine. Poor people of course cannot do this and have to hunt around for ages looking for a legal parking spot. There are many many other examples of exactly this and the rich have a distinct advantage of not actually needing to obey a lot of the laws because they know there are zero consequences other than what they consider to be a meaningless amount of money that goes into the governmental system.

I think that governments are around the world are very aware of this and don't actually intend to have anyone comply with the law - they actually want you to break it so that they can give you a bill for it.

During Covid I looked around the world at the absurd rules that were being placed on various countries and one that really stuck out in my mind was Australia. They really went "all in" on forcing their population to comply and would fine people left and right to the tune of hundreds of dollars per infraction. Once again, the rich could continue to do whatever the hell they wanted to because it wouldn't impact their lives very much at all.

But let's leave money out of this for a second. While I have never been to Australia, I know a few people that live there and a few others that have visited there. One major thing that they all talk about is how basically everything is against the law. One person I know was let off with a warning by two massive police officers who turned on the lights and "whoop whoop" ed the siren to get out of the car and aggressively reprimand him for walking on the "wrong side" of a footpath that had no one else on it. This guy had no reason to lie to me about this so I just took him at his word. How crazy is that? I could understand if it was a busy boardwalk and he was disrupting foot traffic but he was literally the only person on the street in a residential area. Since when do we have certain sides of a footpath that a person is allowed to walk on? I'd love to see them try to implement this in downtown NYC!

Another friend of mine who was just visiting was approached by gigantic transit police on a train because he didn't have a ticket. As he tells me the gates at the station were open, there was no evident ticket booth, nor was there any instructions on how it is that someone procures a ticket. He just assumed that maybe you pay on the train because there were no turnstiles, there were no gates, there were no machines to prevent entry. The way in which he was treated as though he was a criminal in front of his daughter is unacceptable.

Another friend of mine who actually is Australian sent me a photo of a beach that just blew my mind and I couldn't believe it was true until I looked it up and unfortunately, found out that it is, in fact, real but rarely enforced to the point where officials won't even talk about it

You can see by the sign that this is not something that just went into effect and has been around since 2017. It just wasn't brought to my attention until recently. Seriously? You have to wear a helmet to go jogging?

What if you were walking and then for a brief moment you broke into a run to catch a bus or something like that? Would they be able to fine you then?

I am one of those people that believe that one's well-being should be left almost entirely up to that person. Trying to protect everyone from any possible injury that could occur in a seriously unlikely to occur event is not a rule worth having. This is clearly for money generation and I hope that the officer in the background there has a tough time getting to sleep at night knowing that his job is to fine people who are just trying to get a bit of exercise.

I live in a country that is quite filled with stupid rules as well but Australia, I think you guys are taking first place at an alarming rate!