So now any of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies can have a chat with ASIO and get them to coerce companies and individuals within companies to put these back doors in. Then they can all use the same back doors, so everyone living in the USA, UK, Canada, and New Zealand can have their encryption compromised and communications intercepted. There's no way that companies will create back doors specifically just for Australia, so everyone will have access.
In terms of Australia I'm not sure what we could actually do about this. Given that it's ASIO and other government departments that want these powers and that they have tried to introduce this sort of law over the course of the last decade. Both major parties have introduced legislation such as this and both voted for it. Maybe it is time for civil disobedience, and have everyone create and distribute encryption applications for all devices, because they couldn't possibly jail everyone right? I just wonder who will be the first person jailed or the first company fined for refusing these orders.
In terms of the world at large, which country should we trust now? A lot of the Western Democracies are becoming rapidly "security" focused authoritarian, and the other countries powerful enough to stand up to them are not much better. Should we trust applications with code written in Russia? What about hardware products manufactured in China? Should we trust services running in the USA? Now we also have to be wary of any company that runs a service in the Five Eyes countries.
Sometimes I wonder if we really have it better than people in the middle ages or other earlier periods, in some ways it clearly is, but in others it's just the same smell coming from different shit.