[Youden]

Reporting on Australia's encryption laws is wildly inaccurate. For one, it does not allow authorities to compel companies or individuals to introduce an encryption backdoor. The law very explicitly addresses this issue, see section 317ZG, which forbids any kind of "systematic weakness" or "systematic vulnerability" and very explicitly states that weakening encryption is included in those definitions.

What's permitted is to build something that targets a particular person in such a way that it cannot possibly affect another person's security.

The example I use (though IANAL) is that a request to backdoor WhatsApp's encryption would not be permitted under the law. However I think that pushing an update that checks for a particular person's hard-coded phone number and forwards messages to law enforcement would be permitted.

The law in question: http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214...