[nirimda]

> Err... I did look through the V-Dem 2023 Democracy report (56 pages), read several parts at length and looked at the four (4) mentions of Australia and while I agree that many parts of the world are backsliding to what is described as 1985 global democracy levels ... there is no mention there that Australia is one of those parts sliding back and indeed is rated there as on the world's more democratic nations (#11 of 190+ countries)

If Australia is declining "like many other countries" as the PP said, then it might not be called out specifically. You can go to their graphing tools like https://v-dem.net/data_analysis/VariableGraph/ (this one focuses on a particular measure and shows you how it changes over time in different countries), enter the measure you want (for this I looked at "liberal democracy index") and some group of countries. I entered Australia and the G7 countries, and while there does seem to be a peak maybe 10-20 years ago for them all, it could easily be some artifact. On this basis, I would hardly agree with PP that there is a declining trend in Australia.

Btw - once you've selected an indicator, you can click its name (white on dark grey) the box under the box under the graph and find information on it. In this case, it tells you it's an aggregate of liberal and polyarchy. Those in turn are also aggregates but it comes back to expert survey data. With survey data, you probably need to change the scale to original scale because otherwise the values in the graph won't correspond to the description in the text.