The Minns Government would like us to believe that everything happening in New South Wales is separate.
Facial recognition in pubs and clubs is about gambling harm. Police drones hovering over Moree are about youth crime. Access to unredacted toll-road photographs is about organised crime and missing people. Uploading driver licence photographs to a national face-matching system is about identity fraud. Compelling people to unlock seized phones is about encrypted criminal networks.
Each expansion is announced in isolation. Each is attached to a socially acceptable objective. Each is defended as targeted, necessary and harmless to people who have “done nothing wrong”. However, these developments are not separate, and their convergence is not coincidental.
Taken together, they are creating an increasingly integrated surveillance infrastructure: one capable of identifying our faces, recording our movements, watching our communities from the air, accessing the contents of our devices and connecting information collected in one part of our lives with the coercive powers of police.
This is not simply the adoption of several new technologies. It is the construction of a more powerful police state.
Your face is becoming a permanent identification document
The NSW Government has announced that facial recognition will become mandatory in hotels and clubs with gaming machines once its statewide exclusion register is operating. Cameras will automatically compare people entering gaming areas against biometric records of excluded patrons.
The official justification is gambling harm reduction, but the question is not whether gambling causes harm. It unquestionably does. The question is why a government so unwilling to confront the power and profitability of the gambling industry has decided that the answer is to scan people’s faces.
The current code governing facial recognition in venues prohibits marketing use, requires unmatched images to be discarded and prevents systems from being linked to certain other databases. However, the code is guidance rather than an enforceable legislative safeguard. Meanwhile, the government is preparing to make the technology mandatory across an enormous network of privately operated venues. Its own announcement describes the current arrangement as preparation for that mandate.
Surveillance infrastructure does not remain frozen at the purpose for which it was introduced. Once cameras, biometric systems and databases are embedded across hundreds of venues, the political argument changes. The question is no longer whether the infrastructure should exist, but who else should be permitted to use it.
We have seen this pattern repeatedly: exceptional technology becomes ordinary infrastructure, and ordinary infrastructure becomes available to police.
The road network is becoming a police camera network
The Crimes and Other Legislation Amendment (Further Organised Crimes Reforms) Bill 2026 would allow police to obtain unredacted photographs captured by cameras on public toll roads for investigations into suspected serious indictable offences and missing-person matters.
Toll cameras were installed to administer road charges. The government now wants to repurpose them so police can see who is sitting inside a vehicle.
That is function creep in its clearest form. Infrastructure created for one administrative purpose is transformed into a law-enforcement asset after the public has already been made dependent on it.
The same Bill facilitates NSW participation in national identity-matching services, allowing driver licence photographs and associated information to become part of a broader facial recognition system. A photograph supplied because the state requires a person to hold a licence can therefore become a biometric identifier available within a national verification architecture.
The state is not merely collecting more information. It is making previously separated systems capable of speaking to one another.
Police want the contents of your life
The Bill would also create a new category of Digital Evidence Access Order for devices lawfully seized outside the execution of a search or crime-scene warrant. Police could apply for an order after taking a device during an arrest, roadside stop or other lawful detention where the statutory organised-crime requirements are alleged to apply.
This distinction matters: police would still need an eligible issuing officer to grant the access order, but they would no longer need the phone to have been seized under the search-warrant process to begin with.
A phone is not merely another object in someone’s pocket. It can contain years of private conversations, photographs, health information, legal communications, organising work, locations, relationships and political activity. Searching it can expose not only the person targeted but everyone who has communicated with them.
The Bill would also increase the maximum penalty for refusing to comply with a digital evidence access order from five years to seven. That is seven years’ imprisonment for refusing to assist police to penetrate a device holding the architecture of your private life. The Bill confirms both the expanded order regime and increased penalty.
Technology supplied by companies such as Cellebrite makes the extraction and analysis of entire devices possible at extraordinary scale. These corporations do not simply sell neutral tools. They profit from expanding the capacity of police, militaries and intelligence agencies to access, organise and weaponise personal information.
Police powers and corporate surveillance markets now grow together.
Moree is not a testing ground
While these laws move through Parliament, police drones are being normalised from above.
The PolAir Remote trial began in Moree, where drones stationed on the police station roof can be operated from Sydney, hundreds of kilometres away. Community members have described drones hovering above them and fear about leaving their homes.
Moree is a community with a significant Aboriginal population and a long history of racialised policing. That is not incidental to where this technology was trialled. The state routinely tests its most invasive practices on people it believes have the least political power to refuse them.
The government has since moved to expand the drone program before the initial evaluation was completed or publicly scrutinised. The Justice and Equity Centre reports that the expansion occurred without transparency about how effectiveness was being measured and without adequate answers about legal safeguards.
This is how surveillance becomes normal: trial it on an over-policed Aboriginal community, call every police intervention a success, withhold meaningful evaluation and expand it before resistance can form.
Police powers do not remain confined to their sales pitch
Governments always introduce extraordinary powers through extraordinary villains: organised crime bosses, terrorists, so called violent offenders, money launderers.
However, police do not exist outside racism, colonialism and political power. They are the institution through which those forces are enforced.
Powers said to be reserved for the “worst of the worst” inevitably move outward. Definitions expand. Thresholds fall. Temporary trials become permanent programs. Databases are connected. Technologies become cheaper. Information collected for licensing, tolls, gambling regulation or “community safety” becomes intelligence – and those powers are not applied equally.
Aboriginal communities, criminalised people, young people, protesters, people experiencing poverty and anyone challenging state power will encounter this machinery first and most violently. Police have never needed perfect evidence to produce suspicion. New surveillance technologies simply allow their suspicion to travel further, faster and with the false authority of a machine behind it.
The promise that “law-abiding people” have nothing to fear is ideological rubbish. Privacy is not a reward for obedience. Freedom from constant police observation is not something we should have to earn by proving our innocence.
A government that can identify you wherever you go, follow your movements across public infrastructure, watch your home from the sky and demand access to your phone holds an intolerable degree of power.
We should stop assessing each measure as though it exists alone. The camera in the club, the photograph at the toll point, the licence image in the database, the drone above an Aboriginal community and the extraction device in a police officer’s hand are parts of the same political project.
The project is to make us increasingly visible to the state while making the state increasingly unaccountable to us.
It should be feared. It should be named. And it must be resisted.
