Mostly bad take. The long term solution is to remove the incentives for criminal behavior and enact laws that prevent power concentration, authoritarianism is not stable. That being said I can see the value in an authoritarian clamp down as a way to rapidly improve the situation in a country as far gone as El Salvador, I remain extremely skeptical about the long term efficacy. Australia is not in a situation analogous to El Salvador by any stretch of the imagination.
As California has so clearly proven, the issue with human society is that there will allways be optimizing agents that prod the wall of enforcement of law to its extent. With humans it seems that there is ALLWAYS an incentive for crime until ever single human has a star trek replicator and a holodeck, or we put aside consent/freedom aside and have mandatory psychological conditioning for everyone.
You dont need authoritarian rule to have strong law enforcement. You just need sensible laws and good funding for police enforcement.
You can never remove all incentives for crime. There will always be some incentive to try to cheat the system or otherwise defect in societal coordination problems.
You are right that power concentration must be avoided though, as that creates much stronger incentives for corruption. More distributed power structures make bribery much more expensive and logistically difficult.
