From the Sunday Herald Sun:

TATTLETALES are dobbing in their neighbours, workmates and former lovers for being tax cheats. More than 152 people a day are informing on friends, business associates and workmates, delivering a windfall of millions of dollars to the Australian Taxation Office.

Well isn't this a flashback to the 1930's where Stalin's NKVD trained their agents specifically in the art of manipulating people to report on their family and friends. As Professor Robert Higgs has shown, crisis generally leads to rapid government expansion as people fall victim to the "siren song" that the politicians know how to sing all too well. As Margaret Atwood's poem "Siren Song" begins:

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:
the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls.

Fear leads to the misconception, the confusion, that the protective arm of the government is the solution to our woes. The government inevitably expands and becomes more involved in everything to do with our lives. Finally, once the situation "returns to normal", the government may contract, but not to pre-crisis levels; it stays involved with the inevitable trajectory (if it's not stopped) being the creation of a total state.

Encouraging people to "dob in their mates" sets people against each other and will eventually result in an all against all. This divide and conquer mentality is exactly what happened during the creation of the Soviet state. To steal from Prof. Higgs again,

In the present regard, it works every time because the people falsely believe that those who sing it [the siren song] are their protectors, rather than their exploiters. Until people learn to disregard the state's siren song of beneficence and protection, they will continue to suffer and die as victims of the state's wars, foreign and domestic. People yearn for security, and they look to the state to provide it, but they are calling upon a wolf to guard the sheep.

Don't let yourself be blinded by fear or state propaganda: ignore the Siren Song!