The surveillance laws, no matter how often you repeat the word "draconian", are irrelevant because…

Email isn't safe, and most of your email probably ends up on Google's or Microsoft's servers anyway, in which case US companies can be coerced by the US government to give them everything they have, while not being able to tell the public about it. And they do just that, a fact that came to light with Snowden's revelations. Australia cannot be worse than the US.

For emails, the government surveillance is irrelevant, as it happens anyway. And solutions like Proton Email are just privacy theatre that also happen to interact poorly with established standards (e.g., SMTP, IMAP).

I also fear Australia much less than I fear the US these days. I have always feared the US, especially due to their massive security apparatus, but at least I considered them valuable allies. These days we'll just add some extra fear points due to the techno-fascists in charge, voted-in by the people with a popular vote.

Whenever I see such comments on popular forums, such as HN, I lose faith in humanity a little, either because people don't think about the threat model (this being vibes-based) or the consequences of boycotting the underdogs, or because they are disingenuous about it.

Fastmail is a fine service, built and operated by trustworthy people, which also contribute to standards (e.g. JMAP) and to open source. A service that's also not monetized by ad-tech, unlike what the Big Tech email services are doing.