This question was inspired by a question from a US immigrant citizen who came from a country that had been under Soviet political hegemony. They said that in their experience authoritarianism and corruption were kept camoflauged for fear of political backlash, but our new US government is shameless.

I'll put my tentative answer in the comments. I'm very interested to hear your thoughts if you care to share.

Succinctly as possible, what is the purpose of government? And with genuine effort to avoid condescension or disparagement, what do you think someone politically opposite to you would say if they were to thoughtfully articulate an answer to the same question?

I don't know how common this is but in Illinois, USA a lot of our new laws signed each year have an effective start date of Jan 1 of the next year. I thought it might be interesting to share some new laws going into effect in your state and country, if not on Jan 1 specifically then in the coming year.

(Apologies, the tags aren't pre-populating anything useful so I'll leave this to the pro-taggers.)

Edit: fixed my parentheses