Actually it is likely worse than the US, the US government spying would generally stay US government only. Whereas ours in Australia is likely accessible by US agencies.
Indeed, and given the NSA's unique interpretations of some fairly commonly understood english words (like for example "collect" and "no"), I have no doubt that they're capable of creative legal interpretations where they can look their elected representatives and (in theory) overseers in the eye and say "we're not spying on US citizens" - claiming later if caught that it's "the least untruthful answer" - when what they really meant was "we asked the Australians to spy on US citizens for us, and hand over everything they found. _We_ didn't engage in any spying."
On the plus side, while I have niggling doubts about whether GPG and encfs/OpenSSL/AES are really secure against the NSA - I'm reasonably sure that even if they've got practical attacks against them, they aren't likely to be sharing even the existence of them with ASIO. I'm as close to 100% certain as makes no difference that GPG/encfs are secure against even the most powerful Australian government agencies (which is to say, only as secure as anything that'd break easily with rubber hose cryptography…).
