Winston Churchill lost his Cabinet seat in 1929 after he called for striking miners to be suppressed with machineguns. Because there was a shop selling automatic rifles only 500m from the picket lines, and the miners could have easily armed themselves.
The British today are very alien to their recent ancestors. Australians, too, I think we're at most a generation behind.
Will be interesting when our elites stop slavishly imitating their American peers and realise they can do anything, with as little effective public pushback as in the PRC...