[mna_]

Are they suggesting that they came up with this notion independently? I can't speak for other countries but UK politicians who are for this say they're monitoring the Australian ban closely to see if it works, so it's clear they're not claiming they came up with this notion independently.

[nephihaha]

What happens in every case is this political party or that party in each country takes the blame for it, and their opposition will pretend to be against it, when in fact it appears to be part of a bigger picture.

You're right that reactions are being monitored but this has clearly been discussed somewhere and appears fairly co-ordinated, much like the emergence of digital ID and AI chatbots. It seems to be a common pattern now... Smoking restrictions and car ownership seem to approached in a fairly similar manner across different countries.