An intelligent acquaintance declared that the difference between those on the right and left of politics is that the former don’t trust individuals to act responsibly. He was and remains incorrect.
It is the left which doesn’t trust individuals and increasingly seeks to micromanage our lives. It was on the left’s watch that the British nanny state became entrenched. It is under centre left rule that a NSW minister has been empowered to use subordinate legislation to declare that you (but not your neighbour in the next suburb) can’t drink alcohol in your living room. And it’s the same flavour of government which prevents citizens from going to more than one nightclub per night, outlaws plastic shopping bags and all but bans smoking.
It’s not only new laws and, their unchecked nasty little brother, regulation, which threaten individual liberty. The cities are infected with correct thinking which allows this to happen. As Mill noted, protection against the tyranny of authority is not enough, “there needs protection also against tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct”.
It is the comparatively well educated members of society who have acquiesced in, and in many cases encouraged, government intrusion into corporate and private life to the extent that few question the wisdom of state regulation of “junk” food advertising, compulsory exercise regimes, the size of car you’re allowed and what you do in your living room.
As those who govern accumulate greater power to wield against us for our own good, flight from society increasingly appeals. Though the tentacles of regulation reach all communities in this Commonwealth, at least running away will help those of us who choose to drive a 4WD home from the pub via the kebab shop, have extra chicken salt on our chips and finish off with a smoke avoid detection. That is, unless you retreat too far, to our most remote communities, where nothing is permitted and everything is tolerated.
Running away will also provide escape from the too frequent intrusion of the kind bien-pensant non-thinking that refuses to question, even for the sake of debate, whether there is a causal link between global warming and human economic activity, or which has led my local authority to erect street signs declaring that its ratepayers inhabit a nuclear free zone*. Woe betide the nation which dares to incinerate Ashfield with a thermo-nuclear device in defiance of those abundant warnings!
Mr Rudd came to power promising new thinking. The extent to which this new thinking represents old left orthodoxies and, more importantly, the extent to which Mr Rudd will accept valid criticism and make necessary adjustments, will be the real test of the man and the government.
The test for us will be the degree to which we are prepared to challenge new orthodoxies and insist that the smugly self-satisfied justify the intellectual and moral superiority they draw from their uncritical parroting of accepted wisdom.
If all else fails, I’ve got a spare room in my remote bunker. Just bring whiskey and a few cartons of smokes.
* Did the council remember to inform local radiographers they are no longer welcome?
