Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

During this year’s Australian Grand Prix Mark Webber said this about Australia:

It’s a great country but we’ve got to be responsible for our actions and it’s certainly a … nanny state when it comes to what we can do.

                  …              …              …

I think we’ve got to read an instruction book when we get out of bed—what we can do and what we can’t do …

This may sound like an exaggeration to some people but there is a great deal of truth in what Mr Webber said.

Every year brings another raft of rules and regulations by governments seeking to tell individuals what they can and cannot do, and where they can or cannot do it. Often it can happen so gradually that we do not notice it before it is too late and we are left to struggle against increasing levels of government control and intervention, straining against a bureaucratic straitjacket that is getter tighter and tighter.

As a Liberal—like most Liberals—I champion personal responsibility. We believe that individuals are best-placed to know what is best for themselves and in the case of children I believe that parents are best placed to know what is best for their children—not the government. Of course, we have laws, regulations and police to keep us all safe and to ensure a stable and harmonious society. For example, we all wear seatbelts and we follow airport security procedures because the community agrees that as a whole these rules are beneficial and necessary for individuals and for the benefit of all. But there comes a point when we have to say, ‘Enough is enough’. When government seeks more and more control over our lives—telling us what to eat, how fat we can be and what to do with our spare time—it is taking things too far. Increasingly, governments of all stripes right around the world seem to be saying, ‘We know what’s better for you than you do.’ Why should we, as individual citizens, be okay with that?

We see this nanny state manifest itself in many ways, but the current move to set further restrictions on gaming machines as specified by the Productivity Commission and the Gillard-Wilkie agreement is one example. In its report on gambling the Productivity Commission recommended that a full precommitment system be introduced in every state and territory to combat problem gambling. And the government, through the Gillard-Wilkie agreement, has committed to this. Full precommitment essentially means that players must be registered before they can actually play a gaming machine and that they have to have self-imposed limits set on their gambling. These can be spending limits or time limits. That means that people who wish to play gaming machines have to be registered or identified in some way—via a fingerprint, a smartcard or a similar sort of identification—in order simply to play a gaming machine. With a full precommitment system this would apply to all gaming machines, which means that anyone—even the person who just wanted to drop a dollar in after they have a drink at the bar—would need to be registered and effectively need a licence to play a legal product.

Moving beyond the questions of how or if this could actually be carried out effectively—there are natural concerns about privacy, how the details would be stored, how it would work for every machine and so on—it strikes me that this is a complete overkill. It implies that all people who play a gaming machine are irresponsible and cannot control their spending.

We have many programs and initiatives in place to help problem gamblers—self-exclusion and counselling, and there are specialist staff in many venues—that are targeted specifically to the needs of problem gamblers. Of course I believe that we should assist problem gamblers and help them with their problems; but to punish the whole and to restrict the freedoms of the whole to cope with the problems of a few is not the right way to go about it. It offends the most basic freedoms that we enjoy in Australia. Surely all of us can determine how we can spend our money on legal products and services without having to have government permission or approval. The suggestion that government should track and limit what legal goods and services a person may purchase with their own hard-earned money is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Yet that is what this government is proposing.

Some individuals will always struggle with compulsion and addiction. The answer to their problems is not to treat all Australians as being unable to control themselves. But this single policy agenda reflects the growing nanny state movement that is interfering more and more in every aspect of our lives. It is something that has increased since Labor has been in power. And I have to ask: what is next?

If we continue to allow government to get bigger and bigger and to continue to rule increasingly over our lives, what will be the next stage? In a few years, will we need a licence to purchase alcohol, or somehow register in order to buy a drink at a bar? In ten years, will there be a national database of cigarette purchasers to make sure you cannot buy more than your allocated allowance? Maybe in 15 years, you will have to go to the Big Mac police and get a special permit, or you will need a licence to get fries with that.

Big government that is intent on protecting us from ourselves only ever creates bigger problems. And you will never see a government give up this control over people’s lives once it has got hold of it. Big government thrives on the rules, regulations and red tape that stem from the nanny state, so we need to stand against it now before it gets any worse. We need to make sure that individuals are accountable for the consequences of their own actions rather than making excuses for them. We need to empower people to be responsible for their actions rather than giving that up to government.

Unfortunately, it seems that in modern-day life children are the target of many of the nanny state proponents. For example, some Australian schools have banned cartwheels and handstands, removed the monkey bars and stopped children from playing sports like soccer during recess to accommodate some safety concerns. In Canada, a soccer league introduced a rule which stipulates that any team that wins a game by more than five goals will lose by default, claiming sportsmanship as the reason for putting such a ridiculous rule in place. In London, parents were faced with being reported to social services for daring to allow their children to cycle unsupervised one mile to their local school. In Queensland, teachers were encouraged to leave wrong answers blank when marking students’ work to avoid hurting the students’ confidence, and they were told not to use red pens when correcting tests as the colour was too aggressive.

I am parent myself. I know all too well the desire to protect your children from harm and disappointment. But to go to such an extent, to wrap children in cotton wool and deny them the chance to live life, have fun and experience the necessary stumbles that come with it is not right. How else do children learn from their mistakes? How else do they learn about competition? How else do they learn to cope with winning and losing? Where is the motivation to improve and succeed? How else do they experience things for themselves and learn to cope with the outcomes? How is any of this going to prepare them for the competitive and often unfair world that we inhabit as adults? As much as we would like to, we cannot protect them completely from every minor struggle. It’s life; it is how we learn valuable lessons that we take into our adult lives.

Again I ask: what about leaving these lessons up to parents rather than having a bureaucrat behind a desk in London, in Sydney, in Queensland or anywhere else determine what is good for our children? It is just another example of the suffocating effect of the nanny state. Already employers have remarked to me that they have seen in some—not all, but some—of the younger generations of employees young people who have never been told what they need to improve, so they never expect to be corrected and they think they can automatically slide up the ladder without putting much effort in. In a speech before he became Prime Minister of England, David Cameron said:

… in the end, the state cannot do it all. In the end, the best regulation is self-regulation, not state regulation. That’s why the family comes first. That’s where we can really turn things around and start to repair our broken society.

I agree with Mr Cameron, but I go further: governments’ nanny state regulations actually adversely impact on society. They stifle the development of communities and can prevent people from taking part in those social activities that nurture and build harmonious societies.

I will give you an example. This year, in my home state of South Australia, volunteers organised a fundraiser for the Australians for African kids charity. A private garden was the venue, volunteers provided food, tea and coffee, African musicians were booked to play and a local winery offered free wine tasting. It sounds like everything was sorted—but it was not. When the local council heard about the event, it proceeded to wrap this event up in a plethora of red tape. The council required of the event organisers an 18-page application form to get permission to have the event. One would ask: what about the rights of the property owners? But that did not matter to the council. They also needed a liquor licence, the names of all the people who made the food, the qualifications of the volunteers, a food business notification form, public liability requirements, an adequate number of portaloos and an inspection of the venue by an environmental health officer. What a way to dampen the goodwill and the good intentions of the organisers. I am not saying that we do not want people to be safe when they attend public events, but surely this is an example of going too far. And it does not make things easy for those who want to organise these events.

But that is not all. The long arm of the nanny state also extends into areas such as the beach. The Cottesloe Council, for example, is considering introducing an extra 60 clauses to its beach laws, taking the grand total of prohibited beach activities to over 100. Here are some of the proposed prohibited beach activities: kites and toy vehicles, the digging of holes, and umbrellas bigger than three metres. It is also proposed to require prior written consent for meetings of more than 10 people. Heaven forbid if you want to have a game of cricket on the beach anymore and you are walking along with nine of your mates, because the beach police could come and get you for it. Bit by bit, this nanny state nonsense is sucking the life out of society. It is stopping people from enjoying the very best that Australia has to offer, including celebrating the community spirit that makes our country a great place to live.

We trust governments to have laws in place to protect our security, but should this really extend to what we eat, what we drink and sometimes actually what we are allowed to think? My sentiments are supported by the majority of the Australian people. A Galaxy poll this year revealed that 55 per cent of Australians believe Australia has become a nanny state already, and 73 per cent believe that governments spend too much time and effort making rules and regulations on people’s daily lives rather than focusing on important issues like education, health and crime. What is the result of all of this? We are left with an over-regulated society, swimming in red tape and unnecessary rules and laws. We are left with a society where government bulldozes personal responsibility so that it can have increasing control over other aspects of our lives, where we have parents who think that the government is better at raising their children than they are, and where we have the unemployed who think it is actually the government’s responsibility to find them a job.

We are in danger of becoming a country where the government has a hand in everything that we do. Soon, I believe, we will not even be able to sneeze without a government bureaucrat charging us for carbon dioxide emissions.

Honourable Senators:

Honourable senators interjecting—

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You may laugh at that, but it is not a joke. It is on its way to happening, with a carbon card trial on Norfolk Island, funded by the government. Do we really want to end up like other nations such as, for example, Japan, where the government has imposed a waistline standard for its citizens, where people are examined annually to make sure that they are not too fat? Such interference, such extreme levels of control, such disregard for personal responsibility and choice has no place in our country. CS Lewis said:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. … The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

This is something that must be resisted—for the sake of personal freedoms and the freedoms that our country was founded upon.