by PAUL COLLITS – WE ALL realise, or at least an increasing number of us are realising now, that the world and our individual governments are run by creeps.
Putting in a new lot of creeps quickly reinforces our perceptions. Think Albanese or Starmer. Punishing a bad government via the electoral ejector seat provides only very short-term relief.
- Regulation was a real concern of liberals back in the day. Not so much now.
- If the actions don’t solve the problems, perhaps the actions have other purposes.
- Who even speaks of “deregulation” these days?
Perhaps there is a new law of political science – each government is worse than its predecessor. Disprove it!
Not only are they all part of the one UniParty, but they are invariably arrogant arseholes as well. As we all celebrate social media age verification day in Oz, we should clearly be able to recognise both these fundamental truths.
TOTALITARIANISM
Remember that the Liberals supported this tik-tok totalitarianism. And presumably still do.
Despite the fact that the age ban is a little like the COVID State injectable. Not needed, useless and dangerous. The ultimate policy trifecta. Sold to the punters by disingenuous charlatans.
And the behaviour of the minister responsible for this piece of legislative dross and mayhem – rorting the system to within an inch of its life with free trips for the husband to the footy, and whatnot – revealed through the wonderful process of Senate Estimates, reinforces the arsehole bit.
Ah, women politicians!
As Jimmy Buffett once sang, in his most famous song, “some people claim there’s a woman to blame …” This one’s name is Anika Wells, and God knows from under which rock she crawled out.
Enough of political creeps. The theme for today is (not unrelated) mission creep. And it is not unrelated to the arrogance of the creeps who have initiated the creep.
No, I am speaking of regulatory creep. Regulation was a real concern of liberals back in the day. Not so much now.
It is yet another case of the slowly boiling frog. The accretion of State power under the radar.
The motivations for mission creep? They are pretty obvious. Socialist ideology, the arrogance of the elites, the nanny State, do-gooding, creating problems then appearing to be solving them, building coalitions that receive largesse then will vote you back into office, and the myths of progressivism.
Perhaps the most insidious of all are safetyism and the “war on crime”. No, not real crime like all the things police never solve.
This is the moral panic over cyber-crime. Real, but exaggerated, solvable by other means and an excuse for rampant hyper-regulation by the State.
This all came to mind when I came recently to (perhaps) the ultimate bureaucratic nightmare of selling two houses and buying one.
One of life’s great stressors, times three. Of course, when you buy a property, you immediately hit exorbitant stamp duty, which only goes to fund State government vanity projects and pork barrelling on things for which absolutely nobody voted. That is, mostly, the damage that State governments can do.
It has been a while since I ventured into the Australian property game. The recent, accelerating regulatory prying into the business of buyers and sellers has to be experienced to believe.
If you think the conveyancer takes over the whole process, just try it. You need a “Foreign Investor Capital Gains Withholding Clearance Certificate”.
You need clearances from State Inland Revenue. You need proof of identity processes. You need purchaser declarations.
All these things do is provide even more data to the State. The accretion of bureaucracy has been exponential over just a few very, very short years.
NIGHTMARES
The thing is, you don’t notice any of this until you need to sell or buy a house. Or any number of other transactional nightmares inflicted on us by the State.
But we don’t all see them at once, and we only see them periodically. And there is no evidence that they remotely help to solve the problems they see.
Perhaps, for example, the horse has bolted in relation to foreigners buying up large tracts of suburban and regional Australia.
If the actions don’t solve the problems, perhaps the actions have other purposes. Like building upon the already massive data bases on us all held by governments and their inevitably outsourced mates.
Ah, mission creep. The beauty of mission creep is that it isn’t visible and obviously the cause of the exponential expansion of State power.
It is way under the radar. And policy disasters and evil actions only ever get “traction” when obvious and significant.
Death by a thousand cuts is the order of the day. And in each case of extended power, there is always a benign justification. Public servants and public relations consultants are paid well to ensure this happens.
Of course, the great liberal thinkers of the 20th Century were onto this. Perhaps the greatest of these was FA Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom – and yes, I do have an autographed copy somewhere – who absolutely nailed the fallacy of central planning and the slowly boiling frog syndrome. See under mass immigration and climate action.
Back in the day, I wrote a masters thesis on Hayek. In the days when popes were Catholic and masters degrees were worth the paper on which they were written.
DANGER
He called this State accretion of power “the fatal conceit” in his last tome.
Hayek’s thesis was that the greatest danger to liberty was the slow accretion of power by the State through apparently well-meant and effectively sold “reforms” aimed at “solving” social “problems”. Aka mission creep.
Of course, he was writing in the days when evil, corporate soft power wasn’t a thing. Nor was globalisation, which the Left got more right than the Right, though for the wrong reasons. Nor was neoliberalism as it transformed itself into a global threat.
It is good to keep eyeballs on old targets sometimes. Who even speaks of “deregulation” these days? When they do, it sounds limp wristed.
If Barnaby Joyce (yes, a plodder’s plodder) manages to win a Senate seat at the next election, and (miracle alert, here) manages to drag a second One Nation Senator across the line in the Rum Corps State, and manages to ignite a national swing as well, there is one action item that should be at or near the top of his to-do list.
That be mission creep.PC
