Nanny State Spread Crushes Liberty, Spirit

One of the mottoes of the Left is, 'Never let a good crisis go to waste'. Here's how it's playing out in Australia.

From The Australian

By Chris Kenny

Governments around the world are busy trying to convince themselves and their constituents that they can stop a virus. Sadly, they have more chance of doing that than they do of curbing their own inexorable spread. 

One of the most worrying aspects of our pandemic over-reaction has been the growth of government; the unsubtle intrusion of government into every aspect of our lives and the massive economic expansion that has millions of people and businesses now reliant on government payments.

Governments have been prepared to kill off private enterprises to defeat the virus, before attempting to fill the void themselves. The private sector would not do this to itself; left to its own devices it would adapt to weather the storm.

Governments closed entire industries down, borrowed money and sent cash. Their pandemic rules saw police hassle people sitting in parks, evict people from beaches, arrest people for social media posts and fine people for hosting guests.

Having closed businesses or destroyed their viability, governments shovel money to their staff — sit-down money — to keep zombie enterprises alive. If this does not work, everexpanding governments will have killed their golden goose, destroying their revenue sources.

We have not seen enough debate about the size of government. One of the first lines we should look for in next month’s budget is government spending as a share of GDP; it will not tell a happy story.

After creeping above a quarter of the economy, it had been reduced to marginally below 25 per cent in recent years and was forecast last year to push lower. But the final budget outcome released on Friday showed spending increased across 2019-20 by more than 13 per cent, boosting government spending to 27.7 per cent of GDP — presumably we will see these elevated levels for the foreseeable future, and that is just the federal government.

These pages will continue to be full of expert economic reporting, analysis and opinion about Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s fiscal challenges. The economic arguments, as ever, will dominate political debate to the next election.

Thankfully, two of the measures announced by Frydenberg — changing bankruptcy arrangements and loan approval rules — are real reforms that liberate business ambitions without imposing additional burdens on government. We need more of that.

But what about the cultural implications of government responses? Is the pandemic accelerating what was already a worrying national drift to bigger, more intrusive government, therefore diminishing self-reliance? 

This year there will be hundreds of thousands of workers and small-business owners who will have received welfare payments for the first time. Many of these people will have prided themselves on never requiring government assistance and will take this turn of events as a blow to their self-esteem — they should not do that, of course, but we know that will be the mindset.

Others will have been on the margins of embedding a work ethic, building a career or moving into full-time employment for the first time. For them, the additional JobSeeker or JobKeeper payments might have stymied employment prospects and aspirations. 

The pandemic, and the big-government responses, are keeping people’s heads above water, sure, but they will also be dragging people from the cusp of self-reliance back into the dead-end street of welfare dependence. Each day this continues will do damage.

We do not need to overlook the value of the rescue payments to be worried about such a dramatic expansion of the numbers of people reliant on government. Especially when we understand the virus is likely to be with us for years to come, and that these unsustainable financial interventions cannot be reimposed when there is another wave of infections, and another and another — we will have to find other ways through. 

Back in March, hospitality businesses were given coronavirus guidelines to adhere to — restricting numbers of people based on floorspace, etc — but politicians panicked in response to social media pictures at Bondi Beach and the industry was shut down before they had a chance to prove the model. We need to gi ve businesses the opportunity to innovate and adapt to the COVID-19 world — they are doing that in NSW and, to a lesser degree, other states except Victoria, where the state government has not given them the opportunity.

Beyond economics, we have allowed government to decide too much for us. In Queensland guests are banned from dancing at weddings, which is bad enough but, paradoxically, health authorities provide COVID-19 guidelines to assist brothels hosting orgies and sex parties. 

In NSW the rules on dancing at weddings were eased this week, and from now own both parents can attend their child’s sport, so long as everyone keeps their distance. Sydneysiders are now allowed to fly or drive to South Australia; the only state that will have them.

Despite medical advice exposing the silliness of the rules, people have been banned from parks and beaches. And children have been banned from attending schools, even though medical experts from the national chief medical officer down, say this is counter-productive. 

Obscenely, in Melbourne people remain under curfew. The city is a ghost town with restaurants, pubs and shops closed, people can only leave home for designated reasons, visitors are banned and masks are mandatory in all public places.

We do not even have to cite the extreme examples of pregnant women being arrested for social media posts to grasp how we have been burdened with unacceptable levels of government interference. We have accepted all this too meekly, too unquestioningly. 

Perhaps most of us have hoped, against experience, that governments might know what they are doing. Yet in Victoria not a single minister, public servant or other health or law enforcement officer has been prepared to own the decision to have private security guards oversee quarantine or even say they knew who made the call.

Melbourne’s curfew is still in place; we know it was not imposed on the recommendation of the chief health officer or police commissioner and that the Premier says he cannot remember when or who raised the idea. Yet, for three months, five million people cannot leave their homes at night. 

The more government supports people, the more they will expect. And the more government directs people in every aspect of their lives, the more their autonomy and initiative will be inhibited.

The Cape York Institute founder and author of Our Right to take Responsibility, Noel Pearson, has explained how these government forces shape Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. “People do not become dependent on ‘sit-down money’ unless there is someone willing to hand it out,” he wrote in 2006. “Not only cash handouts but also services can displace responsibility from individuals, families and communities, and place it into the hands of the deliverers,” Pearson explained. 

People can be killed with kindness. Every government payment, service and directive takes something away from individuals.

Robert Menzies talked about lifters and leaners, unashamedly looking to govern for the lifters. There is probably a little bit of both in most of us, and government policies can encourage one aspect over the other.

JobKeeper might be a lifesaving bridge for one person and a dangerous drag on initiative for another person. Governments must decide when their support provides the wrong incentives. 

The small-government agenda has taken a beating for decades. Perhaps its greatest recent exponent was John Howard but even he brought in family tax benefits to target families who could not benefit sufficiently from income tax cuts.

Just over a decade ago Labor used the global financial crisis to boost payments and services, establishing a range of failed schemes and the landmark National Broadband Network and National Disability Insurance Scheme. The Coalition struggled to make inroads against this trend and now, in the COVID response, has given up for the time being. 

Governments certainly have a role in slowing the spread of a virus, ensuring health system capacity, organising treatments and working to find solutions like a vaccine — but governments alone cannot stop it. Community behaviour and personal responsibility are central; people adjusting their habits to minimise the spread.

Many people have done this from day one — remember the rush on toilet paper as people decided to self-isolate. And businesses too will revise their arrangements out of necessity to keep their customers, without government directives. 

We must start to wonder how expansive government can get in this country. Stephen Kirchner pondered these trends for the Centre for Independent Studies a decade ago. “While many governments have almost certainly exceeded their optimal or efficient size,” he argued, “the long-run equilibrium size of government in developed countries such as Australia, if indeed there is one, remains unclear.”

But he went on to say: “Growth in government is of concern largely because it is symptomatic of a relaxation of the constraints that have traditionally bound it.” Do we have any constraints on government expansion? Should we? 

So far this year we have given governments free rein on spending, debt, business restrictions and personal liberty. The question is to what degree this is necessary; an understandable response to community expectations, or an ominous overreach?