Editor’s Note: Adam Piggott has another great post. This was originally posted at his site.
James Delingpole has a nice rant about how awful his home country now is.
As dreadful as the plight of the once great Britain is, it pales into complete insignificance when measured against the atrophied mess that is my own nation of Australia. Where Britain is threatening to topple over into the putrid pit, Australia is so far up to its eyeballs in muck and effluent that it wouldn’t even notice if Britain fell over and joined it.
By now most of you have probably heard of the scenes of Melbourne cops smashing in the car windows of terrified occupants, or accosting young women by the throat on the side of the road, all in the name of keeping people safe from themselves. Australia is completely out of control, gripped by an intense fear of what is at best a common cold. But the population is so numbed to the overwhelming intrusion of government do-gooders into their lives that not only do they not protest as what little remaining rights are thrown into the dustbin; they blindly celebrate and accept their enforced incarceration, convinced that they are in fact the lucky ones.
My home state of Western Australia has been cut off from the rest of the world for months now. Nobody is allowed in or out. My own family thinks that this is simply splendid as people are now choosing to take their holidays in forgotten wheatbelt towns that hold all of the rustic charm of a tetanus infected nail to the foot.
Methinks they are confused as to what the word choice actually means.
When I pointed out to them that if something drastic happened in our family, neither they nor myself would be able to travel in either direction due to their government mandated cellophane wrapped existence. This point elicited some uncomfortable ums and ahs in token acknowledgement of being prisoners in their own state with no visiting rights. But the conversation quickly shifted on to more important matters, such as how about that US election?
Australia is a nanny state. For the last 30 years, government has made a point of attempting to protect people from the consequences of their own actions. It all started with the introduction of the ludicrous bicycle helmet laws in the early 90s. Those laws were the test case, the dipping of the toe into the legal waters so as to ascertain if there would be any push back.
There was no push back. And now the government is responsible for your own health. Seen in such a light, the breaking of car windows to haul people out into the street for their own good makes perfect sense. If the government is responsible for your health then it must be seen to be doing everything that it can to lengthen the burden of your life as far as possible into your bleak future. As an individual, your only choice in this matter is to whether or not you intend to resist, and as we are seeing, resistance is not a good idea when the forces of government agents and social ostracism via the media are brought against you.
Australia has long attempted to crown itself the best in the world in many different endeavors. This has mostly been an embarrassing farce that has only been curtailed simply because the rest of the world does not care. But in one respect Australia can be unjustifiably proud in its status as being world leaders; that distinction lies in its pathetic and tragic record as being the best nanny state in the world. So to James Delingpole I simply say that while Great Britain’s efforts on the nanny state front are indeed worthy of hand wringing and a good lie down, unfortunately for myself you lot ain’t got nothing on Australia. Dear old Australia; we finally found something at which we are good at.
Ugh, sorry to read this. I had an outdated impression that Australians were fighters, tough and independent.
To be fair the author lives in Melbourne. Melbourne is full of the sort of people who think living in Melbourne is a good idea, and is consequently a lot worse than the rest of the country.
I’ve heard people joke that the border lock-downs are actually a good thing, because they’re a convenient excuse to keep the Melbournites and Sydneyites out.
I too had hoped that the colonials would be more resistant to intrusive statism but I guess it’s true what we kiwis say about ourselves, we’re more bleedin’ British than the British!
My brother paid for me to join him on a 3 week private tour of Australia. After a week I asked our tour guide Luke what kind of government Australia had. Puzzled he said it was a parliamentary democracy with a token monarchical head. I told him no. You guys are a theocracy whose gods are Health and Safety and each time we get on and off the bus or boat you hit us with a homily.
Australia has a real problem with nanny statism, mostly driven by the large urban centres. (And sometimes the worst of the rules, despite being voted in by the urbanites, end up only applying to rural areas, that’s definitely the case for road-work rules in NSW for example)
But I’m not sure that I’m really a fan of Piggott; something feels off about his writing style, and then we see things like this article where he can’t criticise the poor behaviour of the Melbourne police without referring to small town WA as being like a “tetanus infected nail to the foot.”
The small towns, which don’t have the mass immigration and nanny statism that he claims to so thoroughly oppose get contempt, while Melbourne of all places get’s its clear bad behaviour treated as if it’s just representative of the nation as a whole (which it isn’t).
(For you American’s this is like someone who moved from Georgia to Seattle, Washington as an adult who can’t criticise the poor behaviour of Seattle’s police without also expressing his contempt for small town Georgia)