The Rise of Bureaucracy
Saturday, January 01, 2000
Australians are a tolerant people. That’s why this is such a great place to live. But if you push them too far, they will eventually fight back.
Australians fought and died to defend a quality of life called freedom. Their memory is being dishonoured today by a bullying bureaucracy which is undermining the Australian lifestyle, not by swaggering acts of overt dictatorship, but by thousands of petty, mean-spirited regulations, accumulating year by year. Little acts of oppression are happening every day, in government offices all over the country, most of them not big enough to make the papers.
Almost everything in this country is now tangled in red tape. The attitude of local government in many places has reached virtually overt contempt of its citizens. Many of our petty officials revel in mindless enforcement, making people waste money and time, interfering in lives, sometimes smashing dreams, often knowing full well in specific cases that their controls are serving no genuine community purpose.
Every department has its own narrow reasons for inflicting its new regulations, but there is no department for protecting us from the cumulative effect. And it seems no politician either. There is no party for the Protection of Humans from Bureaucratic Suffocation.
The benefit of our high standard of living is increasingly undermined by man-made controls. It takes a long time to learn the bureaucratic ropes. No wonder life is so depressing for many young people, especially teenagers – to whom it seems that nothing is permitted.
From now on, human room to move should be recognised as a serious argument for repealing controls that aren’t grievously necessary. It should be seen as a valid argument against new controls. Regulations are always clumsy. Officials should be required to back off in cases where they are doing more harm than good. (see COBBERs homepage)
Philip O'Carroll