Get your hands off our lives, you bureaucratic meddlers

As Ronald Reagan famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.”

Writer and juniors sports coach Chris Kenny takes his young charges through their paces.

So there I was in a Services NSW branch, forms and ID in hand, biding my time with dozens of other people waiting for a public servant to call my number before another staffer would see me. I am busy enough with work and family commitments, and trying to keep my ageing body fit, without excursions like this, along with the online application that preceded it, and it got me thinking again about the endless expansion of government, intruding into every aspect of our lives.

Since I could walk I’ve been involved in sport, raised in a family where playing, coaching, managing and helping out were givens, and I have been coaching and ­umpiring kids since I was a teenager myself.

With four sons ranging from the mid-30s to 10, I have spent decades of weekends on the sidelines or out in the middle of the field.

I am still doing it, this weekend included, and I am no martyr. I love it. There is no place I would rather be.

Like millions of other parents this has given me a bird’s-eye view and some influence on my kids’ development, and I have loved meeting other children and their families and helping them get the best out of sport.

Yet the reason I was waiting this week in Services NSW was that for the first time in all those years, to register as coach of my son’s cricket team I had to acquire a “working with children clearance”.

We all understand the good intentions, we all want our children to be safe from creeps, but apart from being mildly insulting, and an inconvenience, this is just another example of governments pretending they are the solution to our woes, while they add to the complexity, costs and reach of bureaucracy. I would not mind betting good people have been lost to sporting groups because of the annoyance and practicality of this requirement.

Name a problem in our society and people will be calling for governments to fix it, and meddling politicians will come up with a plan. State and federal governments continue to pump more money into education, trumpeting this bureaucrat-run scheme or that, while education outcomes head south – what they never try is getting government out of the way, giving schools and teachers more autonomy in the classroom (you know, like private schools).

Many people now seem to expect governments to step in where personal, family and community values should rule. Want to stop kids getting fat? Tax soft drinks and ban junk food ads. Want to save the planet? Try a new tax. Want to stop domestic violence? Perhaps federal government spending will do it. While I supported an Indigenous voice, my biggest problem with it was that it expanded government, yet this was the argument least often used against it.

You cannot escape governments in contemporary Australia. They build tollways then send you rebates because you have paid too much in tolls; they over-regulate the childcare sector then subsidise your place when costs spiral; they survey you about how they should landscape the local park; they send you kits to test your excrement for bowel cancer; and they erect signs on every road re-development, federal, state and local government, using your money to boast about what they built with your money.

Even when we put to one side the outrageous expansion of government during the pandemic response (once-in-a-lifetime, we hope), what is occurring around us at all three levels of government is alarming. From Canberra, as if paying too much income tax is not enough, we are hit by a Medicare levy, compulsory superannuation payments, and additional superannuation taxes, so that even workers on the second highest tax rate can immediately access less than half of any dollar they earn beyond $120,000 (37 per cent tax, 2 per cent Medicare levy, and 12 per cent compulsory super) and of course it is significantly worse for those on the top tax rate of 45c in the dollar.

In return, of course, like it or not, we see constant expansion of services. From Canberra, paid parental leave, a National Disability Insurance Scheme, more childcare, federal funding for every school in the nation, not to mention sports grants, covered outdoor learning centres, subsidies for solar panels, electricity bill relief, and the list goes on. Your state government throws sports and travel vouchers at you, and toll relief, and renewable energy subsidies, and probably funds fireworks displays, sports events and writers festivals for you – God forbid any of these should pay their own way.

The overreach is probably most easily proven by reference to the national electricity market, which is an artificial creation of government, and has been systematically undermined so badly by government that it has rendered an energy-rich nation energy poor.

Governments state and federal have deliberately forced coal-fired power out of the system by subsidising renewable energy but, realising renewables could not do the job, have looked at subsidising some of the remaining coal generators to extend their lives, then still more taxpayers’ money has been funnelled directly to consumers struggling with the resultant higher power prices.

This is a vicious circle where the only winners are the ever-expanding bureaucracies and the subsidised industries that feed off them. The environment does not benefit (global emissions continue to rise) while taxpayers, small business and consumers lose.

Similarly, record rates of net migration might satisfy government aims of growing GDP and the export-expansion goals of the university sector, but mainstream Australians suffer with an exacerbated housing and rental crisis. What is good for government is not always good for taxpayers.

Too often overlooked is the third level of government where local councils escape much scrutiny except when they try to scrap Australia Day. From banning gas heaters and stove tops to getting involved in campaigns against ­Israel and nuclear energy, and from spending small fortunes on self-promotion and stifling development at every turn, local ­governments waste ratepayers’ money and gum up our economy.

All this government undermines our society in at least three crucial ways: it adds to our costs, suppressing our individual prosperity; it complicates everything, slowing down the wheels of our economy and stifling investment, and it fosters a sense of community and personal reliance on government, undercutting innovation and self-reliance. As Ronald Reagan famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.”

Yet the undeclared agenda of the Albanese government is to expand government; to extend its tentacles further. Just the figures on government spending bear this out.

Both side of politics have declared for years that federal government spending should be held at 25 per cent of GDP or less, and by the back end of the Howard/Costello years, government was constrained comfortably below that threshold. In recent years we have seen a dramatic Covid-19 blowout, but Labor now plans for spending in the coming years that settles around 27 per cent of GDP – this means budget spending is about $55bn, or at least 8 per cent, a year higher than it should be.

What do we get for this? Well, in part, an inflation problem, more debt than we should have, and more interference.

This leads to perhaps the greatest worry about the Albanese government. Its biggest political problem might be recovering from a blatant broken promise (like Paul Keating and his L.A.W. tax cuts, Julia Gillard with her carbon tax, and Tony Abbott with his debt levy and budget cuts) but greater economic damage will happen elsewhere.

Labor remains committed to ongoing interventions in the electricity market which will prove damaging enough. Yet a year ago Jim Chalmers published a thin but worrisome essay entitled, “Capitalism after the crises” in which he unveiled a radical new agenda declaring, “It’s not just our economic institutions that need renewing and restructuring, but the way our markets allocate and arrange capital as well.”

So we have a Labor government that wants to control how markets allocate capital? And this same government has just appointed former ACTU boss and climate change minister Greg Combet to chair the Future Fund that manages $270bn on behalf of Australians.

What chance this leads to the fund having an investment bias towards Labor’s favoured “nation-building” and renewable energy projects? What chance the Future Fund is exposed to greater risks if it makes investment decisions based partly on political or ideological considerations rather than merely security and returns – there is a hint of Rex Connor about all of this.

Greg Combet. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Ian Currie

This tendency is strong enough already through the market power of the union-controlled industry super funds. The Future Fund could supercharge this trend and put more of our money at risk chasing green-left goals.

At the same time, Labor is offering billions of dollars of extra funding to the states for schools, but five states are holding out for more. And while Labor pretends its tax cut plan is generous, voters will not easily forgive such a blatant broken promise, and we will be left with more complexity in the tax scales, additional bracket creep, and an extra $28bn taken from personal incomes over the coming decade.

It is all about expanding the role of government, Labor’s undeclared mission. We too often ­ignore how Labor’s platform describes it as a “democratic socialist” party – not a term they tend to utter publicly.

The Coalition must eventually call this out. And take the politically difficult but necessary step of promising smaller government.