We should send nanny packing as Danes have done

Lobbecke

DANES love food. Good food. Unashamedly, delectably, rich, fatty food. Next week, on Christmas Eve, Danes - including my own relatives in Copenhagen - will gather around a table piled high with this kind of food. And this year they will celebrate with even more cheer than usual. Just in time for Christmas, the Danish government recently did something unusual. It said it would axe the country's fat tax.

This tiny slice of news from a tiny slice of a country is about a very big idea. It's about the need to check our tendency to introduce a law, a regulation, a rule to solve every apparent problem and to remove every conceivable risk. Concerned with obesity, the Danes reached for a tax to alter people's eating habits. Only problem is that the fat tax introduced its own set of new problems.

The Danish tax ministry said in its recent statement that "the fat tax and the extension of the chocolate tax, the so-called sugar tax, has been criticised for increasing prices for consumers, increasing companies' administrative costs and putting Danish jobs at risk". Danes such as my aunt and her friends found a cheaper way to buy chocolate. They regularly headed over the border to Germany.

Following the introduction of the Danish fat tax in October last year, the Australian Greens demanded we follow suit. British Prime Minister David Cameron said his government also would look at the new impost. In a world awash with politicians keen to regulate more and more areas of private lives, either so they can say they are doing something or so they can assume the role of social engineer, the Danes deserve credit. It's not easy for people, especially politicians, to admit when they get it wrong. It's even harder to do so quickly.

Even more remarkable, the Danish government, a heady centre-left mix of Social Democrats, Social Liberals and the Social People's Party, reached agreement with a party even further to the left, the Red-Green Alliance, to axe a fat tax introduced by a previous right-wing government. Let's see the Australian Greens express the same generous intellectual honesty and praise the Danes now. Come on, Christine Milne. It's Christmas, after all.

No? Little wonder, then, I have a bulging file with the words "Risk Removalists" scrawled across the cover. It's filled with stories of regulation madness proposed by politicians, bureaucrats, local councillors, school principals and other well-meaning cotton-woollers here and overseas who assume we cannot look out for our selves. Quiet streets in my suburb that for decades offered a safe, smooth ride now carry speed humps at 100m intervals. Playgrounds in my local park are neutered of anything remotely fast and fun for kids. Schools preach to children the dangers of running on asphalt. Little boys are told the schoolyard is no place for what we once called boyhood rough-and-tumble.

A Perth policeman issues a $250 fine to a woman for using a mobile phone while pushing a pram. The police later apologise and withdraw the fine, admitting a pram is not a vehicle.

The parents of a deaf child named Hunter are advised by his Nebraska preschool that he needs to change his name as it offends the school's "weapons in schools" policy ban.

A British man trying to buy a chocolate pudding from his local supermarket is asked whether he is over 18 because reheating a pudding in a microwave oven may cause burns. The shop apologises and admits buying the pudding doesn't require proof of age.

After a wry laugh, no one is all that surprised by these nanny-state interventions and mistakes.

After all, if Nicola Roxon, our most left-wing Attorney-General since Lionel Murphy, has her way, words uttered in the workplace about religion and politics, to name just a few subjects, will soon be outlawed if they offend a fellow worker. Roxon's aim to "help everyone understand what behaviour is expected" is evidence of the eternal wisdom of HL Mencken, who said: "The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression."

What's next? We follow Michael Bloomberg, the "do something" New York mayor who wants to ban the sale of super-size soft drinks at restaurants, the movies and from street vendors? Why not also Nanny Bloomberg's demand that hospitals hide baby formula behind locked doors so that more women breastfeed?

Everywhere you turn, the nanny state is there, frowning down on us, mistrusting us, telling us what to do and what not to do.

By contrast, the Danes have sent their nanny packing. Another small story. Visiting Copenhagen recently, I was struck by three things about Danish cyclists. First there are lots of them. According to the Cycling Embassy of Denmark, a half-million bikes are sold each year in Denmark, a country of only of 5.5 million people. Nine out of 10 Danes use the more than 4000km of bicycle routes.

Second, Danish men seem capable of riding a bike even on the weekend without being encased like a medisterpolse (Danish pork sausage) in neck-to-knee lycra. Australian men, please take note.

The other glaring omission is helmets. During a full week in the Danish capital I saw one cyclist wearing a helmet. Hundreds and hundreds of young professionals cycling back and forth to work, to university, parents cycling their children to school, bikes laden with shopping, well-dressed people heading out for the evening on their bikes. And one helmet. Are we sure we have the balance right in this country with our obsession about bike helmets? Australian regulators, please take note.

Increasingly, the world is regulated for dummies. And the size of government grows inexorably bigger as politicians regulate to eliminate risk and uncertainty from our lives. And when you treat people as idiots, they are likelier to act like idiots. Take away personal responsibility and soon enough we start expecting the state to take more and more care of us.

How far we have travelled from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. "No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions," wrote Mill, before our busy-body Attorney-General decided that even opinions are not so free. But "in matters that do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself," Mill said.

This Christmas Eve my Danish relatives and I will probably eat a little too much rich food, may well drink a little too much good South Australian wine and most certainly will raise our glasses to the welcome disappearance of the Danish nanny.

Now if only her Australian sister could vanish too.