Nanny State
Ideas & Liberty / Nanny State
A core focus of the Institute of Public Affairs is examining paternalist government regulation. Much contemporary social regulation is designed to shield individuals from voluntary risk-taking behaviour. However, having the government assume the role of risk manager is damaging to the principle of individual responsiblity.
News
Advocates of a nanny state assume we are all children
Nanny state critics understand that incremental attacks on our freedom to choose are single steps down a longer road to remove individual choice...
Fat chance scare tactics will trim us
In yesterday's Courier-Mail, a senior Queensland health bureaucrat proposed graphic health warning labels be put on sugary, fatty and salty foods...
Censorship standards come from a personal place
The United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart gave this famously ambiguous definition for what constitutes pornography: "I know it when I...
Both sides of politics should cease nanny-state meddling
Stopping the assault on people's freedom requires an attitudinal change to the role of government. Last week Nick Cater wrote on this page, in...
Grandstanding about mobiles won't reduce the road toll
It's an old principle of policing - if you can't enforce the laws on the books, demand more laws. More than 55,000 people in Victoria were booked...
Should the government restrict super-sizing junk food?
There's a lot of competition for the most stupid Nanny State proposal. But if forced to choose, plans to restrict serving sizes would have to take...
Publications
Government will spend nearly 60 million this year lobbying itself for nanny state policies
The Commonwealth government will this year give $57.7 million of taxpayers' money to the Australian National Preventive Health Agency to lobby the government for Nanny State policies, according to a new paper by the free market think tank the...
The Biggest Vested Interest of All: How Government Lobbies to Restrict Individual Rights and Freedom
The Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan wrote in The Monthly in March 2012 that: Australia's fair go is today under threat from a new source. To be blunt, the rising power of vested interests is undermining our equality and threatening our democracy. But...
End the Nanny State to win
As the polls plunge and a tide of sleaze threatens the government, Labor has responded with a storm of class war rhetoric unseen in decades. The prime minister has declared the next election will be about ‘whether you stand for the...
