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Cheers - AE

Tuesday 28 July 2009

Glass houses and pizza cutters.

Over at Dick Puddlecote's place I left a comment on his post about the Tasered petrol sniffer. He'd talked about the law against possession of a sniffing substance and brought up a few other daft ideas either already in place or in the pipeline and said
So that's their libertarian credentials well and truly gone.
I replied:
Not entirely, but Australia can be fairly inconsistent. Most states have legalized prostitution in brothels, and amazingly the sky didn't fall in. On the other hand it sometimes seems you need a licence to fart in a westward direction... and three more licences for north, south and east. It is true that failure to win The Ashes will mean that Ricky Ponting must be smeared in Vegemite and staked out in the middle of Melbourne Cricket Ground for a week, though apparently it's not an actual law but a penalty clause in his contract.

Mostly it's low level and mildly annoying nannying, and while that's disappointing and shattered my illusions of a country of free spirited and independent minded Aussies I have to say it's not as bad as the UK was when I left (and of course more lunatic nannying has happened there since - we had a good laugh about the clown shoes).
I think I've said it before but just in case I'll say it now: one disappointment about Australia is that the independent minded and free spirited Aussie stereotype that I thought the place would be full of is either endangered or mythical. My own father in law told me that I'd moved to the most bureaucratic and over-regulated state in the most bureaucratic and over-regulated country, which is something of an exaggeration on his part but as I said to Dick Puddlecote, there's a fair amount of that low level nannying and it is annoying.

That said there is far less of the really worrying Orwellian shit that we left behind, and of course the UK does annoying low level nannying as well as or better than anywhere else in the world - so much so that it's a specialty of one of my favourite bloggers. And today I see that a woman in her late twenties was asked for ID before being allowed to buy a £1.50 pizza cutter. Yeah, the most fearsome weapon in the gangstas arsenal... not. Even here they haven't reached the stage of demanding drivers' licences for a fucking pizza wheel, and only recently I bought some big, shiny and very fucking sharp kitchen knives - yes, DP, they were getting on for the size of that one that Paul Hogan had in Crocodile Dundee, and came in a wooden block that could be used to batter someone to death if you didn't want to fillet them - without providing them with anything other than payment.

There's stupidity in both countries but as I've said before, on the whole it's less intrusive here in Oz. Or at least it feels like it.

4 comments:

Dick Puddlecote said...

Nice article, AE.

Agreed that the UK is a pulsating nest of bansturbation, and while casting an eye over the world in search of a bolthole, there don't seem to be many places left who haven't started some way along the same route.

You put your finger on my disappointment that the fabled Australian free spirit isn't as we have been led to believe (although still better than here, granted).

There are still a few places in sub-saharan Africa untouched by such nonsense, so unless the pace of righteousness abates under the Tories (not holding my breath), I may be forced to go all colonial.

;-)

Angry Exile said...

Couple of reasons for optimism for Oz. One is that every other person seems to be happy to say"yahhhh, bloody government" all the time. The other is that there's plenty of nothing where you can go to get away from the bastard nannies and politicians for a while.

microdave said...

Just found this blog from your comments at Obnoxio's. I nearly emigrated to NZ back in the 90's, but chickened out!

Time passes and I cannot take much more of my home country, or rather what it has become. Like Dick, I would love to find somewhere relatively untouched by the creeping malaise affecting this part of the world. Sadly it seems that "Downunder" is not really much better.

Can you, or anyone else suggest somewhere suitable? Or discussion sites, blogs etc that I can visit to get some first hand knowledge?

Whilst getting away from the EU is a priority I have begun to wonder about some of the former Soviet states. Sure they have taken much of my "contributions" to the great project, but they do, at least, seem to have done something useful with it. And the people are all too familiar with intrusive surveillance, having lived with it for years. So I don't think their governments will be able to go down that road again in a hurry.

Sorry to ramble on, but reading blogs for the last six months has brought it home in a way that the MSM never will. And I have added yours to my bookmarks!

Angry Exile said...

microdave, I've been giving some serious consideration to starting a new country along libertarian/minarchist lines and inviting like minded people to live the shitholes they currently put up with. I was thinking about a vast floating island of 1000 square miles or so, with big fuck off propulsion systems so we can move it around. The bugger is I have no idea how, so that's that fucked. Until I come up with something better Australia will do me. It's over regulated, but if you want to live in a technologically advanced part of the world where isn't? I came for my wife rather than the independent and free lifestyle, which is just as well because there isn't one. But despite some annoying points, including governments who have no more respect with taxpayers' money than the pricks in Wastemonster, I have to say on balance I prefer it here. There's nanny statism, but Nanny isn't wearing jackboots yet. As I've said on the blog once or twice, I think Aussies may wake up and see the loss of freedom in another country as a warning to stop it from happening here. Sadly I worry that the warning might turn out to be Britain.

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