Opinion & Commentary
Time we ran our own lives
The Friday before last was Tax Freedom Day -- the day of the year when we finish paying for the Government's spending and we start to work for ourselves. This year, Tax Freedom Day fell later than ever before, for federal and state spending has been eating up an ever-greater proportion of the nation's output.
Why does government keep growing?
A clue can be found in two other items from last week's newspapers. One referred to changes to the rules governing child support payments. The other concerned a strategy to change the nation's dietary habits.
Neither of these policies made the front pages. Neither involves a huge increase in public spending, and neither poses a major threat to personal autonomy or a substantial increase in government powers.
But if you want to know why government keeps growing, and why our sense of responsibility for ourselves keeps eroding, these two polices suggest an answer. They are typical of the kinds of decisions made by federal and state governments every week of the year.
The changes to child support arrangements were proposed by a government taskforce.
At present, when a couple separates, the parent who keeps the children is entitled to support payments from the parent who gives them up (normally the father). Fathers cannot claim any deduction on these payments unless the children live with them for more than three months of the year.
Understandably, fathers' groups think this is unfair. If fathers are paying to put a roof over their children's heads for up to quarter of the year, shouldn't the payments they have to make be reduced to take account of this?
The Government's taskforce agrees. It is recommending that support payments to custodial parents should be reduced to take account of the costs incurred by non-custodial parents when they are looking after the children.
This seems fair. The trouble is, the National Council of Single Mothers insists that women should not be left any worse off as a result of this change. It doesn't mind if fathers who incur part of the costs of raising their children are allowed to reduce their payments, provided mothers do not lose out.
What are politicians to do? They do not want to be seen taking money away from single mums, but they want to appear "fair' in dealing with fathers' grievances. The taskforce has come up with the all-too-predictable solution: dads can reduce their payments to the mothers of their children, and taxpayers will make up the difference.
This recommendation is attractive to government because it is politically costless. The pressure groups are bought off, no voters get antagonised, there is no negative media coverage, ministers appear "caring", and nobody will notice as public expenditure gets nudged up another notch.
Next day, the papers carried a report on a new "healthy eating" advertising campaign being launched by the Federal Government at a cost of $5 million.
Influenced by dieticians and health pressure groups, ministers have decided Australians are not eating properly.
Because they think we are childlike as well as stupid, they have chosen Vegie Man (a character with a fruit and vegetable face) to appear on our television screens urging us to eat two serves of fruit and five serves of vegetables every day.
The financial costs of this campaign (relative to the total size of the government budget) are tiny, but here is another $5 million drop to add to the ever-deeper public expenditure ocean.
And am I alone in finding this campaign particularly demeaning?
Vegie Man can only reinforce the idea that government knows best what is good for us, and that we should look to our political leaders to tell us how to live our lives.
Every week, state and federal politicians launch initiatives, announce policies and implement strategies, each of which adds imperceptibly to the costs of government while eating into areas of life which we used to organise for ourselves.
Bit by bit, government grows, liberty erodes, and nobody really notices.
In the Budget tomorrow we shall be told there is no scope for radical tax cuts, for the Government has so many things it has to do on our behalf.
If we are to challenge this, we need to start taking back responsibility for running our own lives.
Rather than allowing the Government to put us on a diet, it should be the other way round.
Professor Peter Saunders is social research director at The Centre for Independent Studies
