To the welfare statist Small is not beautiful: small is ugly and the enemy.

By Gary Scarrabelotti

People tell us every day that we have to have a Carbon Tax because the world is heating up dangerously, and it’s all our fault. What’s more, unless we act soon to repair the damage we have done, terrible things will happen.

Maybe so.

But is that all there is to it?

I think not.

There are other reasons why we are going to tax carbon dioxide, though of these little is said or written.

Monster mummy

The Carbon Tax is a symptom of the modern state’s drive for “living space”.

Our welfare state is “hard wired” to invade, to intrude and to harass. Like an imperious parent, the state knows best.

For instance, to implement this Carbon Tax no less than 16 pieces of legislation are required.

To support exaction of the tax, two new arms of the bureaucracy will be created: a Climate Change Authority and a Clean Energy Regulator.  The latter is armed with draconian powers and penalties. Acting under authority provided by the Clean Energy Bill, the Regulator will be able to search premises, copy documents, compel people to give self-incriminating evidence, and invoke penalties on errant corporations (up to $1.1 million) and  executive officers (up to $220,000).

Because this state is only trying to save us, to suggest that it should curb its taste for new responsibilities in our regard, or even to shrink them, is a mark of deep ungratefulness tantamount to subversion. Perhaps, indeed, one day not far away, it will actually become a crime to speak ungrateful thoughts.

Whatever the future might hold on this score, the present condition of the Welfare State is paradoxical.  It is mightily robust in the way it treats us, and excessively tender about how we treat it.

Any determined movement to check the expansion of state power would trigger an identity crisis for the political and bureaucratic classes which direct and administer the machinery of government — and a crisis within the state itself.

What on earth is the state – and governing class — to do if it cannot expand, intrude, regulate, fine and jail the citizenry for its own good?

To the welfare statist Small is not beautiful: small is ugly and the enemy. Expect rough handling if you think otherwise.

Left = Right

This is not some Green Labor conspiracy that I am talking about here. It is a thing imbedded in the nature of our state and in the visceral political instincts of our governing class. Modern, so called “conservative” politicians are capable of the same.

September 11, 2001 was a fateful day.

What was, I wonder, your first thought as you took in the real time news images from New York?

Mine was something I’ll save for another day. But my second was this:

“Now they’ll enslave us to save us from the terrorists!”

How many of us rank-and-file voters have paid attention to the anti-terrorist laws and security measures implemented since that dreadful date in order to protect us from the Islamists and other enemies yet to be imagined?

Airports have become a misery. Our email messages can be scoured and read; our bank accounts and transactions scrutinised; our phone and mobile conversations can be scooped up and sifted.

What on earth is the state – and governing class — to do if it cannot expand, intrude, regulate, fine and jail the citizenry for its own good?

The powers of the state to search into our lives have been increasing for a long time thanks, in part, to the growth and increasing sophistication of white-collar and drug-related crime.  But September 11 proved a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the state to steal an even greater march on us.

Powers of surveillance have long been the part of the armoury of ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation), ASIS (Australian Security Intelligence Service) and DSD (Defence Signals Directorate).  But in December 2004 they were extended, through the Surveillance Devices Act, to the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Crime Commission. This frankly chilling development was the work of the “conservative” Howard government.

Policy failure

One of the motivating factors behind this expansion was the need, real enough, to protect us from the most likely kind of terrorist acts — those initiated by home-grown, self-starter terror cells in imitation of Al Qaida and its affiliates.

Consider this, however.

There would be no need to protect us from such threats — and much less requirement to expand the surveillance powers of the state — had it not been for the fact that Federal governments since the Fraser years have imposed, without public debate, culturally colour-blind immigration and refugee policies twinned with an anti-integrationist policy of “multiculturalism”.

There would be no internal threat to Australia from Islamic terrorist groups had not ideology trumped prudence and allowed Islam to gain a foothold in Australia’s already culturally over-rich immigration menu.

In other words, the agencies of state have been equipped with massively increased powers to deal with terrorism, not only to protect you and me, but also to prop up an intellectually bankrupt and socially dangerous troika: our current immigration, refugee, and multiculturalism policies.

We have anti-terror laws, you see, not merely to secure public safety but also to preserve an official state ideology — and (this is the really important thing) to protect the governing class from the political consequences of having preferred its own mad ideas to the strength and safety of the country.

The great fear

The greatest challenge to any human being is to admit that he is wrong.  Or, to put it in theological language, to admit that he has “sinned” in this or that.

“My sin is ever before me,” the Psalmist sang.

Yes, but we ever deny the sight of it.

The same dynamic is at work in the formation and defence of public policy. Weird ideas, bad policies, gross miscalculations, will all be defended to the death.

Why?

Because, just like the individual who fears disintegration if he admits the truth about himself, the political class (and the various rival groups into which it is competitively divided) fear that its power will evaporate if it makes a confession of failure.

And so the state grows like an empire: the acquisition of each new “ring of power” justified by the need to hold on to earlier seizures. If any step along the way were found to be illegitimate, the whole edifice might crumble.

Thus it is with the Carbon Tax.

Having bought – for the sake of political differentiation – the ideology of climate change, there is now no going back for Federal Labor. To question the irrationality of the policy is worse for Labor’s sense of itself than the Carbon Tax will be for the Australian economy. Better to put at risk the people’s livelihood than to admit the truth about a once great political party.

In any case, the momentum of the state toward the acquisition of more power over us seems unstoppable.  A new frontier has been discovered and beyond lies a great project truly worthy of the state: saving us from the weather.

To imagine that such a vision glorious lacked legitimacy would raise too many dangerous questions about the state’s previous conquests.