In seemingly every Western nation at the moment, the number one question to be asked about the governing class of society is, Are they stupid or are they corrupt? The corruption option is always the easiest to invoke because political decisions almost always benefit some group or other. To explain any policy, you just find the group who benefits and say that they bought off the politicians.
Every now and again, however, an issue comes along where seemingly nobody wins and this means that the corruption explanation doesn’t work. Nominally, this should leave us saying that the government is stupid. But we can be more specific than that because what is really going on is ideological wowserism, which, I suppose, could be thought of as a sub-category of stupidity.
(Note: “wowser” is an Australian word for sanctimonious hypocrites whose main purpose in life is to stop anybody else from having fun. Basically, modern day secular Puritans).
We have a uniquely clear-cut example of ideological wowserism going on here in Australia right now and it shouldn’t surprise us in the slightest to find that it’s been implemented by the same morons that ran the Covid debacle, i.e., public health technocrats. On the advice of said public health morons, the Australian government has been significantly increasing the tax on tobacco beginning with a 25% hike back in 2010 and then going up by 12.5% every year. The compounding effect means that the excise more than tripled over this period which has resulted in a massive spike in the retail price of a pack of cigarettes. It took a while, but eventually the price got so high that smokers began looking for alternative options and a black market for tobacco began to appear, which grew and grew in proportion as the excise on retail cigarettes went up year on year.
As the size of the black market continued to grow, so too did the cutthroat nature of the business model as the criminals involved sorted out their problems in the way that criminals normally do. Firebombing tobacco stores has become so common now that it seems like a weekly occurrence.
There are countless news stories of drive-by shootings and other assassinations. More importantly, a lot of these stories now involve innocent members of the public. A couple of months ago in my area, some strays bullets from a failed drive-by shooting came within inches of killing a young boy who was sitting in the family car in a suburban driveway. The collateral damage includes stores that have been mistakenly firebombed or got burned down because they were next to a tobacco store. To make matters worse, even though the percentage excise has more than tripled, the gross revenue to the federal government has fallen because so many people are simply no longer buying tobacco legally.
It’s hard to think of a more comprehensive policy failure. Just off the top of my head, here’s a list of the losers:-
- Federal government has lost billions in revenue, not exactly a good thing given how much debt it has on the books. Incidentally, one of the promises of the imbeciles who came up with this policy was that it would raise money. Whoops.
- Citizens around the country are now getting caught in the crossfire of gang wars
- Small business owners are having to deal with damage to their property and presumably higher insurance premiums as a result of all the fire bombings
- State police forces, which are already significantly understaffed, have had to devote major resources to responding to all the crimes and also to trying to break up the criminal gangs
- Smokers have had to choose between paying outrageous retail prices or turning to the black market
That’s an impressive set of losers. But the key point is that the only people who are winning from all this are the criminal syndicates. Thus, unless you want to make the argument that the politicians are in the pocket of Big (Illegal) Tobacco, it is not possible to explain any of this by the usual corruption excuse.
The only other excuse would seem to be that our elected officials are complete morons. But, more specifically, what is going on is a moral crusade against cigarette smoking. A few months ago, the premier of New South Wales explicitly called on the treasurer to cut the excise. The premier has a vested interest in the matter because it is his state that has to pay for the police resources required to tackle the problem created by the federal government’s decision to increase the tax.
Since all of these negative outcomes were obviously and clearly caused by the policy decision in the first place, the solution is dead easy. All you have to do is reverse the policy. That would lead to billions of dollars in revenue flowing back to the federal government and away from criminal syndicates, something you would think the treasurer of the country would want to happen. What was the treasurer’s response? He said there would be no change in the policy because apparently the goal here is to get rid of smoking.
Now, you might ask the question, if the goal is to get rid of smoking, why doesn’t the government just make it illegal? The obvious answer to that is that about 10% of the adult Australian population smokes, and they are going to be mightily pissed off with whichever party pushed to ban tobacco. 10% of the voting public is more than enough to swing an election. What’s more, a policy of making tobacco illegal would be rather strange at a time when we’ve all but decriminalised marijuana and even harder drugs are now being considered for the same treatment. How is the government going to explain why tobacco must be illegal but not other drugs? Thus, what the government can’t do for political reasons, it is doing through taxation instead.
Now, if you think about it for a minute, that’s a big problem. The whole point of democracy is that we should be able to vote on these kinds of issues and debate about the pros and cons first. Here is a government pursuing a policy agenda where the costs clearly outweigh the benefits, and it is doing so entirely on ideological grounds. It is clear that this course of action is not in the national interest, and yet when the obvious problems are presented back to the government, it refuses to back down. Thus, the government of Australia is currently waging an ideological war against a section of its own citizenry and forcing the rest of the public to be collateral damage.
Now, if we assume for a second that the elected politicians are not complete morons (a tenuous assumption, I know), then the only other way to explain this is that the politicians have more to fear from the public service than they do from the public. That seems to me to be true. The true source of political power now lies not with elected officials but unelected bureaucrats. There are a number of other examples from Australian politics that lead to that conclusion. We don’t have a democracy anymore, we have a wowserocracy: government by bureaucrat.
And so, if we come back to our initial choice between corruption and stupidity, we now have a third option, which is ideological zealotry. Our government appears to be full of zealots who utilise the reins of power to pursue an ideological agenda that is never actually presented to the public honestly and which the public has to pay for both directly and indirectly.
The tobacco issue provides an unusually clear example of that dynamic. But we can ask the question to what extent this same dynamic is the driving force behind other questions of public policy. When you start to think about it in this way, it seems that the majority of issues in modern politics can be primarily explained by the Wowserocracy: Covid (especially the forced vaccines), renewable energy, the trans issue, immigration and housing (including illegal immigration), offshoring of jobs, ostracising smokers, etc.
It is no coincidence that every one of these issues seems to be affecting all Western nations at the same time. It turns out that the issue of tobacco is a lot more relevant to all this than would appear at first glance because when did the war on tobacco start? Almost the exact same time that the neoliberal agenda was implemented. What a coincidence.
What a coincidence also that it was at exactly this time that Western culture in general began to suck. Correlation is not causality, but pretty much everything was better when everybody smoked. At the very least, Western culture was much cooler back then.
Here in NZ a similar thing has happened with ‘road safety’ in an effort to reduce the road toll to zero (!), another high-and-mighty neoliberal target. Although curiously the current government has been attempting to roll back some of the most blatant excesses. There is still a long way to go before it all stops being blatantly absurd, but the reversal is the first I’ve ever seen of the kind.
A couple of examples. Our open road speed limit is 100km/h, and historically this was marked with a white circle with a black slash across it. About 25 years ago all these signs disappeared and were replaced with explicit 100 speed signs – I don’t think I saw a single instance of the old signs for about a decade. Then suddenly in the last decade all the old open road signs came back replacing the 100 signs, alongside a whole host of ‘safety’ zones where the open road speed was reduced to 80km/h for long intermittent sections. It turns out the change to ‘open road’ signs was preparation to allow making the national open road speed limit 80km/h everywhere in a single edict. Thankfully the current government ditched the policy, although ominously the signs are still there. They also removed most of the 80km zones implemented in the last 5 years.
Another example (that seems to be common across the western world) is that to fix a pothole now requires a minimum of a half-dozen traffic management staff on site, hundreds of road cones, temporary traffic lights, and about six weeks planning, preparation and cleanup to do a two-day job, that would have once taken an hour or two (I might be exaggerating, but not by much). Any slightly sane person can see this is ridiculous, and the central government dictated the road cone count must be reduced – I see today they’re threatening funding to local councils if the workers don’t cut back on cones. Inter-governmental warfare, how proud I am that we can keep up with you lot across the ditch.
Of course the national highways department is fighting to maintain the insanity, but they chose a different route – no road cones at all! It’s easy, you just close the entire road and it’s a perfect solution becasue it is ‘faster’ that way. I’m sure every road user who now must take a 1,2 or 3+ hour detour is absolutely thrilled with how much faster it is.
Daniel – that sounds like a paradigm example of technocratic dysfunction. It makes sense when you think about it more broadly. When China agreed to make all our stuff for us, we sent all the productive work to them and then we had to find something else for everybody to do. Almost by definition, we only had unproductive work left and so we’ve created all these jobs that serve no purpose. That’s on top of the more general problem that there is simply a limit to how many goods and services people are able to consume and so the idea of just infinitely creating more is an absurdity. The double bind we are in is that if we sacked all the technocrats, we’d just create unemployment and that would tank the economy. On the other hand, if we don’t sack them, they’ll slowly choke society to death, all in the name of “safety”.
As a side note, I think this is a big part of the driver for the push for “AI agents”. We’ve monetised people as much as we can and now we need something else to make money from. So, we’ll create an infinite number of “virtual humans” to make money from.
Hi Simon,
If a person was to strip away all of the ideology and just look at events as they are, then what could be deduced is that if marijuna becomes suddenly legal and can be purchased through official channels, then how are all the crims who used to sell that stuff, then going to fund their existences?
Incidentally, listening to the youth news, what I hear predominantly regarding that particular choice of smoking tipple, is that the commonly expressed downside is that you have to interact with dealers.
You may have missed this: Crüed shock: Tommy Lee left fuming by Australian cigarette prices. Seems even celebs who can presumably pay, have noticed the issue.
As a side note, it’s always unwise to conclude that bureaucrats in the collective are bright. In many ways, it’s a system which seeks to administer itself and falls to the most average level, sometimes lower.
Daniel – thought you might be interested. There’s a road in Collingwood Victoria (Wellington Street) which recently had heaps of parking removed and the speed limit reduced to 30kmh. That’s a difficult speed to drive at, and very easily exceeded. The bicycles overtake the cars.
Cheers
Chris
Chris – oh, I’ve had the misfortune of working with government bureaucrats on a couple of occasions. I think a mandatory lobotomy must be part of the induction process.
Simon – I feel we’re already well into overshoot on the cost front for these boondoggles. Now that the government here has turned down the debt spigot just a smidge it is already getting very ugly for a lot of people I know. I wonder sometimes if we may already be into our final recession.
On the AI front I suspect it is an attempt to plaster over the quickly widening cracks rather than an attempt to make actual money. Our Ministry of Ed was forced to admit recently that nobody knows what the word salad direction statement underlying their new school curriculum actually means. Pointing AI at the meaningless phrase was proposed as some sort of solution.
Chris – Oh, we have the same everywhere here too. A new cycleway/road crossing near me has so much coloured paint on the pavement that I (with a degree where I studied traffic control) have difficulty understanding the intention of the markings. It looks a lot like those match-box car play mats we had as kids, which having just wrote that I realise is exactly what it is.
Although in one instance I know of – where the local council spent a notable percentage of their annual budget on a bike lane separation using planter boxes that somehow cost more than small cars – the locals objected strongly, and eventually vandalised the boxes such they had to be removed for ‘repairs’. I don’t believe they’ve been put back.
Daniel – I recall that Trump announced a lazy $600 billion for AI funding earlier this year. Stupendous amounts of money are being pumped into it and apparently quite a lot of the senior people involved think we’re about to live through the plot of the Terminator movies. Maybe we need a rewrite of Terminator 2 where the Miles Dyson character knows full well he’s destroying the world but plans to escape to New Zealand when the proverbial hits the fan. Not sure that would be a popular film 😛
Hah, indeed. The problem is that the cracks in western society will swallow $600B without even a hiccup. Maybe for the film they could re-use the hobbit sets that are kept around for tourists. I’m sure a hobbit hole would the perfect bunker. A LOTR Terminator cross-over – what could (not) be better?
Have a bunch of terminators destroy the shire. I genuinely think that idea would break a lot of people. It would be a modern-day Book of Revelation.
Indeed. I’ve often pondered a world that actually achieves what the singularity (or alien overlord) fantasists dream of, but instead of going off the rails into a caricature of evil, simply slays all the sacred cows and the fantasists (protagonists) perish trying to protect said cows. In a sense “The Day the Earth Stood Still” but not just about whatever issue is du jour.
Have you any thoughts on upcoming comet visit hoopla? I’m half-pie wondering if it might be the start of the next round of madness.
Daniel – hmmm, just thought of a variation on the story. Silicon Valley billionaire invents the terminator and tries to escape to his New Zealand bunker but the terminator tracks him down and kills him. Basically, a modern day Frankenstein.
Which comet are you referring to? Haven’t heard anything about it.
Hi Simon,
Must be something in the water: Wyndham City Council referred to IBAC as MP claims tens of millions ‘flushed down the toilet’ on failed IT project.
Obviously we’re unable to discuss the particulars of the matter, but it will be interesting to see what comes of this one…
Cheers
Chris
Hi Daniel,
Long ago I observed that an inner city hip-and-with-it council which allowed for planter boxes located on the pedestrian path presumably as long as the correct permits and styles were issued. The housing stock was mainly older Victorian era terrace housing with tiny plots so it was an extension of gardening space. Anyway, the boxes that I’m aware of have long since been removed. Apparently the things cost heaps, and people were growing very hardy plants in them, like mint. That weed will grow in the gutters, it doesn’t need some fancy super-expensive box. A mystery! Maybe that lot just get ideas which are impractical…
Cheers
Chris
Chris – looks like a perfectly normal “cost variation” to me. The same kind of “cost variation” that occurs on our energy bills seemingly every quarter.
Simon – It started with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1I/%CA%BBOumuamua which had some very odd characteristics which were roundly ignored. I have no idea what the truth is, but here is a brief alternative explanation https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1942745270447415414
Now there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS generating a lot of speculation about an alien craft. I’m not sure whether that being true or not (or even possible) actually matters, it strikes me as the sort of wacky madness that could spread rapidly given how much stress and instability still abounds in our society.
Daniel – interesting. I’m not sure the alien probe story would ever spark a mass panic. Unless the aliens were drinking bat soup.
This sort of government behaviour is par the course in Australian history, and has been to a lesser degree in the USA too. I really do think the Puritan streak in the Anglos never died out, it just became secular. The 6 O’Clock swill of Australian pubs in the middle of the 20th century was the bizarre outcome of a teetotaler policy, and the multi-pronged attack on pubs at the moment (taxes, laws, etc) is killing any fun anywhere.
The whole transmission line thing is really heating up in the rural areas of Vic, and the wowsers are a bit scared. The anger and hate has reached a point where meetings are being cancelled because of the threat of violence breaking out. Even if these towers get built in the end, I gather there will be a lot of extra maintenance costs due to unfortunate accidents befalling them often. If this new bill gets passed that allows unlimited access without landholder permission, I can see some ugly results coming; fines and arrest don’t scare people when their entire livelihood and family legacy are at stake (something the wowsers fundamentally don’t understand).
Itis interesting in the offical media that even those opposed always offer the caveat of ‘I support the transition but..’ whereas no one s allowed to point out the obvious that there is zero evidence that any massive ‘renewable’ rollout would make a one iota of an impact of global emssions, in fact it would increase them, and it would be far cheaper and easier to maintain the coal plants in Australia. Overton window and all that.
Skip – this kind of thing brings out the inner Catholic in me. What was one of the first thing the protestants did? Get rid of a number of feast days. There’s more feast days than fast days in the Catholic calendar. Apparently too much fun was being had. Seems that only the largest economic surplus in history could get the protestants to chill out for a few decades in the aftermath of WW2. Now they wanna revert back to making everybody miserable.
The renewable rollout is one of the madder things I’ve ever seen. At least for that you can argue that it’s corruption since squillions of dollars are getting made. But note that it still gets sold to the public in Wowser terms of saving the planet. “I support the transition but…” has become the new “I’m not an anti-vaxxer but…”. Or, how qbout “I’m not anti-immigration but…”
What’s interesting in Aus is that climatically the whole Protestant work vibe doesn’t work so well because our winters are mild and our summers are long, and we are more ‘Catholic’ in our climate and I’d argue our attitude. Maybe there are more reasons than Irish and Italian immigration that Australia has always been more Catholic than the UK or USA.
Yeah I’ve seen amongst younger people and the many on the ground that this whole religious genuflection ‘Im not a X but’ is being replaced with ‘yeah I’m X, I don’t care anymore and what the hell are you going to do about it’. Obviously in America it’s much further along, and it’s starting only to sneak into people in politics like Barnaby Joyce slowly in Aus, but outside the mainstream reporting it’s everywhere amongst regular Australians.
Another factor would be reward for effort. Australia never had a large domestic market to profit from and the land isn’t fertile enough to make money from agriculture (for most people). Yeah, waiting to see the big swing to the right in the next generation. I saw that Britain reduced the voting age to 16. Once upon a time, that would have meant a leftward shift in politics but I’d say that the upcoming generation, especially young men, might end up somewhere to the right of Franco, so we’ll see.