Meet The Nanny Spider: It Wants To Wrap You Up In Little Rules And Eat Your Life

Ignorance of the law is no excuse. So here’s a bunch of things you can’t do without council approval.

You can’t sit in a chair on your nature strip. (The council will impound your chair.) Nor can you play with toy cars on your nature strip, according to the City of Maroondah’s Proposed Local Law No. 8.

You can’t set up a lemonade stand. (The stand will be confiscated.) Nor can you put lemonade on a tray and offer to sell it.

Well, you could; but you’d have to provide proof to the council that you possess public liability insurance of at least $10 million. You’d also need to submit a Temporary Food Event Application and Footpath Trading Permit to the council, as well as an Events Food Safety Program to the Department of Human Services – having familiarised yourself with a 40-page document detailing the protocols for cleaning, producing, acquiring the ingredients for and properly labelling your lemonade. (This is no doubt why we don’t have a vibrant street food culture like America.)

You can’t hold a street party. You can’t take a half-empty bottle of wine or spirits home from a dinner party, unless your journey home avoids footpaths, parks or travelling on roads. (Drink it all at the party. That’ll learn ’em.) You can’t busk without approval. If you have approval, you have to stay mobile. You can only play Billie Jean on your keytar for an hour at a time in any one spot.

That’s a lot of rules and paperwork for what most people would consider basic community interaction. So is it any wonder we don’t know our neighbours?

Australians have talked a lot about the nanny state since the Rudd Government came to power. And not entirely fairly. Many proposals to tax and regulate fatty food, booze and smokes were considered during the Howard years. (An endearing quality of the Howard government was they didn’t actually do much.)

But when we look at all the petty regulations that increasingly govern every aspect of our social and community life, it becomes obvious the nanny state is about more than just taxing alcopops.

The nanny state is a vast array of rules and regulations that filter our social lives though rough bureaucratic webs, and patronisingly hold our hands through the most basic of tasks.

Government advertising campaigns are morphing from information dissemination to schoolmarmish mollycoddling – just look at those WorkCover posters telling us to get health checks, or those “championship” violence ads that seem to believe the best way to communicate with young adults is through condescension.

There is no facet of life the Government doesn’t want a stake in. Our communications regulator has been trying to figure out why some people don’t use the internet or mobile phones much. The answer was revealed in a report released on Thursday: they don’t want to. The report says these people are missing out on the benefits of technology, but come on. If people don’t want to download iPhone apps, why on earth should anybody, let alone the Government, care?

The Federal Government has announced an expansive “Golden Guru” program, which seems to be a sort of real-life social networking for seniors. And every Victorian council puts out a brochure or has a spot on their website encouraging us to be good neighbours – some even recommend topics for small talk.

But at the same time these governments seem to be trying their darndest to stop communities forming. In 2009, the winners of the Premier’s Community Volunteering Award have to be more than just civic-minded; they also have to be really good at filling out paperwork.

This stifling of social interaction is a worldwide phenomenon. In the UK, more than a decade of Labour government has left a moribund nation struggling under the weight of bureaucracy.

It was brought into stark relief this week when the British Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills accused two best friends who babysat each other’s children of running an “illegal child minding business”. They determined that taking turns constituted virtual payment for services. Then they told the mothers surveillance teams would be monitoring the families to ensure this regulatory breach did not occur again.

Pretty much the same thing happened in Michigan: a woman was fined and threatened with jail for minding children waiting for the bus in front of her house.

Australian community hasn’t been totally regulated away yet. But it’s disappearing. Unless governments drop their nanny-first attitude, we’ll lose it.

Climate Trumping Needs Of The Poor

At one of those weird, celebrity-laden events they have every few months in New York, Hugh Jackman announced last week “climate change and poverty are inextricably linked”. World leaders furiously nodded their heads in stern agreement.

In a basic sense Jackman is right. Rich societies can cope with changes to climate. Poor ones cannot. Subsistence farmers will struggle more with any global warming than accountants in suburban Australia. But for all the talk of climate aid and sustainable self-sufficiency, the developing world needs to do just one thing to successfully adapt to climate changes: get on with developing.

But the political demands in developed nations for inspiring, grand, historic, operatic action on global warming are putting those stodgy old targets of economic growth in developing countries on the backburner.

Jackman inadvertently gave an illustration of why. Admitting his wolverine claws and mutant powers would be ineffective against climate change, he told of an Ethiopian coffee farmer converting methane from his cows into gas for electric lighting.

It’s a great story. It’s wonderful to hear of anyone using their resources more productively, particularly where those resources are at such a premium. But it misses the point. A greater thing to celebrate would be the coffee farmer being connected to the power grid, or wealthy enough to get decent medical care or education. Or when he is wealthy enough to pay others to generate electricity for him.

Industrialisation and economic growth in Africa and Asia no longer seem a universally agreed goal. Instead, some see it as a potential threat, if not carefully supervised by the West. If growth is to occur, aid agencies believe it must follow a strictly delineated path of sustainability and low emissions.

This new attitude has some dire consequences. According to a new study by World Growth, a non-government organisation, the share of aid directed to economic growth has fallen from 28 per cent 10 years ago to just 12 per cent today. Instead, aid is being focused on social and environmental aims.

The more priorities, the less likely anything will be done. It’s not thrilling to hear the United Nations, the European Union and many national governments repackaging foreign aid as “climate aid”. The EU plans to offer the developing world €15 billion ($25.4 billion) of climate aid as a sweetener to play ball at Copenhagen. This builds on the host of new programs and agencies distributing “climate-specific aid” such as the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism and Global Environment Facility, or the World Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit and Carbon Investment Funds.

With sufficient economic growth, the developing world can cope with the stresses of a changing climate and any number of the other stresses: chronic malnutrition, infant mortality, illiteracy and many diseases we believe to be “tropical” today, such as malaria, but are the consequences of extreme poverty. These problems could be exacerbated by climate changes, but they are problems right now. Only wealth can alleviate them.

From an environmental perspective, we should push for rapid economic growth in the developing world. Wealthy societies are cleaner; the technology to reduce pollution is as much a product of economic growth as the pollution is in the first place. First World factories are cleaner, more efficient, and healthier for their workers than Third World factories. Local industrial pollution in the developing world can be devastating.

Poverty is a dog of a problem. And foreign aid has always been an imperfect way to fixing it. Aid has congealed bureaucracies at the expense of the poor and funded the lavish lifestyles of oppressive dictators.

Nevertheless, a few years ago the theory and practice of overseas aid was getting somewhere. Encouraging development was not as simple as funnelling money from treasuries in the First World to treasuries in the Third World.

More important is allowing nations to build the institutions and legal frameworks that organically grow a productive economy. And we know trade liberalisation, deregulation and open markets are extraordinarily powerful drivers of growth.

Climate aid is just another illustration of what the economist William Easterly calls development paternalism: a belief well-paid international experts, equipped with enough power and resources, should take the third world’s destiny under their benevolent wings.

When those experts shift their priorities from economic growth to sustainability, they make it less likely they will achieve either. Unfortunately, as the Copenhagen looms, it seems the “right to develop” is no longer absolute.

Alcohol Is Good – So Let’s Drink To That

Australia’s relationship with alcohol is ”calculated hedonism”, according to the latest of many reports into drinking commissioned by the federal Health Department. This presumably is a Bad Thing.

The report, released last week, argues the intentional pursuit of pleasure is getting in the way of productivity, which is a shame. But what if alcohol is, on balance, good? Alcohol, and the social practices that have developed around it, is a key part of human society, and even human civilisation.

My point isn’t to downplay the very real negative consequences regular excessive drinking can have. Or to ignore the damage some drunk idiots can do, like drink-driving or street-fighting.

But Australian public health activists and the Health Department have decided the small minority of chronic alcoholics or our inadequate late-night policing isn’t the problem – it’s our drinking culture in general.

Traditional Australian mateship rituals like shouting a round of drinks are now seen as a form of peer pressure, and allowing staff to go out for after-work beers is seen as employer negligence.

So the Preventative Health Taskforce and the report leaked out of the Health Department argue workplaces are potential ”alcohol harm-intervention settings”, key battlegrounds for the Government to change our drinking culture. They recommend enacting workplace alcohol education, introducing health checks for employees, and making alcohol prevention strategies a part of industrial relations awards.

What’s interesting about these proposals is what they reveal of the health community’s beliefs about the sort of lives Australians should be leading.

A philosophical watershed was reached in February this year when the Health Department updated the Australian alcohol guidelines to describe the consumption of more than two standard drinks on any given day as risky drinking.

A bottle of wine contains more than seven standard drinks. So if you are one of those couples who like to spend their Saturday evenings with a serve of fettuccine marinara, a DVD box set of SeaChange, and a bottle of Clare Valley Riesling, you are now part of Australia’s booze problem.

Sure, the harmful drinking guidelines are just that – guidelines – but they fly so dramatically in the face of normal human behaviour they are almost completely meaningless. All they reflect is the steady ratcheting-up of claims about how we’re drinking, eating and smoking towards our demise. Never mind the fact that on practically every measure we are much healthier than our ancestors.

The vast majority of people have an overwhelmingly positive relationship with alcohol. Drinking is an important social lubricant. All this discussion about the harmful impact of drinking seems to forget alcohol is a key part of almost every adult social engagement held after 5pm. And for good reason. We enjoy alcohol’s effects and how it helps us relate to others. In almost every situation where alcohol is consumed – even consumed above what the health department has declared as risky – the effects of drinking are benign and, well, pretty enjoyable.

People very quickly learn how to manage their own drinking. Health officials might not always agree with our choices about alcohol consumption – bureaucrats will be bureaucrats! – but they should start to recognise these choices are nevertheless deliberate and informed.

After all, alcohol has played a fundamental role in the history of human civilisation – drinking has been tightly enmeshed with religion, nutrition, medicine and, above all, pleasure.

Compared to coffee and tobacco – regional delicacies that only achieved their global popularity a few hundred years ago – brewing, distilling and fermenting has been a major part of almost every culture for thousands of years.

In their new history of drinking in Australia, Under the Influence, Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor Jordon note Australians are nowhere near the booziest people on the planet, contrary to our self-image. Perhaps we deserve governments that treat us with the same relative moderation we treat alcohol.

Higher, Faster, Costlier: The Price Of Olympic Gold Is Too Great

Malcolm Fraser opened the Australian Institute of Sport in 1981 by saying we were “no longer going to let the world pass us by”.

Since then the performance of Australian sportspeople on the world stage has been not just a matter of pride, but an essential matter of government policy.

Just this week the Rudd Government announced plans to allow foreign athletes to fast-track (I daren’t say “queue-jump”) our laborious citizenship process so we can claim them as our own as quickly as possible. For all the Government’s lyricism about the romance of becoming a citizen of this great, wide, red-brown land, it is happy to toss aside its sacred citizenship rites so we can clock up one or two more medals at the next Olympics.

Indeed, Australia’s relatively weak performance in Beijing – Australian passport holders came a dismal sixth place on the gold medal tally – has panicked senior sports apparatchiks. The $220 million the Federal Government gives each year to the Australian Sports Commission is an embarrassingly small amount of money, according to athletics officials, and risks Australian athletes being trounced by better-resourced foreigners.

So maybe it is better we import athletes rather than hand the Australian Institute of Sport the extra few hundred million bellowed for after Beijing.

Australia is a sports-obsessed country, according to Lonely Planet. That’s fine. But all this political energy, tax money and policy directed towards the four-yearly achievement of a few medals by Australian athletes has to make you wonder – why bother?

It’s anachronistic, for one thing. When Fraser directed the government to mine Olympic gold, he was responding to a Cold War fear that free countries could not compete with socialist ones. Having watched the success of Russia and East Germany at the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Games, Australia’s athletics bodies were convinced they needed state central planning if they were ever going to win medals again. (Not a bad theory, perhaps, if you believe the superiority of your political system can be demonstrated only in a water polo pool. Of course, we now know that a key part of the Eastern Bloc’s sporting plan was performance drug binges.)

It’s been 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. Now might be a good time to abandon the state-subsidised jingoism embodied in elite sports funding.

Perhaps we could start thinking of sport like we think of any other industry. Competitive sport is like a competitive market. We import things which are uneconomical to produce in Australia. So too we could appreciate the skill of – and morally support – athletes from around the globe. The political insistence that our national honour is tied up in our domination of sporting contests is quite similar to the belief that we must have a home-grown Silicon Valley or green manufacturing industry if we’re going to have a self-respecting economy.

After all, globalisation has changed irrevocably our sporting allegiances. Many Australian soccer fans are just as likely to be interested in the fortunes of Real Madrid as they are in the Socceroos. Cricket fans might be more eager to watch the Rajasthan Royals compete in the highly competitive Indian Premier League than watch the Victorian Bushrangers. The traditional Australian constellation of swimming and tennis on the world stage, and football and cricket at home, is being undermined – in a good way – by our increasingly diverse ethnic make-up, as well as the accessibility of international sport on pay television and online.

These multicultural sports surely hold more appeal than the millions of dollars we spend on highly subsidised, niche elite sports such as volleyball. Most people care about volleyball for only 10 minutes every four years – and even then only if the sport rises above the din of other Olympic events. (Can anybody name an Australian volleyball player?)

Popular sports can afford to support themselves, and sports that are unpopular do not necessarily deserve to be propped up by taxpayers’ money. Australian athletes will continue to dominate many international competitions. As consumers of sport, we will be drawn to their success. Let’s leave it there. Why subsidise Cold War-style nationalism?

Consumerist Kiddies? Come On, Give Them A Little Credit

There’s a lot of rage directed at the advertising industry. The comedian Bill Hicks famously told his audience: “If anyone here is in marketing or advertising, kill yourself… you are Satan’s little helpers.”

And Hicks was just talking about companies that advertise to adults. In a documentary aired on the ABC last week, one talking head described advertisers who specialise in children’s products as “very similar to pedophiles”. This is an apparently widespread view, if the reactions to the doco on ABC message boards and Twitter are anything to go by.

In The Age, author Sharon Beder argued there is “a generation of children who have been manipulated, shaped and exploited” by the advertising industry. Corporations are, apparently, turning kids into mindless consumer drones.

But hold on a moment: children can’t afford to be consumers at all. Kids aren’t allowed to earn money – child labour laws are pretty explicit about that. Anything children consume is directly or indirectly controlled by their parents, whether by giving children pocket money, or buying them stuff. Kids aren’t the consumers here. Their parents are.

Often complaints about the commercialisation of childhood seem more like complaints about parenting than marketing. We keep hearing about the insidious development of “pester power”, as if kids are only annoying because a Bob the Builder (a division of HiT Entertainment, owned by Apax Partners) corporate planning session decided that nagging would be the firm’s third-quarter marketing strategy.

If there are parents who think their child will shut up when the advertising industry shuts down, they obviously don’t remember harassing their own parents about a new cricket set, or having their hair braided like other kids.

Take a child to the zoo, and all they want to do is talk about zebras. Watch a movie about cars, and all they want to do is play with cars. If the vast amount of culture modern children are enjoying on the internet, in video games and on DVDs makes them want to wear Elmo pyjamas or eat Transformers-branded cereal, it’s hardly a sign of the apocalypse – unless, of course, you have a philosophical objection to capitalism and brands in the first place.

Claims about the insidious nature of advertising are massively overblown.

Sure, children’s movies may often feature subtle product placements. Last year’s WALL-E did feature numerous references to expensive Apple products. But the plot of the movie was a satire of overconsumption and environmental degradation. Not many children would have left the cinema exhorting the virtues of consumerism.

Kiddie entertainment is usually pretty good like that – greedy characters get their comeuppance; the value of friendship is affirmed.

Similarly overblown are fears of the corporate takeover of schools. Companies that have been told to be “good corporate citizens” and sponsor community and school events are now being accused of brainwashing children.

In her book This Little Kiddy Went to Market: The Corporate Capture of Childhood Sharon Beder even speculated that “it is as if underfunding of schools is part of a corporate strategy to enable advertisers better access” – which only makes sense if you believe that government budgets are determined solely by a cabal of industrial tycoons.

Nevertheless, critics of consumerism argue that advertising is making kids depressed and unsettled because they can’t get everything they want. It’s certainly true that more children are being diagnosed with disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hypertension and depression than in the past. But we’ve only seriously started to diagnose mental illness in children within the past few decades. And there is good evidence to suggest that, particularly in the US, some schools are mischaracterising unruly childhood behaviour as a symptom of mental illness: 82 per cent of American teachers believe that ADHD is overdiagnosed, according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Attention Disorders.

Mental illness in children is not trivial. But to try to blame it on product placement in Pixar movies is just a little tenuous.

Going Green Is Just Another Rinse In Government Washer

There’s no better way to dress up your drab, colourless economic plan than calling it ”green”.

The Victorian Government has been trying to create a ”green economy” where business innovation is guided in a greenish direction by the gentle hand of subsidies, taxes and government purchasing decisions.

Last year’s Green Car Innovation Fund gave a nice, fresh, enviro-trendy spin to the traditional Australian pastime of taking money from successful, productive industries and giving it to car companies. For a short time, we all seemed convinced that dumping money in the deep black hole that is the Australian automotive sector was the best thing we could do for the environment.

Ten years ago, it wasn’t green jobs but technology start-ups that were going to be the future of our economy.

Remember the great tech hub in the Docklands that was supposed to make Melbourne the Silicon Valley of the southern hemisphere? The Victorian and federal governments spent millions on ”ComTechPort”, a network of buildings to host innovative tech start-ups. But the jewels in ComTechPort’s crown now have as their tenants such innovative, nimble start-ups as the Australia Customs Service, the Bureau of Meteorology, VicTrack and the Telstra Corporation.

Unfortunately, it looks as if we’re seeing that same cycle of wishful thinking and half-baked policymaking when governments talk about all the new cool green stuff they’re doing.

The Federal Government’s recent announcement of 50,000 new green jobs hit a quick snag when Participation Minister Mark Arbib, and then Kevin Rudd himself, admitted they weren’t ”new”, they weren’t really ”jobs” (most of them were more like work experience and training positions) and there probably wasn’t going to be 50,000 of them.

But they are still green. We will be getting a new Green Jobs Corps, educating, oh, a dozen-thousand or so unemployed youth in the finer points of tree planting and walking track construction. We’ll get a few more thousand ”local green jobs”, which also involve tree planting. And we’ll get 30,000 green apprentices. That last program will involve, among other things, ”training mechanics in green car engines”. There have been only about 10,000 hybrid cars sold in Australia. If all goes to plan, they’ll be very well maintained.

Government-created green jobs don’t tend to make a lot of economic sense. We might have great ambitions for a green, sustainable economy, but other countries have tried it already. In Spain, a recent study has found that each of the green jobs created in that country has cost nearly $1 million, and each job cannibalises more than two jobs from another sector.

Of course, some things are more important than money or the economy. But governments can’t simultaneously claim their green jobs schemes will drag us out of the economic doldrums, and argue green jobs are too important to dismiss with crude, heartless, economic analysis.

Nevertheless, a lot of people seem to view the financial crisis as a time to pursue other goals – we mustn’t just have one of those standard, boring economic recoveries, we have to have an exciting, innovative and forward-looking green economic recovery! But Australia’s unemployed would no doubt be a lot happier to get back into work as soon as possible, rather than waiting to be funnelled into a hypothetical green job according to the Government’s policy priorities.

Green is fashionable, sure. Consumers are demanding more environmentally aware products, and businesses are supplying that demand. Indeed, right now the private sector is doing a hell of a lot better than the Government when it comes to innovative green products and services.

But governments that slavishly follow fashions might just find themselves with a wardrobe full of old, worthless policies that don’t fit and cost the taxpayer way too much.

PM’s National Broadband Plan Really Is No Net Gain

Has there ever been a major Commonwealth program more hastily conceived than the national broadband network?

After it was clear their previous $4.7 billion broadband plan was a dismal failure, it was reported Kevin Rudd and the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, dreamt up this $43 billion plan while on two flights between Sydney and Canberra in April.

That’s not just policy on the run. That’s policy desperately sprinting from a horde of angry zombies while trying to pretend that the bite mark on its arm is nothing to worry about.

This latest iteration of the great broadband plan is three months old and already behind schedule. The Tasmanian leg – supposed to be available to consumers from this month – has been pushed back until mid-2010.

The project’s conception is still at an embarrassingly early stage. The Government’s financiers haven’t yet been consulted about exactly how the funds for the project will be raised, as a Senate committee heard last month. It’s veiled in secrecy. The Government has told the Opposition they’ll have to cough up $24,000 to see the documents which were supposed to have recommended the Government build the network.

And, unsurprisingly for a project entirely developed by two career politicians in the brief time while the seatbelt sign was off, the broadband network’s business case is supremely flawed.

The economist Henry Ergas has calculated it would have to cost individual subscribers at least $215 a month for the network to pay off its investment, and only if almost every broadband customer in Australia – 80 per cent – signs up.

Furthermore, the Government is discovering to its surprise that it can’t untangle the telecommunications industry’s dense knot of competitive rivalries and regulatory quagmires just by waving around a giant novelty cheque.

Yet to argue that the great broadband plan is perhaps just a tad undercooked is to invite accusations of Luddism. This seems to be because a lot of people view the broadband network as less an infrastructure project, and more the first tranche of broad social and economic revolution – the opening set-piece for the utopian-sounding “digital economy”.

So we’re repeatedly told it is a tragedy that Australia’s broadband take-up rates are somewhat lower than in other developed countries like Korea, because … well … think of all the cool things you can do online!

For these supporters, the technicalities of the national broadband network are just technicalities – what really matters is the internet’s sheer awesomeness.

So, fittingly, the Communications Minister’s pronouncements about broadband are rarely little more than a checklist comprising of a few key terms: “smart infrastructure”, “digital education revolution†and the more mundane “œmobile banking”.

Those are all wonderful, of course. Who isn’t looking forward to “e-Government”? But most e-Gov ideas are usually either stunningly obvious (such as more government information being provided online) or fashionable but pointless (the vapid, machine-written “blogs” of Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd).

Another commonly cited benefit from the Government’s broadband plan is its potential to revolutionise Australian hospitals with “telemedicine”.

But hospitals have been the recipients of a decade’s worth of special government programs to deliver them the best internet available. It seems silly to have to point this out, but Australia’s hospitals aren’t on the same ADSL plan the rest of us are.

Sure, your internet connection might have frustratingly capped just before you finished downloading that handicam copy of Transformers. But that doesn’t mean surgeons at St Vincent’s have to wait for another doctor to finish downloading x-rays before they can start the next heart bypass.

The most common argument for government-sponsored broadband is productivity. But the national broadband network isn’t going to be a magical productivity switch. There just aren’t many potential Australian entrepreneurs having their innovative business plans stymied because their broadband isn’t fast enough. Some businesses might find a faster internet connection useful, but few people seriously think our present internet speeds are what’s holding the economy back.

Anyway, our hunger for ever-greater productivity might be better satisfied by allowing the private sector to build the network. (As much as four years ago Telstra was begging the government for a regulatory reprieve so it could build a new broadband network by itself.)

Hell, if it’s productivity we want, perhaps the Federal Government could just reduce a few taxes. That’d give the economy a bit of a kick-along.

Of course, faster broadband for everybody would be delightful. But so would government subsidies for sunshine, flowers and walks on the beach.

Just because everybody loves the internet doesn’t mean that this $43 billion government-owned national broadband project is good public policy.

Personal tragedies under Stalin

A review of The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan Books, 2008, 740 pages)

It has taken historians in both Russia and the West a long time to get their minds around Stalinism. Anne Applebaum’s 2003 Gulag: A History went a long way to shedding some of the misconceptions about the Stalinist system of repression-most obviously on the left, where the history of the gulag has been shamefully minimised. In The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, Orlando Figes steps into the lives of individuals and families to expose the personal tragedies which are hidden behind the statistics behind Stalinist repression.

The tragedy of the individual under a dictatorship has been a common theme in the history of 20th century totalitarianism for more than fifty years. But as Figes points out in his introduction, our understanding of the individual in Stalin’s Russia has been shaped by the outpouring of memoirs by émigrés and intellectuals who have been eager to represent their deep yearning for liberty-and the resilience of individualism-under totalitarianism. Autobiographies like Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom contained many revelations but were extremely atypical of the average Russian. Yet, for lack of better alternatives, during the Cold War the West treated high-profile intellectuals like Kravchenko or Solzhenitsyn as ‘the authentic voice’ of repressed individuals under communism.

This has been compounded by a historiographical fashion to focus on resistance to authority, however isolated and atypical. Since the opening up of many Soviet archives post-1991, historians treating the era have enthusiastically depicted the Stalinist period as a continuous duel between repressors and dissenters, seizing upon the examples of defiance against Soviet rule or stubbornly brave individuals. Certainly this approach is an improvement on Cold War era historical investigation-when the academic focus was on either Politburo politicking or the broad sociological studies of the Soviet ‘masses’-but it has had the effect of understating the total-ness of Stalinist totalitarianism.

Resistance and dissent was not a viable option for individuals living in the early Soviet Union. Almost everybody faced the stark choice between arrest and collaboration. That choice, and the dual way of life it created-between the fear of arrest and mutual denunciation-is the source of The Whisperers’ title.

There are two words for ‘whisper’ in Russian. Shepchushchii means whispering out of fear of being heard. As many urban Russians lived in communal apartments-either buildings specially designed for collective living, or in large houses confiscated from their owners and subdivided into cramped living quarters-there was an ever-present fear of being overheard saying critical things about the Soviet regime. And the word sheptun refers to whispering or informing to the authorities. In the cramped communal apartment, which often housed dozens of residents, it was easy for petty grudges to escalate into letters to a local party chief.

To tell his stories of private life under Stalin, Figes has amassed an impressive amount of unpublished memoirs and archival evidence. But the true star of The Whisperers is the enormous amount of oral testimony he was able to accumulate-more than one thousand individuals who lived under Stalin were interviewed.

And it is all the more important because this is a generation rapidly disappearing. Figes notes that almost six per cent of the total sample died before the book was published.

In The Whisperers, the dominant unit is the family. Idealistic Bolshevik activists envisioned the 1917 seizure of power as a revolution in not just economic and political terms, but as a revolution in family relations as well. As Maxim Gorky wrote, ‘the new structure of political life demands from us a new structure of the soul’. While ideologists maintained that Soviet children were to be raised collectively, rather than in the now outdated family unit, the less appealing flip side of this was that it gave dedicated Bolshevik parents almost carte blanche to ignore their children. If it takes a village, then parents are almost redundant.

One of the most striking illustrations of Soviet life is the Figes’ discussion of the communal living arrangements and how they were so central to the communist experience. Our modern image of the Soviet Union may be those lifeless identical and symmetrical apartment complexes rising up out of the Russia flats. But in the Stalinist period, Russian accommodation was forged out of the existing, prerevolutionary housing stock. In the mid-1930s, three-quarters of the population of Leningrad and Moscow were living communally in former apartments-dozens of families squeezed into single dwellings, whole families living in single rooms.

One typical arrangement described by Figes consisted of an apartment revamped to consist of thirty-six rooms, each housing an extended family in a space of 12.5 square metres. In one of those rooms, a former inhabitant related,

There was a table in the room, on which my grandmother slept. My brother, who was six, slept in a cot underneath the table. My parents slept in the bed by the door. My other grandmother slept on the divan. My aunt slept on a feather mattress on the floor with her cousin on one side, while my sister (who was then aged sixteen), my cousin (ten), and I (eleven) somehow squeezed in between them-I don’t remember how. We children loved sleeping on the floor: we could slide our bodies underneath our parents’ bed and have a lot of fun. I don’t imagine that it was fun for the adults.

Kitchens, laundry facilities and bathrooms could be shared or allocated by individual families depending on the layout of the apartment but would always be utilised as more places to sleep. These communal living arrangements were originally just to resolve a housing crisis created by the rapid industrialisation of the soviet economy (and the rural refugees created by collectivisation) but they quickly embedded themselves in the Soviet surveillance apparatus.

With 30 or more families living virtually on top of each other and with often paper-thin walls, denunciations-justified or not-could be easily borne out of petty domestic disputes.

Work provided little relief. One factory manager, in a letter to the Soviet president, described the perverse outcome of the Soviet bureaucratic system:

The problem with Soviet power is the fact that it gives rise to the vilest type of official-one that scrupulously carries out the general designs of the supreme authority… This official never tells the truth, because he doesn’t want to distress the leadership. He gloats about famine and pestilence in the district or ward controlled by his rival. He won’t lift a finger to protect a neighbour… All I see around me is loathsome politicizing, dirty tricks and people being destroyed for slips of the tongue. There’s no end to the denunciations. You can’t spit without hitting some revolting denouncer or liar. What have we come to? It’s impossible to breathe. The less gifted a bastard, the meaner his slander. Of course, the purge of your party is none of my business, but I think that as a result of it, decent elements still remaining will be cleaned out.

The most harrowing sections of the book when Figes looks at what he describes as ‘the great break’, when the semi-liberal period of the New Economic Plan gave way to Stalinist five year plans, collectivisation and rapid coerced industrialisation.

The Whisperers reads at times like a catalogue of family tragedy, as the voluntary ideological family breakdown common in the first few years of the Soviet Union, quickly gives way into the now-familiar Stalinist pattern of arrest, imprisonment, release and rearrest.

While not for the most part an interpretative history, The Whisperers is not totally disengaged from contemporary historiographical debates. Figes disputes Robert Conquest’s characterisation of the famine of 1932-33 as a ‘deliberately inflicted… massacre of men, women and children.’ As Figes argues, while the policy of collectivisation was undoubtedly the culprit of rural Russian suffering in this period, the scale of the famine itself took the Moscow government by surprise, and it had no reserves of grain ready to account for the shortfall.

But whether famine was a weapon of terror or just its consequence is surely beside the point. If we cannot go so far to describe this period as a genocidal ‘terror-famine’ as some historians have done, we can still agree that genocide did occur against the ‘kulak’ population. It was a deliberate policy of genocide which brought about the famines of the 1930s, even if the linkage between famine and genocide was not as deliberate as Conquest makes out.

Figes quotes one Komsomol activist describing the kulaks as ‘bloodsuckers’ and ‘parasites’: ‘We were trained to see the Kulaks, not as human beings, but as vermin, lice, which had to be destroyed’. Ten million kulaks were expelled from their home between 1929 and 1932. And this figure obscures the countless individual horrors which accompanied collectivisation.

The Whisperers is not a book of macro-level statistics, but of intimate family and personal histories. And at that level, terror and collectivisation were nearly indistinguishable from thuggery and murder. One focus of Figes’ narrative is the Golovin family from Obukhovo, a small town about 400 kilometers east of Leningrad. The local Komsomol were little more than a dozen violent teenagers armed with pistols, and the Golovins, having been branded as kulaks, were at their mercy. Ivan Golovin, visiting the family from a neighbouring town, was shot in the head when obviously drunk Komsomol activists started firing at the Golovin house during dinner. In a later confrontation on the family doorstep, the Komsomol ring leader yelled at Nikolai Golovin, ‘I shall shoot you, just as I murdered your brother, and no one shall punish me’. Nikolai escaped from that heated exchange without being but he was soon after denounced by the young activists, arrested, and sent to a White Sea Gulag.

The farms of Obukhovo were collectivised a few weeks later.

One important conclusion of The Whisperers is just how large the Second World War looms in the Russian memory. As Figes writes, for all the excesses, hardships and moral atrocities of the Stalinist years, for a certain generation the war was the defining event of their lives.

It was a time of comradeship, of shared responsibilities and suffering, when ‘people became better human beings’ because they had to help and trust one another; a time when their lives had greater purpose and meaning because, it seemed to them, their individual contributions to the war campaign had made a difference to the destiny of the nation. These veterans recalled the war as a period of great collective achievement, when people like themselves made enormous sacrifices for victory…

But for the regime, the memory of the war years was a double edged sword-on the one hand, Figes writes, ‘the commemoration of the Great Patriotic War served as a reminder of the success of the Soviet system’, but on the other hand, the war was a period of de facto de-Stalinisation, as the instruments of repression took a secondary role compared to the war effort.

By the 1960s, Victory Day was a tightly controlled state celebration of the war effort, carefully integrated in the government’s propaganda narrative. But to a large extent the memory of the Soviet war effort defined the attitude of many Russians towards their Stalinist past. This attitude was complemented by a tacit silence about what Vladimir Putin has coyly described as ‘some problematic pages’ of Russian history.

Figes is one of the strongest historians of the Soviet Union and the Russian psyche. His book on the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy anticipated his Whisperers methodology by telling the story of the revolution through a series of tightly examined interconnected individual narratives. Both A People’s Tragedy and his cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance won Figes a truckload of awards, and it is easy to understand why-Figes presents his often highly specific and interwoven material in a uniquely engaging fashion. While his earlier books are powerful and compelling, The Whisperers is undoubtly his largest achievement. Bringing together so many personal narratives, Figes is able to illuminate aspects of life under the Soviet regime which other historians, relying on more scattered testimony and the inherent biases of official archives, have not.

In the final pages of The Whisperers, Figes quotes a former prison guard who through a mixture of half-baked ideology and hard-learnt realism justified his own position in the Stalinist system:

What is Soviet power, I ask you? It is an organ of coercion! Understand? Say, for example, we are sitting here and talking, and two policemen knock at the door: ‘Come with us!’ they say. And that’s it! That’s Soviet power! They can take you away and put you in prison-for nothing. And whether you’re an enemy or not, you won’t persuade anybody of your innocence. That’s how it is. I get orders to guard prisoners. Should I believe these orders or should I believe you? When you kill a pig you don’t feel sorry for it when it squeals. And even if I did feel sorry for somebody, how could I help them?… In the camp I guarded mothers with sick children. They cried and cried. But what could I do? They were being punished for their husbands. But that was not my business. I had my work to do.

The tragedy of Stalinism was that these sorts of justifications were common. We might describe it as ‘Stalin’s’ Russia, but the totalitarianism of the early Soviet Union came from below, as individuals were forced to slot themselves into the system: to whisper, or be whispered about.

10 Worst Nanny State Policies

10: Plain packet cigarettes

The argument for plain cigarette packaging is one of the most stark examples of how Nanny State regulations treat individuals as childish automatons. Plain packaging involves the complete removal of any brand logos, special colours or fonts, pictures or any other unique packaging design, to be replaced by only the brand name in a mandatory font, complemented by health warnings.

But would it work? Supporters of plain packaging cite studies which suggest that consumers would find plain packaging boring and dull, and marginally reduce the positive connotations of smoking. This certainly makes sense. But cigarette packages are already plastered with images of rotten lungs and cancer-ridden body parts. How removing brand logos could significantly make these already extraordinarily distasteful packages less appealing is hard to imagine.

Mandatory plain packaging seems to be predicated on the belief that attractive packaging is enough to convince non-smokers to become smokers, or that for smokers trying to quit, a good-looking logo is just too much to bear. Undermining brand identity would no doubt change the attitude that smokers have towards cigarette brands-the public health research has convincingly demonstrated that-but, as to how this would effect the desirability of smoking itself, the evidence just isn’t there.

The National Preventative Health Taskforce’s discussion paper on tobacco was titled ‘Making Smoking History’. This is surely a new stage in the public health movement’s war against smoking-an open affirmation that the goal of the government should not be to reduce risk, or to inform consumers of risks they should be aware of, but to eliminate an otherwise totally legal product.

9: ‘Clarity in Pricing’

Believing that consumers are being duped into paying too much for goods and services because the market doesn’t provide them enough information, the Rudd government altered the Trade Practices Act in 2008 to compel retailers to display the total price of goods. That is, the law forces firms to add up those pesky ‘fees and charges’ and show a single, total price of products.

In the words of Consumer Affairs Minister Chris Bowen, the amendment was intended to ‘empower consumers to make the best decisions about what they buy.’

But this was easier imagined than implemented. In fact, in the case of car companies, it was nearly impossible to implement. The fees and charges added on the price of a new car include things like stamp duty, registration, luxury car taxes, and dealer delivery fees, all of which can vary depended on jurisdiction, dealer or purchaser.

As a consequence, many major car companies-Ford and Holden, for example-have concluded that they can not display any prices on their national websites at all.

Increasing the amount of information consumers can access seems like a no-brainer for many economists and policy-makers seeking to improve the market. But it is policies with these sorts of justifications that have led to financial product disclaimers which are so long and complex that almost no consumers read them-again, the totally counterproductive result of mandatory information disclosure is that consumers are less informed, rather than more informed.

8: The internet filter

Few Nanny State initiatives have had such bipartisan opposition as internet filtering. Both the Coalition and the Greens Party oppose the Federal Government’s scheme, and the Institute of Public Affairs is joined by organisations such as Electronic Frontiers Australia and Get Up! in arguing that the filter will be costly, ineffective, and a breach of basic principles of free speech.

The primary justification for the internet filter, like so many Nanny State measures, is the protection of children-protecting children from ‘inappropriate’ internet content, like legal pornography or violent websites, as well as the policing of child pornography. But these are two totally separate issues, demanding two separate approaches. Protecting children against inappropriate content is the sort of task parents can easily perform-apart from basic supervision of what children look at online, there is an extremely wide variety of filtering software that can be installed on computers which children may access. Child pornography is however an issue for police. Because child pornography is not generally trafficked on openly accessible websites, a filter will do nothing to disrupt child pornography networks.

Nevertheless, the government has deliberately fudged the distinction between the two issues. Indeed, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy argues that ‘if people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.’

The dangers of the internet have long been an electorally potent issue-the 2007 election saw the Coalition rest a lot of their electoral hopes on a campaign for internet safety. But while many parents may be concerned about what their children come across online, the capacity for those parents to monitor and control internet access has never been greater.

7: Banning junk food ads

There are literally dozens of proposals to deal with Australia’s love of junk food. The National Preventative Health Taskforce has recommended everything from subsidies for gym memberships to subsidising fresh fruit. But the most prominent proposal-and one which has had the longest running support from the public health community-is a ban on junk food ads targeting children, or a ban on junk food ads broadcast during childrens’ programming.

Would this materially shrink our children? The lead editorial of a 2004 edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine argued ‘there is no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children’s food consumption and, consequently, no reason to believe that a complete ban on advertising would have any useful impact on childhood obesity rates.’ It continued: ‘the claim that food advertising is a major contributor to children’s food choices and the rising tide of childhood obesity has obvious appeal, but as an argument it does not stand up to scrutiny.’

But inevitably, public health criticisms of junk food ads eventually reduce to vague claims about ‘pester-power’, which perhaps says more about parenting than it does about advertising.

6: GroceryChoice

When the plug was finally pulled on GroceryChoice in June, it was the end of one of the biggest Nanny State failures in recent years. GroceryChoice purported to better inform shoppers about the relative price of their supermarket shops.

That was, at least, the theory. In practice, the website was grossly deficient. Totally unable to effectively monitor the price of individual goods, or even individual outlets, the GroceyChoice instead offered up ‘typical’ baskets of goods in a region.

Furthermore, it was never clear that there was a demand for the service. GroceryChoice revealed a supermarket industry that was actually highly competitive. And the information the website was able to provide was totally dwarfed by the information supermarkets provided as part of their advertising campaigns, and their individual websites.

While the concerns that led to the GroceryChoice project involved the apparent ‘duopoly’ of Coles and Woolworths over the supermarket industry, the results of GroceryChoice actually further encouraged shoppers to favour the big two. In any given region, either Coles or Woolworths may be cheapest option, but the nationally consistent result of GroceryChoice was that independent supermarkets such as Franklins or IGA were always significantly more expensive.

GroceryChoice may have been well-intentioned-who doesn’t want a market with better-informed customers?-but like so many Nanny State proposals, completely fell apart in its implementation.

5: Street parties

Nanny State regulations don’t just have negative economic consequences or erode personal liberty. The stock of regulations from federal, state and local governments that affect all aspects of public gatherings are critically eroding our capacity to form communities.

Take local street parties. Local government regulations are making it near impossible to hold a community gathering, and making it certainly impossible to hold an impromptu one. As the IPA Review pointed out last year, navigating the complex bureaucratic hurdles to hold a party takes a lot of work. Party organisers have to fill out safety plans-a typical one, from Stonnington Council in Victoria, is 25 pages long.

The safety plan makes event co-ordinators safety wardens, responsible for abiding by the safety plan and controlling the safety organisation, which comprises the safety warden and any additional wardens.

As a safety warden in Stonnington, you will have to complete a complicated seven-step risk-assessment process in accordance with joint Australian/New Zealand risk management standards. Fortunately, you will have five response guides to follow, ranging from vehicle accidents to electrical failures, and several prewritten emergency announcements to memorise.

The safety plan is just the beginning. In some councils, event co-ordinators need to undergo a police background check. Sound levels need to be monitored by qualified acoustic engineers. Lemonade stands need regulatory approval, as well as the payment of appropriate fees to the council.

Food handling regulations are particularly pernicious, especially for rural communities, which rely on volunteers to support the also-voluntary Country Fire Authority. The IPA’s Louise Staley found this out for herself when she tried to help the Red Cross feed firefighters during the 2006 bushfires.

She wrote in The Age:

When I was helping the local Red Cross make lunches for the firefighters, it all had to be done in a registered kitchen and a person who had done the food-handling supervisor’s course had to be there at all times. What that means in practice is nobody is allowed to make a slice or biscuits at home.

Governments are increasingly talking about the importance of social capital to alleviate the causes of poverty and isolation and strengthen civil society. Unfortunately, it is too often government regulations that act to undermine social capital-making it increasingly hard to connect with neighbours and build communities.

4: Kogarah’s fat planning

State and federal governments are not the only levels of government imposing the Nanny State. Local governments are using what little powers they have over urban planning to impose a disparate array of regulations. The most absurd example of local government Nanny Statism is the manner by which a number of councils in NSW are trying to manipulate individual food choice.

Three councils, Waverley, Gosford and Kogorah, are using their control over planning applications and development controls to introduce a ban on trans fats-fats artificially made by introducing hydrogen to vegetable oils. Trans fats are used in some foods to lengthen shelf life, enhance consistency and add flavour. The three councils have placed conditions on new commercial developments that they avoid using these sorts of fats.

Food regulation is hardly core business for councils, who are usually limited to hard rubbish collection and approving property developments. The trans fats ban is only the most extreme version of an tendancy for local governments to expand their purview into social issues. Local governments seem eager to become regional Nanny State fiefdoms.

Many councils have also weighed heavily into the debate over alcohol and public health, trying to use their surprisingly adaptable planning powers to enact social change. This, of course, has been encouraged by the historically ambitious nature of the urban planning community to cast their role as less about nominating places to put shopping centres, and more about manipulating society. When the bizarrely political urban planning activists and the strange collection of political trainees and community do-gooders that comprise local councils get together, the result is Australia’s lowest level of the Nanny State.

3: Moreland’s gaming rates

More than any other Nanny State issue, the attack on gambling exposes the long history of class antagonism that supports much paternalistic policy. As Richard Allsop writes in this issue of the IPA Review, the forms of gambling that attract the most adverse attention from the Nanny State’s great and good are those which appeal to lower socio-economic groups-the pokies and the races.

Pokies in particular have been targeted by every level of government with discriminator taxes and regulations-from the vitriol of South Australian Independent Senator Nick Xenaphon who told a gambling industry conference that he looks forward to a future were ‘common sense prevails and you are shut down for good’, to the discriminatory rate rises which many local governments are trying to place on gaming venues. Victoria’s Moreland Council is trying to double the rates of local pokies clubs, while leaving all other businesses in the area alone.

And Xenophon has expressed hope that the government’s proposed internet filter would target online gambling as well.

This is a lot of hate for a leisure activity which only creates a problem for 2 per cent of those who participate. And there are an extraordinary number of well-endowed and accessible resources to support those who have problems with their gambling. In Victoria alone, the Community Support Fund-which draws its revenue from a portion of the state tax on gaming machines alone-has an annual fund of more than $110 million. Every state has a wide variety of 24-hour hotlines, counselling services and support networks. But for those 98 per cent of individuals who have no problem with their gaming continue to be targeted by anti-gaming politicians and lobbyists who cannot bring themselves to admit that gaming can be enjoyable-and manageable-just like any other leisure activity.

2: Drinking in Sydney

Policymakers often have contradictory goals. Nowhere is this clearer than the regulatory back-and-forth surrounding Sydney’s liquor licences. In 2007, the NSW government announced changes to the existing licensing laws that favoured large licenced venues over smaller ones. This was explicitly an attempt to develop a ‘small bar’ and laneway culture which many Sydneysiders felt the city lacked in comparison to Melbourne. These changes lowered the price of licences to $500 for small venues, and allowed restaurants to serve alcohol without meals.

But the intention to develop the small bar culture was dramatically curtailed by a competing Nanny State philosophy-to reduce the amount of liquor consumed and alcohol related violence. In common with many other cities, Sydney has seen an array of early morning liquor lockouts (policies which restrict the entry of patrons into a licenced venue after a certain hour) and freezes on licence applications. These anti-alcohol policies are stopping the much-heralded 2007 changes from having any significant effect on Sydney’s drinking culture.

But these aren’t the only regulations holding back Sydney’s prospective laneway culture. One new bar in Darlinghurst was shut down after just two weeks because the local council decided it shouldn’t open onto a laneway at all, serving the owners with a $3000 fine and an instruction to open onto a main road.

1: Stay out of the playground

Many ‘public health’ problems which lead to Nanny State policies could actually be mitigated, at least in part, by the elimination of other Nanny State policies. One clear illustration of this is the burgeoning limits on what children can do at schools during their lunchbreak. As Christopher Murn pointed out in the November 2008 IPA Review, risk-averse education department bureaucrats are slowly but surely banning all the forms of physical exercise that previous generations enjoyed during their lunchbreaks. In NSW and Victoria, swings, see-saws, flying foxes and roundabouts have been banned. Monkey bars have been removed from many schools-when they were removed from a Townsville school recently, it made national headlines. Various schools across the country have banned competitive sport, games that are ‘too rough’ and cartwheels.

Those activities that haven’t been banned are being regulated out of existence. The NSW Department of Education and Training’s ‘Guidelines for Safe Conduct of Sport and Physical Activity in Schools’ reaches 284 pages, and describes elaborate restrictions for all physical activity. Finishing tape is banned from running races. Curve balls are banned in baseball until the children reach Year 9.

Like so many other Nanny State restrictions, the cost of these sort of restrictions is impossible to quantify. But the social costs are significant-what will happen to a generation of children who cannot compete in sport, or who have been taught to be so risk-averse to totally eliminate any possiblity of injury, no matter how unlikely? Nanny State paternalism will have profound effects on Australia’s social makeup unless there is a dramatic reversal in our attitude to health and risk.

Let’s Bin The Overcooked Moralising

When MasterChef announces its winner tonight, it will have done more than inspire a few home chefs to cook half a pig’s head, as third-place winner Chris famously did.

MasterChef takes an overwhelmingly positive perspective on modern food and home cooking. This is actually pretty rare. A lot of the discussion about modern food is highly political and deeply pessimistic. Even popular shows that try to celebrate food can’t quite welcome the base pleasure of good cooking. Gordon Ramsay won’t stop mumbling about “local produce” and the evils of imported ingredients, and Jamie Oliver seems just as desperate that we grow our own vegies for the good of the planet as he is that we make our own pasta sauce from scratch.

Cultural critics have spent the past decade trying to convert our dinner into an ideological statement. We’re told we face a future torn between a diet of instantaneously prepared frankenfood made primarily of transfats, or a diet that is richer in politics than flavour – with a functional, expensive and bland mixture of local, organic, slow, GM-free and fair-trade food.

So it’s refreshing to watch a food show that doesn’t even pay lip service to all the over-cooked moralising about the “ethics” of food. You get the impression that even if a MasterChef contestant used ingredients that were artificially grown in a chemical factory by robot arms, the only thing the judges would be interested in would be taste, texture and presentation. You know, the reasons why we enjoy eating.

And MasterChef recipes almost always involve some nutritionally mischievous ingredients – sugar, butter and the ubiquitous salt. This, too, has upset some people. One nutritionist, Catherine Saxelby, was particularly concerned that the show has “no regard for health or nutrition”, arguing that MasterChef makes “the basic chop, potato and two veg look boring when there’s actually nothing wrong with it from a nutrition point of view”.

That makes sense: a dish consisting of a chop, a potato and two vegies is extremely boring. If nothing else, MasterChef will have encouraged a few more people to think carefully about food preparation and variety. After all, it is often out of boredom with home-cooking that we go for takeaway alternatives or just defrost frozen food.

The variety of food cooked by the MasterChef contestants – and the high standards they are able to achieve with easily sourced ingredients – also reflects the powerful consumer revolution in food that is changing what and how we eat. It’s no secret that the food we eat is different from the food our parents and grandparents ate. Sushi and home-cooked burritos would have been completely alien to most Australians just a few decades ago. The way foods have migrated because of globalisation is a story of long-term developments in food culture. But it’s not hard to find examples of how our tastes are rapidly expanding right now.

In my local Brunswick supermarket in the past month, the chorizo sausage has gone from being a niche delicacy, offered only as single, vacuum-packed sausages tucked away near the freezers, to being offered in large, fresh multipacks proudly displayed with the other meat. They’re now just opposite the mince. And you can’t get more mainstream than mince.

Incidentally, this new location also puts the chorizo within a sausage-throw of the okra – a weird, slimy fruit used primarily for gumbo, a Cajun and Creole stew. Many Australian-born generations before us would have had no idea of what okra was, let alone what to do with it. Yet it sits comfortably in suburban supermarkets, where space is at a premium.

Seemingly inconsequential technological developments are providing us with fresher produce at the humble supermarket. Lettuce and baby spinach is now most commonly available in pre-packaged, sealed plastic bags, rather than exposed for consumers to grab at. This began in Europe in the 1980s but has only recently had a big impact here. A seemingly minor change, sure, but it’s the little things that count. According to Packaging magazine Australia (it’s “Australia’s premier packaging news”!), most of the innovation in packaging is developed for the food industry – like “oxygen scavengers”, those weird little sachets that come with pre-made tortillas.

These changes in technology and taste have made it possible to narrow the distance between elite restaurants and home cooking, changes without which MasterChef would not be as engaging and relevant to the nearly 2.5 million Australians who watched the show’s final week. We are served a lot of ideological pessimism about contemporary home cooking. But MasterChef shows that the proof is in the eating.