In Australia, anyone who supports rules and regulations that make products safer or improve public health can expect to come under attack from critics arguing they’re restricting freedom and turning the country into a “nanny state”.

These “nanny state” critics are everywhere and they’re superficially persuasive. After all, who wants government to tell them how to live their lives? But scratch the surface and you’ll discover nanny state critics are frequently backed by powerful vested interests, like the tobacco industry arguing against plain packaging on cigarettes, or the secretive PR outfit know as the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) arguing against government per se.

Nanny state critics are almost always self-interested. They’re rarely motivated by the freedoms they purport to defend. And invariably their arguments crumble under scrutiny.

Personal liberties

In May, the IPA’s director of climate change policy and intellectual property and free trade unit Tim Wilson wrote an opinion piece that encapsulates the organisation’s opposition to nanny state regulation:

incremental attacks on our freedom to choose are single steps down a longer road to remove individual choice and responsibility.

Wilson wrote of the “rising groundswell of Australians who are sick of increasing local, state and federal government regulations of their choices” and denied that people like him want to “selfishly put their wants above the safety and happiness of others”.

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Wilson also warned that we should all “learn to manage risk through our choices” and that it is not “the job of government to coddle us from the world’s evils, avoid risk and use taxes, laws and regulations to either steer or direct our behaviour”.

The IPA has academic pretentions and calls its associates “fellows”. But it has not the first idea about academic principles such as funding transparency, refusing to name its corporate sponsors (they include British American Tobacco).

The IPA has an infamous list of 75 policies and institutions it would like to see abolished. These include the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission, the Australian National Preventive Health Agency, repealing renewable energy targets, plain cigarette packaging and the alcopops tax, and the end of mandatory food labelling.

This isn’t surprising. I was a board member of Choice magazine for 20 years, and lost count of the number of times manufacturers staunchly resisted voluntarily making changes to their dangerous, ineffective or substandard products.

Public good

Changes to laws, regulations, mandatory product standards and public awareness campaigns have saved countless lives over the years:

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Before the advent of mandatory shatterproof safety glass for showers, many people suffered major lacerations and occasionally died after bathroom accidents

Before 2008, it was legal for fast-buck retailers to sell children’s nightwear that could easily catch fire: many children were hideously burnt and scarred for life

Prior to the introduction of safety guidelines, at least three Australian children were reportedly disemboweled after sitting on swimming pool skimmer box covers shaped like children’s potty.

And the list goes on.

With these, as with nearly every campaign to clip the wings of unethical manufacturers, there was protracted resistance.

Similar attacks once rained down on Edwin Chadwick, the architect of the first Public Health Act in England in 1848. He proposed the first regulatory measures to control overcrowding, drinking water quality, sewage disposal and building standards.

In response, the Times thundered:

We prefer to take our chance with cholera and the rest than be bullied into health. There is nothing a man hates so much as being cleansed against his will, or having his floors swept, his walls whitewashed, his pet dung heaps cleared away.

And yet on the 150th anniversary of the Public Health Act, a British Medical Journal poll saw his invention of civic hygiene, and all of its regulations, voted as the most significant advance in public health and medicine since 1840.

Counting the ways the nanny is good for us

Next time you hear someone attack “the nanny state” for intruding on personal liberty or being a heinous burden on business, here’s a long list of examples that show how nanny state coddlings and protections have paid off. I stopped at 150 but I could have doubled, tripled or even quadrupled the list.

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We don’t hear much from the IPA and its ilk on any of these because they are all immensely popular, taken-for granted safeguards on our health, safety and quality of life. Because of them, Australia is one of the healthiest nations on earth. And other countries are climbing over themselves to emulate many of these as best practice.

So a public invitation to the IPA: which of these 150 heinous intrusions on people’s freedoms and the right to unbridled commerce does it wish to see abolished?