Gone are the days when you could fire your shotgun at whim and be fat if you wanted to be, writes Ben Pobjie. It's time for Australians to fight back against the nanny state.

I blame Mary Poppins. She convinced us that nannies were kind and decent people with our best interests at heart.

If only we had seen her for the autocratic practitioner of dark magic that she was, maybe we would be a little warier of falling victim to nannies ourselves.

Today we are under attack from the nanny state as never before: you can't swing a cat in Australia without hitting a bureaucrat who will fine you for violating a council bylaw forbidding cat-swinging after 8:00pm.

The Australia of my youth, where people were free to make their own choices, follow their own consciences, and inflict their own horrific injuries upon themselves, seems almost completely gone, destroyed by politically correct social engineers who preach "tolerance" for all — as long as you're neither fat nor armed.

And so we all have a decision to make: fight back today, or lose our country tomorrow.

You can't even be fat anymore, if you want to be

The latest blow to our national sense of self-sufficiency is the suggestion that the Government should impose a "sugar tax" to reduce Australians' consumption of soft drinks and energy drinks.

The tax, recommended and presented to Federal Parliament last week by the Grattan Institute, is designed to fight obesity, but it seems more likely its real purpose is to fight self-determination.

I will accept a lot from my Government — lying, stealing, involving my country in pointless unwinnable wars — but it crosses a line when it tries to take away my Pepsi.

The Government crosses a line when it tries to take away my Pepsi, says Ben Pobjie. ( iStockPhoto/bhofack2 )

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has called the idea "bonkers mad" and, as usual when commenting on matters of derangement, he is right on the money.

How crazy is it that in Australia — a country that was at one time easily distinguishable from North Korea — we are actually countenancing the thought of punching citizens square in the hip pocket in order to prevent them enjoying an ice-cold Sprite or refreshing Red Bull at the end of a long day?

Governess-in-chief Richard Di Natale, of course, says it's for our own good.

"We have a major health crisis on our hands with one in four Australian kids overweight or obese," he wheedled, like the craven, recalcitrant, creaming-soda-hating communist that he is.

What Mr Di Natale is conspicuously silent on, however, is the crucial question: why can't children be obese if they want to be? I thought we were raising our kids to believe they could achieve anything.

What are we to say now? "Good news little Eric, in modern Australia, you can grow up to be anything you want to be — unless that's fat."

How many youngsters are today going to bed in tears because Richard Di Natale has told them their dream of becoming a morbidly obese shut-in is invalid? Is that how he plans to inspire the next generation?

But then, what else should we expect in a country where citizens aren't even permitted to avail themselves of the myriad benefits of the Adler 110 lever-action shotgun?

We can't even defend ourselves from wild pigs

Millions of law-abiding Australians are being forced to make do with shotguns that can fire no more than five rounds; hopes of being able to fire seven rounds is still just a pipedream after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared the import ban on the Adler "set in stone".

Imagine you were one of those law-abiding Australians, out for a nice morning walk, as is your constitutional right. Imagine your walk gets interrupted by a pack of wild pigs.

You whip out your trusty shotgun to deal with the deadly razorbacks, but — Oops! — there are six pigs and your gun only fires five shots.

Boom, you're pig food.

And yet our current Government would actually rather you be eaten by pigs than allow you to experience the sweet taste of freedom. Or the sweet taste of Fanta, for that matter.

Sorry, this video has expired What is the Adler A110 and why is it controversial?

I'm old enough to remember when the Government trusted its citizens to make their own decisions about what they drank and/or shot.

I grew up in a country where people could live their lives however they saw fit, where I and my childhood chums played happily in the streets with our soft drinks and our guns, ingesting sugar to our hearts' content and spraying bullets at whatever seemed appropriate.

That country is, I fear, rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror.

It's time for us to make a choice. Do we want to live in a free country, a country where decent hard-working men and women can live their lives in whatever way they see fit, sipping from a can of whatever we fancy, firing whichever shotgun we prefer at whichever targets we select?

Or would we rather live in a totalitarian dystopia where we exist only to work and obey, and not get fat or shoot things or smoke or do drugs or anything fun at all?

Time to decide, folks. It's us or the nannies.