Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. — Franz Kafka
I’d been back in Australia less than a day when I found myself slip-sliding in the slime with worms of a new bureaucracy. At least it was a new one for me.
While Australia was having its nanny state revolution, I was off toiling in Milton Friedman’s laissez-faire paradise of Hong Kong and later in Milton’s Paradise Lost with prawn soup, the lawless melange otherwise known as Bangkok.
I had assumed this usurping of the public service and the law by nannies and ninnies to have been greatly exaggerated … until, back in Sydney, I stood, quaking, under the gimlet gaze and granite face of the woman welcoming the great unwashed at the Australian Taxation Office in Martin Place.
