In the care of a nanny state ON its own, the attempt to use the courts to silence Andrew Bolt is not the end of the world. If successful, one newspaper columnist will no longer be free to express a particular opinion. It will be a victory for the thought police, but society will go on. And when looked at in isolation, Health Minister Nicola Roxon's plan to have cigarettes sold in repulsive packages merely erodes the commercial freedom of one unpopular industry. Few will care. But when these incidents are added to thousands of others, they point to what some consider to be the rise of the nanny state. We may well be witnessing a surge in social enginering in which the legal system is being used to wind back individual liberty in order to achieve goals favoured by populist governments. And that process appears to be redefining the meaning of citizenship. Australians might like to think of themselves as robust individualists who are free to make the most of their own decisions. But the Bolt case and the plans outlined by the health minister suggest that in a growing number of fields the nation's governments believe they know better. Bolt, a columnist for Melbourne's Herald Sun, is being sued under the Racial Discrimination Act in a class action over columns in which he referred to light-skinned Aborigines. The plaintiffs are seeking a court-ordered apology, a declaration that his columns were unlawful and an injunction against their republication. While this case could trigger sweeping changes in the way the media deals with the issue of race, it is based on a very old law. The RDA was enacted when Paul Keating was prime minister. And while this is one of the first cases to highlight the RDA's effect on free speech, that may well be due to the fact that hundreds of other cases have been dealt with behind closed doors through confidential mediation. That course was not acceptable in the Bolt case. Because this case is being dealt with in the Federal Court, it has brought to light an issue of much broader significance. Concerns are growing that well-intentioned statutes, tribunals, mediators and publicly-funded programs are chipping away at individual liberty. Through an avalanche of law, the foundations may well be in place for a new balance between the individual and the state. Under this new order, government gets to decide which provocative ideas are too dangerous to disseminate. Government also gets to use taxpayers' money not just to inform the community about dangerous but legal products, but to tilt the balance so consumers know what to do. Anti-discrimination tribunals might even be helping the community to decide what to think about religion. Rocky Mimmo, chairman of the Ambrose Centre for Religious Liberty, says there is no doubt that many governmment tribunals are biased against religion. "In low-level tribunals there is this problem of people deciding on a hierarchy of rights - and religion always comes last," he says. There is also a rise of a new bureaucratic form of authoritarian control. In relation to cigarettes - which I detest - you are getting authoritarian freaks who are deciding how you can trade. It's a creeping authoritarianism - it's the nanny state. 'We will tell you what is good for you'. His view is in line with that of two of the leading think tanks, the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs. They both believe the nation's governments have gone beyond their proper role and are trying to take responsibility for decisions that rightly should be made by individuals. The IPA's John Roskam relates an incident in which a visitor from Britain said he was delighted to be back in Sydney but had noticed that the growing role of government meant Australia's biggest city was beginning to resemble Singapore. In the view of Roskam, who is executive director of the IPA, governments are increasingly treating citizens like children who lack the ability to make their own choices. He points to the background documents for the national education curriculum which states that it is aimed at "moulding" citizens. He believes the federal government's approach to health is emblematic of the nanny-knows-best approach. "What Tony Jones should have asked Nicola Roxon on Lateline the other night was 'Nicola, can you guarantee that we will never have hamburgers in plain packaging'?," says Roskam. He says governments are increasingly bringing in new rules governing gambling, alcohol and fast food that "infantalise" the community. The recent debate about new rules governing child care also indicates that governments believe they are best placed to make decisions about disciplining children, he says. So how did we get to this point? Roskam suggests that one of the contributing factors has been what he describes as "behavioural economics." This allows policy-makers to think that by a 'nudge' here or there, they can mould precise outcomes. We now have a whole academic industry that thinks it can very finely modify human behaviour. Roskam believes that one of the factors pushing governments to take on this new role is globalisation. This trend, he believes, might well have pushed governments out of many of their former roles - hence the move to find new relevance by enacting a new category of laws aimed at moulding individual behaviour. Jeremy Sammut of the Centre for Independent Studies says it is instructive to examine the thinking at the root of the legislation being used in the Bolt case. "The thinking is that individuals lack robustness and their feelings can be hurt so easily that they need a huge legal apparatus to protect them," he says. And with Roxon, the thinking is that people are so stupid that they need to be scared away from consuming a legal product. They need to be treated as though they are children," Sammut says. Instead of presenting the community with information and allowing adults to make their own decisions, Sammut says the hallmark of the nanny state is "a constant nagging" by government and regulators. He predicts that the real danger in this approach is that it will eventually result in a downward spiral in which the community will "learn helplessness" and come to rely on government. He believes the push to stop people smoking has "morphed" and taken governments into more questionable areas of health care such as advice on how to lose weight. Everyone knows what they need to do to lose weight, but we are now in the realm of having government-funded telephone counselling services to tell you to get out of bed in the morning. Sammut was referring to the NSW government's "Get Healthy Information and Coaching Service." This government-funded telephone counselling service tells people to eat well, exercise and advises them how to lose weight. In order to measure the growth of the nanny state, the IPA tracks the amount of legislation enacted each year by federal parliament. Since 1962, the overall trend has been on the rise. And the moves to make cigarettes less appealing to consumers look set to add to that. The exposure draft of the Tobacco Plain Packaging Bill runs to 84 pages. Like the other elements that are contributing to the growth of the nanny state, this bill would assume the risk and responsibility for actions that were formerly the province of individuals. While governments might be acting with the best intentions, their decision to expand their area of responsibility - and diminish that of individuals - is not without cost. Instead of getting on with their lives, people and businesses are finding they need to spend more time simply ensuring that they comply with the law. This compliance cost is then added to the cost of doing business and, eventually, is passed on to consumers of goods and services. But from the perspective of government, that cost is invisible. What governments generally see are problems that can be remedied by new laws. "It's a lawyer's wet dream," says IPA research fellow Chris Berg. But from the perspective of the private sector, the new ambitions of the nation's government are one of the prime factors behind the growing cost of doing business in Australia. Because the Bolt case is not finalised, Press Council chairman Julian Disney declined to discuss its implications. But speaking generally, he said people needed to be free to express opinions, even if those opinions might offend some people. But that freedom was not absolute. It's important that journalists and others in public discussions be able to mention the unmentionable - even if that is at the cost of hurting feelings. But if the hurt is severe then the issue needs to be sufficiently in the public interest to justify causing that hurt. "It is also important the hurt is not aggravated by any gratuitous comments," Disney says.