In February 1985, the Age reported that at least three Australian children had been disembowelled in the previous two years after sitting on swimming pool skimmer-box covers shaped like children’s seats. Before the advent of mandatory shatterproof safety glass for showers, over the years 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. Random breath testing was first introduced in 1976, to the chagrin of the Australian Hotels Association.1 In New South Wales it was followed by “an immediate 90 percent decline in road deaths, which soon stabilized at a rate approximately 22 percent lower than the average for the previous six years”.

These are just four of many examples of changes to laws, regulations, mandatory product standards and public awareness campaigns that were introduced following lobbying from health advocates. With these, as with nearly every campaign to clip the wings of those with the primitive ethics of a cash register, there was protracted resistance. 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.

These bans and brakes on personal and commercial freedoms are routinely ridiculed as the interventionist screechings of that reviled harridan, the nanny state. And the cathedral of the anti-nanny state in Australia is the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). One of its high priests is Tim Wilson, who pumps out an incontinent flow of the doctrine regularly on ABC’s The Drum and in numerous blogs and op-eds.

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. After he was sacked for his trouble the Times gloated: “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 of all time.

In May this year, Wilson, Australia’s champion of contemporary pet-dung-heap rights, railed that “Nanny state critics understand that incremental attacks on our freedom to choose are single steps down a longer road to remove individual choice and responsibility.”2 He wrote of the “rising groundswell of Australians who are sick of increasing local, state and federal government regulations of their choices”; denied that people like him want to “selfishly put their wants above the safety and happiness of others”; and argued 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 like funding transparency, and refuses to name its corporate sponsors (which include British American Tobacco3). It has an infamous list of 75 policies4 and institutions it would like to see abolished. These include the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission, the Australian National Preventive Health Agency, renewable energy targets, plain cigarette packaging and the alcopops taxes, and mandatory food labelling.

Those, like Wilson, opposed to state intervention in markets subscribe to often-unarticulated social Darwinist values that imply that those with the misfortune to be killed, injured or made chronically ill by their participation in untrammelled marketplaces had it coming to them. The unregulated marketplace and community is a kind of noble jungle where the fittest survive thanks to their better education and judgement in their consumer choices, and to their better ability to pay for superior, less dodgy products, to keep up repairs on their cars and homes, and to get employment in work that is not dangerous or toxic. Children living in poorer housing near busy roads in the leaded-petrol era had only their parents to blame for their lead-lowered IQs: they didn’t have to live there! When a toddler drowned in a backyard pool before mandatory pool fencing laws, it was the fault of the feckless parents for not being more vigilant, and nothing to do with the failure of government to mandate the cost of a fence as part of the cost of a pool. When kids ingested lead or other heavy metals from dodgy toys when these were legal, their parents should have just done their homework and not bought them.

Those who can’t keep up find their way into national health statistics, where, across almost every area of public health, the poor and less educated have higher rates of disease, injury, major disease risk factors and death.

Below is a big list of nanny state coddlings and protections that a profoundly ignorant Wilson would say are “rarely supported by credible research”.5 I stopped at 150 and could have doubled, tripled or even quadrupled the list. 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. Other countries are climbing over themselves to emulate many of these as best practice. Australia is one of the healthiest nations on earth. The precious freedoms that they “erode” are almost always trivial, and the industries that were regulated (with some exceptions, like asbestos and hopefully tobacco) reluctantly rolled over and still make money, now from safer products and procedures. No one could care less that their “choice” to buy leaded petrol has been removed, or that women are being “coddled” by the criminalisation of domestic violence. Only the most rapacious libertarians swoon at the unregulated, let-it-rip free market that would wind back the clock of civil society many decades if unleashed by their ideology.

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?6