And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

— Hillaire Belloc

“Fuckwalk” didn’t get nearly as much publicity or debate as the event whose name it co-opted. A pity, really, for the June 25 event — people walking along, swearing freely in the street — had a clear and important political objective: to protest the Baillieu government’s decision to render permanent a trial law first introduced by the Brumby government, giving police the power to issue on-the-spot fines for swearing.

The move renders the police de facto prosecutor and magistrate, obliging anyone so fined, and objecting, to initiate full court proceedings — if they are even aware that they can do so, which many aren’t. Since the law fails to specify any sort of level or quantity of obscenity, and includes all public places, from trains to sports grounds, its application could easily become capricious — used against people, frequently teenagers, who are merely a bit mouthy or irritating to the cops.

Few would doubt that a law against gross public indecency or continued obscene abuse is a good one — but such laws are dependent on a key element of good policing, that public disorder offence should involve a breach of the peace. That element is absent from the new law, which allows the cops to give you a $250 ticket for one stray “fuck off”.

Thus, the anti-swearing law, though in many ways a small matter, constitutes an enormous extension of policing into everyday life — and into one’s internal consciousness, as the mental tripwire against swearing becomes not a commitment to a polite public sphere, but because the “policeman has gone inside the head”, to quote Josef Skvorecky.

This combined Labor-Liberal production is not the only extension of unilateral policing into everyday life. It’s matched — and may well be consolidated by — the extension of police powers to transport security staff, the latest stage in the conversion of public transport from a consensual public activity to a punitive one.

Dictatorial policing has also been extended by both governments to free movement per se — in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda and surrounding areas the police have the power to ban “suspicious people” from entering the area for a 72-hour period. Though initially claimed to be a measure to protect street sex workers, it now seems to have become a de facto social policy tool, to abolish the street sex work market altogether. It certainly removes the annoying need for the police to sort out the genuinely predatory from the merely marginal or “suspicious”.

These approaches to public life, pioneered by the Blair New Labour government in the UK , have become bipartisan modes of controlling social life in a world that  the tabloid and mass media construct as “out of control”. In Australia the most enthusiastic proponent of such measures was former Liberal opposition leader Robert Doyle, who wanted to adopt new Labour’s ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders). When Doyle became mayor of Melbourne, he introduced not merely CCTVs, but the “roving eye” beloved of London Labour mayor Ken Livingstone — a CCTV mounted on the top of a car, speeding round the streets.

Given the endless howls of protest about the “nanny state”, you would imagine that these far more intrusive and heavy-handed invasions into everyday social life would attract greater opposition. You would think wrong. You will look in vain on the website of the IPA, for example, for much debate about such matters. The group’s passionate concern for liberty, extends, according to its website, to the effect of taxes, and the tyrannical effects of food labelling, but not to the gradual erosion of the presumption of innocence and the remorseless extension of surveillance into every corner of existence.

The group’s energetic opinionista Chris Berg will draft endless articles on the nanny state whenever regulations affecting the food and beverage industries are announced, but rarely ventures into areas of freedom that don’t somehow affect the conduct of commerce.

The IPA’s silence on these matters is matched by the wider Right as a whole.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. The whole concept of the “nanny state” formulated by Spectator magazine editor Iain MacLeod in 1965, has always been a way for the Right to pose as champions of liberty, while ignoring its most egregious abuses, those applied to individual citizens. Initially an attack on the basic extension of the welfare state — such as the provision of free milk for schoolchildren, at a time when poor nutrition remained a major problem in the West — the term has morphed as centre-left governments have abandoned direct provision, and increasingly resorted to managing citizens’ behaviour. Their approach has been dual.

As a consumer society encourages the reality and perception of cultural disarray — from sexting to obesity — the state takes over control of life that would once have been the preserve of cultural norms or the individual conscience. The public space of  the street, the commercial space of the cigarette packet and the private space of the mind (through cultural engineering such as a policy of “progressive patriotism”) come to be equally regulated and controlled.

The only one of these three that the Right is really interested in is the limit on commercial freedom. For good reason. For many of the commercial freedoms they so enthusiastically spruik rely on the imposition of limits on social freedom in order to be maintained. Some things are true even though the Salvos say they are — thus open-slather cheap alcohol and mega beer barns do contribute to an urban environment that is not what one would like.

Limits on their sale would help; instead the social space must be regulated with cameras and cops, social repression thus authorising commercial “freedom”. Spot-fine policing penalises the poor, the pedestrian, often at the behest of retailers, and is class-defined; but the real danger to liberty, according to the “nanny-staters” is not the state’s occupation of pubic space, but “traffic light” food labelling.

Of course, the increasing enthusiasm for behavioural control does represent an attack on freedom, and the idea of taking control of life, individually and collectively; but as an attack on freedom it cannot be understood except as a complementary expression of social repression.

To ban cigarette advertising is wise; to ban a gold-coloured packet is ridiculous. To stop fast-food companies recruiting kids is simply the minimum due by adults to children; to put calorie counters on every menu is to demand that every citizen engage in compulsory self-monitoring. But the exclusive focus on the “nanny state” that prompts these initiatives is overwhelmingly designed to obscure the rise of what one might call “the transport police state” — pioneered by Jeff Kennett, extended by Labor and now Ted Baillieu.

Petty, repressive, heavy-handed, it’s by far the more immediate enemy of a free society — and an essential tool of centre-Right governments. One doesn’t expect the buttoned-up thin young men who populate the IPA to join va youf on “Fuckwalk”; but any genuine commitment to freedom would demand that they identify the real threats to it. Absent of someone to pay for it, I can’t see that happening any time soon.