Lang Hancock, “Boston Tea Party 1986 style,” The Weekend Australian, May 31-June 1, 1986, p. 16, as a letter to the editor.

SIR — As Katherine West says, “We don’t need yet another summit”. These grand corroborees can perhaps be described as a “talkfest” or irresolute people bleating like sheep, wandering leaderless in the wilderness. The only party to benefit from such an extravaganza will be the media reporting political claptrap.

Seeing that there are so many abuses, extravagances and, worse still, restrictions being perpetrated in the name of government, there is not much sense in breaking the law (even though it is a bad law) in the hope of rectifying a single problem such as the “perks” tax.

However, if we are prepared to tackle the full problem head-on and rescue a very sick Australia from becoming a banana republic, there could be merit in Mr Ansett’s suggestion of a repeat of the Boston Tea Party.

Instead of “No taxation without representation”, let’s aim for no taxation without increased production and destroy forever the power of “big government” to paralyse by regulation, to discourage by exorbitant taxation and to bankrupt Australia by squandering taxpayers’ funds.

One of the problems is that Parliament, like democracy, has lost its meaning. Parliament’s sole activity these days is to pass laws, which the MPs don’t understand, but which are drafted by civil servants for their own enrichment and aggrandisement.

Consequently Parliament’s main function is to legislate, either for the purpose of creating a new costly government department or enlarging an existing one. This being so, I think it would be hard for anyone to name any law passed in the past couple of decades which would not have served the country better if it hadn’t been passed at all.

It could be said the Boston Tea Party No. 2 could be justified in usurping control of the administration if it drastically reduced the power of “big government” by rescinding these restrictive laws on the basis of “the last to come, the first to go”.

If we rescinded the law upon which even one, repeat one, of the several big spending departments was brought into being, the department would disappear without any prime minister or cabinet having to rake up the guts to do what should be done and the budget could be balanced overnight: then perhaps we could return to form a government that the Westminster system was meant to be.

As things are, Australia today is government by four non-elected arms:

  1. The almighty central bureaucracy;
  2. The almost semi-permanent heads of the more militant unions;
  3. The media in all its forms;
  4. The big lobby groups which have their hands in the till securing quotas, subsidies, licences, tariffs and handouts generally.

The elected representatives of the people, whom we are wont to blame for our problems, really have very little say irrespective of whether they are Labor or Conservative.

To destroy “big government” legally means altering the Constitution and limiting the power of government so that it cannot indulge in deficit spending, but must be forced to live on its income like any good housekeeper.

However, it is not possible to alter the Constitution by any practical means, so the short cut to this national objective may be Mr Ansett’s Boston Tea Party idea.