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Comment by urthor | Hacker News Reader

> do you really want to trust your personal decisions on health, diet, and entertainment to those elected via a popularity contest?

Yes.

Read the history of Teddy Roosevelt & the Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history

If you're familiar with the political culture of Australasia, you'll realise it's an overwhelming "nanny state" culture.

Also, you'll realise that Australia/New Zealand have the highest HDI indicators of any nation globally with mean winter temperatures above 10 degree Celsius.

Why?

Because Australia and New Zealand have a particular cultural value others don't.

They trust technocratic experts to know what's best for people. And implement.

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> They trust technocratic experts to know what's best for people. And implement.

I think reasonable people could object to Australia's internet censorship laws, COVID response, climate activities, etc.

There's a big difference between being an expert & representing the will of the people (aka policy).

There's a margin of error in decision making.

By no means do they always get it right.

Remember, much of the fourth estate innately will be crassly negative, for commercial reasons. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars. New Zealand for example has some remarkably shrill national news stories about remarkably petty crime.

> There's a big difference between being an expert & representing the will of the people (aka policy).

Yes, and the technocrats don't always get it right, at all.

Democracy works because nobody actually trusts the technocrats. Just like nobody trusts the investment bankers, politicians, real estate developers, police, lawyers.

However, Australasia has had a remarkable run of success via eventually doing what the technocrats tell them to do.

The will of the people supports the technocrats.

I’m a resident of Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, which had the longest pandemic lockdown in the world AFAIK. It certainly was at the time the lockdown ended, at least.

Victoria recently had an election wherein the government which was responsible for implementing the lockdown was re-elected. Notably, the state government’s pandemic response was dictated by facts, indeed the chief health officer responsible for informing politicians and implementing policy was a medical practitioner and undeniably an expert in public health matters.

During lockdown and even still, there continue to be protests against the government for their pandemic response, despite the re-election being a clear sign that the will of the people is that they want a government led by (or at least informed by) experts who know what they’re doing.

It’s important to note that there are examples within the Victorian government which show the opposite, though. They have aided logging of old-growth forests, despite saying they won’t allow it to continue. They’ve repeatedly and demonstrably used tax dollars to fund infrastructure projects in electorates where the ruling party has a slim majority (so-called marginal seats).

My point is the Victorian government is far from perfect. It’s been a year since the last lockdown ended, yet the lockdown is still the thing people discuss when it comes to policy. It’s the most invasive action a state government has taken, affecting so many people. It’s what people remember. And it mattered at the polling booth last month, when people voted the government back in. They even saw an increase in the seats they hold, from last election.

> despite the re-election being a clear sign that the will of the people is that they want a government led by (or at least informed by) experts who know what they’re doing.

I would heavily challenge this just because the opposition is utterly incompetent in Victoria. I am as against the lockdowns as they come and think they border on criminal as an action taken by the state against citizens. A disgusting violation of human rights I never thought I would see in Australia in my lifetime and honestly changed permanently how I viewed the moral compasses of my fellow citizens.

However they were done and now I have to vote based on what is going forward and the policies put forward by the liberals in Victoria are, frankly, moronic. Matthew Guy is a buffoon who has no place in leading the party.

So I gritted my teeth and voted Labor. But using that as an endorsement of lockdowns or Victoria covid policy is absurd. I know many who feel the same as me and acted similarly.

There seemed to be avenues open for people to register their displeasure at Labor, via preferential voting. Two minor parties 'Angry Victorians' and 'Sack Dan Andrews' party were obvious targets to put before Labor, along with the usual alternatives such as Green, Reason, Legalize Cannabis (although those risked electing someone instead of a Labor candidate). Yet the Labor vote was overwhelming. It very much seems that there was only a vocal minority against the lockdown policies. The displeasure with Labor seemed more about their environmental policies, with the Greens and Legalize Cannabis taking left wing votes away from Labor.

I don't vote for clowns or lunatics which it is fair to say both "Angry Victorians" and "Sack Dan Andrews" are both.

I'll never vote Greens again until Lidia Thorpe is gone, shagging the heads of outlaw motorbike gangs is disgraceful behaviour for a member of parliament and completely disqualifies Greens as being a serious party from my point of view (at least while she remains a part of the party). And honestly the longer she remains the more I have to question the judgement that the members of the Green party show at all and makes it more likely that even if she eventually leaves I will never vote for them again.

Reason I do like the look of tbh and will consider them going forward. I can't say I am the most hyper-engaged voter so can't pretend I was fully aware of them or what they stood for. But looking them up now I like a lot of what they say and prefer their general policy stances over Labor.

> However they were done and now I have to vote based on what is going forward and the policies put forward by the liberals in Victoria are, frankly, moronic. Matthew Guy is a buffoon who has no place in leading the party.

Hear hear. The Victoran Liberals are a bunch of muppets. I disagree with a lot of actions of the Andrews government, however there was no functional alternative.

It should go without saying: voter preferences seldomly condense down to a single issue. A party gaining or retaining power doesn't mean broad support or opposition on a single issue.

Again: technology or science experts deal with facts (or implications of setting policy), not setting policy or the will of the people. As an example: COVID can & did kill people, but where to set the threshold for acceptable mortality is a policy issue that is orthogonal. Not dissimilar to actuarial accounting.

>Notably, the state government’s pandemic response was dictated by facts, indeed the chief health officer responsible

Dictated by culture. To say that everyone else was dictated by things-that-weren't-empirical is nothing short of a naive reading of how laws and social policy are set. There are values.

> Also, you'll realise that Australia/New Zealand have the highest HDI indicators of any nation globally with mean winter temperatures above 10 degree Celsius. Why? .... culture

If you want to look into temperature vs productivity you should note these populations overwhelmingly have ancestry from colder weather climates

> They trust technocratic experts to know what's best for people. And implement.

It helps to be small & pragmatic. People (mostly) follow the rules and politicians (mostly) only implement rules with broad support. Police have wide discretion to apply laws and (mostly) do this to benefit public good.

That's not to say we don't have problems, of course, but this particular law is seen as a compromise approach to public health that more-or-less works for everyone.

I find the root cause is not so much size... and more so younger sibling syndrome.

Australia/New Zealand have a... very, very, very deep-seated feeling of inadequacy, comparing themselves to large Anglophile nations.

There's a genetic urge to "impress Mother England."

For Australia, also a deep seated desire to prove they're not an island of criminals.

For New Zealand... a deep seated desire not to be left off maps.

It's not so much size... there's just a culture of needing to be a better place to live than America. To stop people moving away.

Edit: root cause. Not benefit.

Your other statements about AU/NZ culture have been extremely questionable, but this one is just complete nonsense.

The idea that there is a genetic urge to impress England is bizarre, typically about 50% of people support becoming a republic. Some recent data in [0]

Australia's original status as a penal colony seems to be held onto as trivia externally but is entirely irrelevant in modern discussion (as it should be as it stopped 150 years ago). Thinking that this is something Australians think about suggests that you have a very outside perspective.

I don't know what a culture of needing to be a better place to live than America means. I don't think being a good place to live is a culture, I think it's an objective of a society.

[0] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/support-for-republic...

As we'd say here: "Yeah, Nah". This is a caricature of parochial English thinking of the colonies from the 50s, and is entirely divorced of what Australia and New Zealand are like today.

As someone from a southern US state who faces similar "caricatures", there's no need to pretend and hide your feelings. Instead, I think we should join together against those who would oppress us and keep us down and uninformed in modern society.

Time for Australia to become a republic? I wonder how people would vote if there were another referendum.

It would already be a republic if the last referendum wasn't nobbled by the government at the time, where the only choice was between the status quo or giving more power to the historically untrusted elected government.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Australian_republic_refer...:

"With republican models of one form or another winning a majority in opinion polls prior to the referendum, it was expected that the republican referendum would pass. However, the question put was for a particular model of republic with a head of state appointed by Parliament. This was opposed by some supporters of a republic, who preferred a directly elected head of state. Some of these, such as Phil Cleary, advocated that republic supporters vote "No" in order that a future referendum could be put on the directly elected model. Some commentators—including the president of the Australian Republican Movement, Malcolm Turnbull—identified this split within the republican camp as a key reason for the referendum's failure."

Completely agree, this bloke has no idea what's he's yapping about.

I'm Australian and I have never really had any interest in going to England.

Australia is culturally downstream from America though, so you're right about that.

Or put another way, they don't take personal responsibility, and hand their decisions over to other people running the state.

Put another, another way, they recognize the limits of their own discipline and choose to remove the temptation by social agreement.

Individual responsibility is tied to economic rationalism.

With 100% devolved individual responsibility, you create market failure.

Nicotine based addition is a pure example of market failure.

To advocate for 100% unhindered individual responsibility, is to advocate against economics.

No rule-free economic market, free of arbitrary constraints, is ever truly rational.

That's because market failure is the default state of nature. The rich take from the poor, the incentive to economically specialize is lost due to theft.

"Personal responsibility" is a gross simplification of the complexities of political and economic science.

I would never simplify the enormous complexities of human computer interaction and UX, fields I know nothing about.

Don't over-simply how difficult a decision regulating nicotine was, and how many decades of academic careers have been sacrificed to come to this consensus.

Cable news slogans can never summarize the efforts of thousands of doctorate wielding technocrats arguing endlessly over the solution to nicotine.

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