1964 was a very good year

12/28/2025

Government intervention in daily life in Australia is excessive, largely because regulation is introduced without any serious attempt to quantify risk against reward, which allows rules to accumulate over time while almost none are removed.

The scale of intervention is constrained primarily by fiscal capacity, because tax does not merely fund services but pays for regulatory design, compliance infrastructure, enforcement staff, courts, goals and penalty systems, meaning that as the tax take increases the amount of regulation that can be written and sustained increases with it.

Technology removes what used to be the limiting factor, namely the cost of enforcement. Digital identity systems, compulsory reporting, cross-agency data sharing and automated auditing reduce labour and monitoring costs to the point where behaviour that was previously uneconomic or impractical to police becomes continuously observable and enforceable.

As enforcement shifts from selective to pervasive, regulation expands in scope even when the marginal benefit is low.

Political incentives reinforce this dynamic, because introducing new rules produces visible action and the appearance of harm prevention, while the cost of compliance is spread thinly across the population. The result is a system that optimises for regulatory activity rather than net social benefit.

There is plausibly a threshold at which taxation is sufficient to fund courts, defence, and core infrastructure without enabling pervasive behavioural control. In Australia, total taxation crossed roughly 20 percent of GDP in the mid-1960s, and around 1964 that balance still existed, not because of restraint or wisdom, but because the fiscal and technical capacity to regulate everyday life at scale had not yet arrived.

Regulation and control will become pervasive enough to provoke resistance when regulation shifts from episodic enforcement of specific activities to continuous monitoring of ordinary behaviour, because discretion, anonymity, and the ability to temporarily opt out disappear while compliance becomes automatic and unavoidable.

The trigger will not be a not tax level but a technology-enabled enforcement mode, with rebellion risk rising sharply once detection is real time, penalties are algorithmic, and noncompliance is identified without intent or visibility, especially when regulation extends into thought, speech, association, and identity rather than conduct.

In Australia, given the trajectory of digital identity, cross-agency data sharing, and automated compliance now underway, that threshold is likely to be reached in the early to mid-2030s, with 2032 to 2036 being the most plausible window for visible pushback rather than isolated evasion.