A smaller Australian government would mean bigger Australians

The United States has a strong small government culture, which at the moment is asserting itself through the Tea Party movement. This culture comes from the ideas on which the US was founded.

There have been a couple of founding ideas in Australia’s history. The earliest was that Britain needed a place to send it convicts, many sentenced for nothing more than stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving family.

Australia has a second founding when after the Second World War, thousands immigrated to Australia, to escape authoritarian European regimes and find a new life in a safer place.

Yet unlike Americans neither of the ideas underlying these foundations has resulted in a culture of small government.

Every single year government grows by two percent; government will be bigger tomorrow then ever before. Every single day government borrows a 100 million dollars. Yet we sit blindly by and allow our freedoms to slowly diminish, for what is claimed to be the "greater good".

I therefore propose a new way to perceive government success - how much liberty has it returned back to the people? Has its spending decreased over the past twelve months? Has it borrowed less? Are our taxes now lower and more equitable giving us back the right to spend our own money?

Every single tax dollar we pay, whether we like it or not is an admission that the government somehow knows better then us. They, whoever "they" are, somehow know better how to spend our hard earned money than we do.

For right or wrong, we should have the freedom to spend our money how we wish. It's not up to someone else to instruct us.

Across the world governments have slowly learnt the lesson that unrestricted growth, and debt to fund this growth, is not sustainable.

The UK is cutting spending because they have allowed their government to get too big. Some worry that this is immoral. This is misguided. They should be celebrating the increased freedoms and liberty that come out of smaller government.

We as a country need to refocus and understand that bigger, is not better. In a democratic society, power should be with the people not with the government.

In Australia we have created such a bureaucracy, such a large system of government we have come to depend on it.

We depend on the government, but how wise is this when we demonstrate our dissatisfaction with it by changing it regularly.

I would propose we learn to rely on ourselves. That we learn our actions have benefits and consequences, and we learn to deal with these. Not run to "mummy" every time something goes wrong.

And this is the real issue - lack of personal strength - we all want to run away to someone else to solve our problems. But the more we run away, the less we deal with our own problems and the less freedom we maintain.

Hong Kong and Mainland China provide a good example of the pitfalls of relying on government for everything.

In Hong Kong, where historically they had little or no natural resources, the government was forced to step back and allow for trade, a free market and only act to provide defense, a court to confirm contracts and the bare bones of government.

This left Hong Kong with an outstanding amount of growth, their GDP has grown 200 fold over the last 50 years. Over the same period China's protectionist closed government policies of the mid-twentieth century led it to grow less then half of that.

Despite China's more substantial natural assets a small government allowed the people to be more prosperous.

New York is another illustration of the principle in practice. The early waves of immigration to New York, where there was little or no government control, provided a backbone for one of the fastest growing, most prosperous countries of the century.

Government should be like a laid-back parent - provide protection, provide itself as an incubator for fulfilling our own life's aspiration, and allow us to judge our own morality and ethics. All this of course with moderation.

They shouldn't do things for us, they should allow us to fail and succeed, knowing we will grow from both. Stepping back can be just as powerful as stepping in.

If we stopped running to mummy and took back our freedoms, we would all live a happier, better, more fulfilled life.