Politicians should stop banning our fun

I've been pondering the national inquiry into fat kids, booze-hounds and nicotine freaks - otherwise known as the Preventative Health Task Force. While waiting for my "butter pride" T-shirt to arrive, I started to wonder why politics has to be so humourless.We've created politics in which politicians have become the fun police. Whatever goes wrong, from dodgy kids' toys to smoking to beer guts, we insist the government pass a law about it. We've created a situation where politicians are afraid to laugh off requests to interfere for fear they are seen as "not taking it seriously".Snaps then for the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who, asked to comment on his responsibility to prevent obesity, said his policy was eat less.During a parliamentary inquiry into smoking in cars, a cancer expert, Bernie Stewart, said that while smoking was undoubtedly an accident risk, just as fiddling with the radio and talking on mobiles phones is, there were few health risks to passengers because smokers usually opened a window. The hot air was demonstrated to leave the car, but sadly not the legislature as the interest groups and the media convinced politicians a law was required.Among the most irritating requests for government overreach arising from the Rudd Government's 2020 summit was the proposal that we all do government-approved exercise every day. I first suspected this was designed by an infiltrating cell of small-government activists to deliberately ring the emergency George Orwell-alarm, but no such luck. Po-faced do-gooders actually canvassed the idea that we should perform state-approved calisthenics.If you visit the official Australian Government's culture portal you will learn that "Australians can havea very black sense of humour ... A (perhaps unintentional) example of this is the naming of the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool in Melbourne after a prime minister who disappeared whilst swimming in the ocean in 1967". Indeed.You will also learn that "Mocking the wowser is another common element in Australian humour". So I think I can argue with an official sanction that expecting politicians to take every danger, slight or impropriety to be an occasion for a national scowling competition is not the Australian way. And the Australian media needs to stop pretending that it is.Surely Bob Hawke would not have tolerated this. He would have led by example, not imposed regulations. He showed a real leader can mediate an industrial dispute, deregulate the currency and down a yard glass. That guy was Rodney Dangerfield - the minute he arrived at the cricket, the factory floor or Parliament itself music started, chicks got shirtless and people wondered, "where did all this beer come from?"I miss Amanda Vanstone. There, I said it. She rarely gave an interview where she didn't drink the journo under the table and sing the praise of cheese. And I shall never forget Gareth Evans, who suggested we "work hard, think hard, play hard, drink hard". Is there room for another verse in the anthem?Turning politicians into the fun police means it's harder for them to have a laugh, and harder for them to show common cause with the rest of us by sharing a laugh. Alexander Downer's "the things that batter" didn't quite get there, but we liked the former treasurer Peter Costello much more after he did the macarena with Kerri-Anne Kennerley.People felt much worse about not voting for Joan Kirner after the I Love Rock 'n' Roll leather jacket episode. And 50 or so return seasons of Keating! shows that even double-digit unemployment can't dim our nostalgia for great one-liners.The more recent success of Beaconsfield - the Musical celebrated this great national ideal. As the diggers knew, among the many great and noble virtues of larrikinism is the ability to keep things in perspective - to remember that in the midst of death we are lucky as hell to be alive.To butcher an Irish prayer I grew up with, I pray for a return to the larrikin spirit - may it give us the strength to change the things we can, humour to laugh at the things we can't and politicians who know the difference.Cassandra Wilkinson is the author of Don't Panic: Nearly Everything is Better Than You Think. This is an extract from Binge Thinking, a collection of political essays to be published on Saturday.
Enjoy your Humour