Tunisia or Australia

In December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire outside a government building for the high crime of selling fruit without a permit. That act ignited the Arab Spring. A sweeping rebellion against bureaucratic suffocation, political corruption and economic despair..

Now, let’s get this out of the way: Australia is not Tunisia. Our institutions (mostly) function. But before anyone starts humming the national anthem with a hand on heart, let’s be clear, authoritarian creep doesn’t always arrive with tanks and truncheons, except in Victoria. Sometimes it shows up in a suit, with a rainbow lanyard, holding a clipboard.

Case in point: the Australian government’s bright idea to tax unrealised capital gains on superannuation balances over $3 million. That’s right. Not money you've earned, but the money your assets might, maybe, possibly be worth one day. It’s like getting fined for speeding while you're parked in your driveway because your car might have gone fast eventually. Or perhaps taxing you for winning the lottery before you’ve even bought a ticket.

Any sentient mammal can see this violates the basic logic of taxation. It treats hypothetical gains like cold, hard cash, even though you can’t pay your tax bill with imaginary dollars. But hey, when the treasury’s hungry, nuance is the first thing on the chopping block.

Which brings us to Alexis de Tocqueville, 19th-century philosopher who warned about bureaucratic overreach with eerie precision:

After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having moulded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Mark these words.