Squashed by Brisbane's brainless sandwich-stealers

Being a Pom in Brisbane this week was not a whole lot of fun. Not much fun being an Aussie, either. There were barriers around the Gabba stadium, where the first Ashes Test was played, of the type you might throw across a street in Baghdad to stop a riot. They were there to prevent jay-walking. Everywhere you looked baseball-capped security men, many armed, eyeballed the paying customers suspiciously. They were on guard for offensive items. Beach balls, cool boxes, home-made sandwiches, trumpets, you know the sort of thing. All banned. Welcome to Western democracy, 2006.

You read a lot of sentimental old rubbish about Australia. Sun all day, party all night, one long shrimp-fixated barbie, in which nobody takes life, or themselves, too seriously. Don’t you believe it. “Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free,” runs the first line of the national anthem. Except at some time over the past two decades Australia became swamped in rules and regulations, taking its lead from the old country and, of course, America.

What is it about English-speaking democracies that their officers work so hard at mining the meanest, most small-minded elements of human nature? Traffic wardens, the various layers of piddling, incompetent bureaucracy that sap the human spirit just in the act of trying to cross the road. All Englishmen knew the type that barked its orders at the Gabba, just as an Australian in London would recognise our breed of council narks, issuing tickets to those whose wheelie bin etiquette does not conform to the latest directive. There is something about the zeal with which parts of the West have embraced the war against free will that is as terrifying as any dictatorship.

There were so many things you could do to get ejected at the Gabba that when the ground emptied late in the day it was hard to work out if the absentees had gone home for tea or were all being held in an underground dungeon for trying to start a Mexican wave. Banned, apparently. Banned by those in charge of the fastest-growing industry in the West: small-minded, false authority. Jumped-up little twerps telling everybody what to do. A nation of traffic police is what we have created, a nation of sheep unable to cross a clear road unless a little green man tells them to and worse, a nation of glowering baseball caps, who feel empowered by that little green man.

We are losing our ability to stroll to the park while doing nothing wrong. It is hard to do nothing wrong these days. You can break three laws putting your rubbish out. You can get the third degree at the departure gate for the possession of toothpaste. Fly south and see the future. Australia is a fascinating study because it shows what can happen to even the most unpretentious society once this mind-set takes hold.

You know what was great about Australia? Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat. The Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 had three proper mascots, Syd, Ollie and Millie, but nobody gave a monkey’s about them. The figure the nation took to its heart was a large-rumped, stuffed marsupial, the unofficial mascot of an irreverent late-night sports show. At first the Olympic Committee tried to ban Fatso, but sensing a PR disaster, and after he had appeared on the podium with two gold medal winners, it beat a hasty retreat. That is Australia, left to its own devices. How did the country go from there to ejecting people from a stadium for wearing watermelon shells as hats?

The ridiculously overbearing security presence around the Gabba were nicknamed the fun police. They would not let supporters take rucksacks with drinks or sandwiches into the ground, but instead made them remove their rations and place them in a plastic bag. The rucksack could then be carried in, but only if it was in a plastic bag. This raised the bar for global stupidity, but do not expect the new standard to last long.

And we can moan and shake our heads, but there is a deadly serious by-product of this thinking. We deliver to foreign lands the same idiots who decree that our own citizens can’t be trusted to eat a sandwich while watching the cricket. Then when there is a disaster, we wonder why.