Parks and Abdication

On Leslie Knope, the dog park that still has no water tap, and a whole society that has abdicated its personal responsibility.

I’m about twenty episodes into my twentieth rewatch of Parks and Recreation, and some things never change.

Leslie Knope is optimistic, bureaucratic, and constitutionally incapable of leaving a problem for someone else to solve. The show is the comfort viewing I turn back to when the world feels particularly bleak. The irony of finding solace in a show glorifying local government red tape is not lost on me as a card carrying Liberal Party member.

The irony is also not lost on me as I’m genuinely considering running for local council. My motivation for running is simple - some may even say it’s petty. The dog park near my house has no water tap. Dogs go thirsty. The council, apparently, has other priorities.

That’s not quite right. The council has every priority simultaneously, which is functionally the same as having none. They will install signage about responsible dog ownership. They will commission a strategic plan for the activation of green spaces. They will hold consultations, produce reports, convene working groups. Hell, they’ll even host roundtables about events happening on the other side of the world. But they will not install a tap.

I’ve been to this dog park enough times to know that nobody expects them to anymore. The owners bring water bottles. They adapt. In the gap between what the council is supposed to do and what it actually does, they stopped expecting anything at all.

The See-Saw

Somewhere in my childhood memory palace (a term I learned from another of my favourite comfort shows, The Mentalist) there is a metal see-saw bolted to the ground in a suburban park. Galvanised steel, chipped red paint, the particular screech of the pivot when weight shifted from one end to the other. If your partner jumped off, you landed hard. You learned that lesson once. After that, you worked out ways to navigate it.

At some point in the 1990s, councils across Australia started removing them. Too dangerous. Children might fall. The rusty old see-saw was replaced by equipment so carefully engineered and padded against the possibility of harm that it became, in the process, engineered against fun.

Nobody organised a campaign to remove the see-saws. It happened through the accumulated logic of a thousand small decisions made by people doing their jobs. The same logic produced mandatory bicycle helmets for adults - a regulatory position held by almost no other country on earth. The same logic now requires warning labels on alcohol bottles, explaining that the bottle contains alcohol. The same logic, somewhere along the way, decided that Australians could not be trusted to manage their own encounter with risk.

This is not a rant about the nanny state, or about smaller government. Those arguments are usually made by people who are perfectly comfortable with the particular risks they enjoy and irritated only by the ones they don’t.

What I’m interested in exploring here is what we traded away, and how we got there.

The Addiction to Being Looked After

Australia did not arrive at this point by accident. It was built, carefully and with genuine good intentions, across the better part of a century.

The post-war social contract established the terms: the government would provide, the citizen would participate, and the distance between them would be managed by institutions designed to absorb collective risk. Medicare. The aged pension. Compulsory superannuation. A safety net so padded that falling through it required genuine misfortune or determined effort. For most of the twentieth century, this was an extraordinary thing. A country that had sent a generation to die in two world wars decided, with some urgency, that the state owed its citizens more than a medal and a letter of condolence.

Enter Bob Hawke. By most accounts, he perfected the emotional register in which it was delivered. He was the version of government that felt like being genuinely cared for. He cried on television. He understood cricket. He could negotiate with unions at dawn and carry a state dinner by night. He made the relationship between citizen and government feel like an actual relationship.

What Hawke perfected, the decades after him quietly calcified. The warmth remained as an expectation long after the conditions that produced it had changed. Australians became more addicted to the idea of being looked after without maintaining the institutions capable of doing so.

The Grateful Surrender

Nothing tested the architecture like the pandemic, and nothing revealed its condition more completely.

I don’t want to go on and on about COVID times because I think we have collective trauma. What I will say is Australians embraced harsh COVID restrictions with open arms. We policed them, in many cases, with an enthusiasm that made the actual police look restrained. The states that locked down hardest polled best. Premiers and health bureaucrats became celebrities. Dan Andrews won re-election with a majority so large it suggested Victorians wished they could give him a third term before the second had started.

Why?

What is striking is the cultural response. The relief. The widespread, visible, genuine relief that someone had made the decision to keep them safe. That the government was handling it. That the risk had been lifted from individual hands and placed somewhere institutional, where it could be managed by people with lanyards and clipboards. A country more accustomed to carrying its own risk might have produced a different response - the kind of productive friction that forces governments to justify their decisions in real time, rather than simply assert them.

Instead, it produced complacency. And complacency, in politics, is the fastest route around accountability.

What the Price of Complacency Looks Like

The Royal Commission into the Bondi Beach terrorist attack released its interim report this week. Fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration in December. The report is careful, restrained, and ultimately damning.

The counter-terrorism coordinator role established after the Lindt Cafe siege over a decade ago specifically to fix coordination failures had been quietly made part-time since 2019. Counter-terrorism funding declined as a proportion of the overall intelligence budget, even as that budget grew by 31 per cent. The Jewish Community Security Group emailed NSW Police before the attack to warn of a high threat and request a permanent police presence. Instead, five officers were assigned to check in at some point during the event.

The report describes a system that filed the threat correctly, attended the right meetings, produced the right documents, and distributed the weight of responsibility so evenly that nobody was actually holding it. What resulted was a very large number of complacent people doing their jobs inside a complacent system that had decided that a thousand decisions were keeping people safe.

The community that had been told to feel safe was thrown into the firing line.

The Scheme That Swallowed Itself

Another topical example is the NDIS. Launched in 2013, it was designed to give disabled Australians genuine choice and control over their own support - to move power away from bureaucrats and toward the people who actually needed the agency. It was, in intent, one of the most progressive social reforms in the country’s history.

What it produced, in practice, was a system so complex that navigating it became a profession in itself. Families now routinely employ plan managers to manage their funding, support coordinators to coordinate their supports, and allied health practitioners to write the assessments that justify the supports the coordinators are coordinating. The 2023 Independent Review found the scheme had drifted comprehensively from its founding purpose. Costs had blown past every projection. And the people it was designed to empower were, in many cases, more dependent on professional intermediaries than they had ever been on the systems the NDIS replaced.

The scheme is not failing through malice or indifference but because of the same mechanism that removed the see-saw. Each additional layer of process was added with a legitimate reason. Each safeguard addressed a real concern. The accumulated weight of those decisions produced something nobody designed and nobody wanted: a bureaucratic ecosystem so dense that independence became the casualty of the system built to deliver it.

The government had taken responsibility for the problem. It had also, in taking that responsibility, taken the problem with it.

The Tap

I might run for council (someday). I will probably lose. If I win, I will almost certainly discover that the tap has seventeen stakeholders, requires an environmental approval, and cannot be installed until the completion of a strategic review of the open space activation framework currently scheduled for the third quarter of 2031.

I know this.

But I also think we need to be honest about what the last eighty years in Australian politics have produced. We built a country so comprehensively looked after that we forgot what it felt like to look after ourselves. We removed the see-saws, issued the warnings, mandated the helmets, and told ourselves we had made life safer. In actual fact, we had buried danger in layers of bureaucracy, which is a different thing entirely.

At some point we confused being looked after with being safe. We abdicated the difference.

Leslie Knope would have the tap installed by Tuesday. She would have already filed the forms, convened a public meeting, and baked everyone a waffle. We built an entire country on the promise of Leslie Knope. At some point we stopped noticing she hadn’t shown up.