Hydraulic Despotism Hits the Road

In the 1980s: the NSW Government, under Nick Greiner, entered a secret commercial agreement with toll road operators not to create any public transport alternatives to their toll roads, effectively granting them a near monopoly on transport in parts of Sydney.

In the 1990s: the NSW Government removed the prolog from road legislation granting the Minister the power to regulate "for the purposes of road safety and traffic flow,"  implicitly permitting him or her power to regulate for other purposes, such as the enrichment of commercial interests, raising revenue, or because he or she felt like it.  This quiet elision was justified as part of a process of 'harmonisation' of NSW road rules with those of other states.

The 1960s: My primary school teacher, the venerable Bonnie B. Dean, told us all the story of a world renowned race car driver who was charged with speeding.  The driver may have been Stirling Moss, but it was a long time ago.  His defence was that he admitted the facts, but asserted that he was driving safely at that speed as he was a trained racing driver, well used to travelling safely at far greater speeds.

Mrs Dean's explained the moral and legal implications clearly, to a class full of 8 year olds, and I remember her learned exposition clearly:  Driving is a privilege, and not a right.

The 1860s:  My great-great-great grandfather, William Delaforce, was granted his ticket of leave, he set out to walk from Port Macquarie to Sydney, a journey of nearly 400km.  He was stopped in Newcastle, some 240km into his journey, and required to produce his ticket of leave.  The constable doubted the authenticity of the documents, so arrested William, and had him sent back to Port Macquarie.  Despite his papers being validly granted, and his consequential common law right as a freeman to go about the land having been violated, my grandsire stayed put in the port, took up land at Rawdon Island, and as far as I know never sought to leave the place again.  He died there in 1900.

Apparently it was quite common for tickets of leave, issued as they were by a penal colony, to restrict the rights of former convicts to move - this enabled local economies to have a captive work force, and kept wages down.  We were never very interested, as a state, in civil liberties when money was at stake.

1753: Blackstone on the Absolute Rights of Individuals wrote:

To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole kingdom; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.

Such confinements as imposition of a curfew, Blackstone suggests, might be occasionally necessary for the common good or security of the realm, but they are not to be regarded as commonplace or usual, they are to be imposed for a purpose and for a particular time.

 1215: Magna Carta

(39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

 Confinement of the person, imprisonment, does not necessarily proceed by means of slamming of barred doors, laying on of hands, arrest or official detention.

Confinement of the person can consist, as in the case of my forebear, of the arbitrary imposition of a requirement to produce a proof of one's right to go about, through an erosion of the common law, through an excessive executive zeal, through the derogation of the rights of the people, through the erosion of the principles of right, through ... let's be clear ... laziness of the common man.

Hydraulic Despotism is governance in which a natural monopoly is leveraged to coerce the people into acceptance of arbitrary rule.

Where once Mrs Dean may have been correct, the actions of successive governments at all levels in Australia have made it impossible to live normally in Sydney without a car.  Zoning, lack of alternative transport modalities, illicit secret deals, unaccountable authoritarian structures like the RTA, have so changed the fundamental relationship of people to the land that it no longer makes sense to speak of driving as a privilege, any more than one would speak of clean water as a privilege.

I was surprised, on visiting suburban Chicago a few years ago, to see roads without sidewalks, pedestrian crossing lights not working, to find places it was impossible to walk to, and to hear my taxi driver's explanation that living in a car-only suburb was considered a status marker - I guess it forces criminals to drive to get into the suburb, presumably selecting for a better class of criminal.

We, as a population, have been sleep-waltzed into a belief that a government has the right to selectively grant or revoke permission to drive while at the same time it systematically closes off all other means necessary to move about, and hence to live.

I remember, as many would not, the days when a car was a rarity.  In those days the means of subsistance were delivered to the door - bread, milk, vegetables, even meat were transported to walking distance of a house.  Vendors of same were within walking distance of houses, because the land use provided for it.

Those days are long gone, and with them any semblance of validity for the contention that driving is a choice.  As it is not a choice, nor can it be a privilege.