I moved from the UK to Australia two years ago. Aussies tell themselves a big lie – the real, infuriating truth about this country is clear, writes MAX AITCHISON

Long before I arrived on these sun-kissed shores, I thought I had grasped the idea of the Australian soul.

The tolerant, open-minded, ‘she’ll be right, mate’, approach to life Aussies like to show to the world.

It was, my reading informed me, the great land of larrikins – a proud tradition of holding a healthy disrespect for rules and order that drew its inspiration from the legendary outlaw Ned Kelly.

A nation of plucky underdogs who viewed their former British overlords with contempt.

A land where rugged individuals laughed in the face of authority and forged their own meritocratic identity.

A people who valued common sense, who fought for their own beliefs and scorned the establishment’s stuffy rules.

It seemed to me that Kelly and his heroic last stand embodied what it was to be Australian.

Yet, having lived in this country for over two years, I now realise how naive I was.

A striking photo shows a beach-goer being confronted by four police officers while beaches were open to the public – but only for exercise in April 2020

The tolerant, open-minded, ‘she’llbe right, mate’, approach to life Aussies like to show to the world is a fiction, argues political reporter Max Aitchison 

For it is painfully – infuriatingly – obvious that a very loud minority of modern Australians have much more in common with the men who strung Kelly up, than the mythical outlaw himself.

As the late, great Australian critic and journalist Clive James once observed: ‘The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.’

I see this slavish adherence to rules and pettifogging everywhere, at all levels of society, from the individual to the state.

I see it in my multi-millionaire banker neighbour who rang the council to send out a ranger to fine me $350 for parking four inches across his driveway, rather than leaving a note, which would have achieved exactly the same thing.

I see it in the council rangers who not only demanded that a family pour out the champagne they were drinking to celebrate Christmas day onto the hot sand of Bondi Beach, but also to pop and pour their unopened bottles too. 

I see it in the surly staff at the Avoca surf club restaurant who, on Good Friday of all days, refused a table to a young couple and their two children, both of whom were under the age of three, because the toddlers had committed the inexcusable sin of not wearing shoes inside.

I see it too, more times than I care to mention, in the power-hungry bouncers staffing Sydney’s pubs and clubs who seem to relish in ruining any decent night out.

‘How many drinks have you had?’ – the question to which there is no right answer, honest or otherwise.

I see it also in the intensely passive aggressive note left on my windshield after I had the temerity to leave my car parked in the same, entirely legal, spot on the street I live on for two weeks, which read: ‘Has this car been abandoned? We will call the council and have it removed – residents.’ 

It is painfully – infuriatingly – obvious that a very loud minority of modern Australians have much more in common with the men who strung Ned Kelly (pictured) up, than the mythical outlaw himself

State premiers, drunk off power, acted like Communist dictators during the pandemic (former Victorian Premier Dan Andrews is pictured in 2023)

I had half a mind to flip the paper and write: ‘Hi resident. Also resident. Why don’t you get a life and mind your own business?’ (And yes, I am starting to wonder if there is something wrong with my neighbours). 

Regardless, I see it everywhere: this curtain-twitching, joy-extinguishing, fun-sponging desire to pursue conformity at all costs.

And it’s not just confined to neighbourhood spats, officious hospitality staff of lowly council bureaucrats. This rotten, rule-making insanity runs right through the heart of state and federal governments across the country.

Of course, it plumbed new depths during the pandemic. 

State premiers, drunk off power and acting like Communist dictators, families unable to say goodbye to loved ones and the appalling case of a pregnant woman in her pyjamas being taken from her home in handcuffs for daring to stand up to the tyranny.

But it didn’t end there.

Take the upcoming social media ban for children under the age of 16 or the $420,000-a-year eSafety Commissioner whose job seems to entail telling social media companies to remove mean posts, sometimes made by people in foreign countries.

Police horses were a common occurrence on Bondi Beach during the Covid pandemic in 2021

Families were unable to say goodbye to loved ones as people were forced to wear masks and cower in their homes

You hear politicians praising these measures as ‘world leading’, as if being the first country to do something precludes any discussion over whether it’s actually a good idea in the first place.

Because they’re not. The eSafety Commissioner is about as useful as a chocolate teapot and if anyone sincerely thinks that children aren’t going to get around any ban in a matter of seconds then I have a good bridge to sell you.

No, what these laws are all about is pandering to Australia’s obsession with policing other people’s lives.

And nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of Sydney restaurateur Nahji Chu, whose Lady Chu eatery in Potts Point was visited last Friday by unsmiling council bureaucrats who were unhappy with her potted plants.

In an explosive showdown, filmed by a staff member, Ms Chu unleashed on the council employees: ‘This is ‘f***ed up, this whole city is f***ed up!

‘I’m not a f***ing naughty school kid, so don’t speak to me like that.

‘I’m paying f***ing taxes and I’m paying your wages, so f*** off.

‘I’m trying to activate this f***ing dead city, so don’t shut it down.’

A woman enjoying a spot of rollerblading is moved on by police during the Covid pandemic

While a family website such as this one cannot condone Ms Chu’s colourful language, I applaud her sentiment wholeheartedly. 

Here is an Australian hero, willing to stand up for herself and others in the face of joyless officials.

This is a woman who fled the communist Pathet Lao regime as a child in 1975, only to then be thrown into a Thai jail cell with her father where she caught TB and languished for three months.

Her family then bounced around Thai refugee camps for three years before they eventually became among the first Vietnamese refugees to settle in Australia.

Ms Chu has worked in the varied worlds of fashion (where she once helped dress Kylie Minogue) banking and hospitality, a sector in which she has built and lost an empire before starting all again from scratch with the popular Lady Chu in 2021.

She was gloriously unapologetic when she spoke to my colleague Jonica Bray earlier this week.

‘There is no fun in this city, you can’t do anything or you face a fine,’ she said.

‘No one even leaves their house anymore – they just work to make money and go and spend it overseas where they can get culture and have a good time.’

And she’s right. 

If the average Australian allows the small but powerful minority of rule-lovers to win, then the country must drop any pretense to being some kind of laidback nirvana and must face a reckoning with its true identity. 

I urge all proud Australians to follow Ms Chu’s lead and resist loudly and openly – to stand up for the values and the spirit that makes this country so great. 

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