“WA: The State of Excitement” the slogan on the number plates used to read. So risqué. But that was a long time ago.

Now, bureaucratic wowsers in Western Australia have gone one better than their 2014 refusal to sponsor the state opera’s 2014 production of Carmen because it featured not just smoking but an entire cigarette factory.

The Director of Liquor Licensing has rejected plans by German supermarket Aldi to sell alcohol at its new Harrisdale store, in Perth’s southeast, because the prices are too cheap.

An application by the Woolworths-owned BWS chain to open in the new development won approval of the pen-pushers two months ago, with the Liquor Commission finding it offered “greater benefits to consumers in the locality”.

Consumer benefits, of course, are a radical concept in the West, which is only just experimenting with twenty-first century trading hours and where, until the beginning of next month, the state’s Potato Marketing Corporation will still technically exist, along with powers to stop and search vehicles its officers reasonably believe may be carrying more than 50 kilograms of potatoes.

Aldi pushed its luck too far. The McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth, the Executive Director of Public Health and the WA Police – the same mob of funsters, you might recall, who argued against any extension of the liquor licence of that well-known den of iniquity, the State Theatre Centre – all opposed its plans to sell the demon drink.

Why? Well, as the Director of Liquor Licensing noted, its prices were cheaper than BWS. The horror.

Naturally, The West Australian is alert to this threat to the citizenry. “Nearly two dozen varieties of wine at Aldi are listed at a price below $5 a bottle,” it reports. “Three can be bought for $2.79.”

It sounds just like the sort of relief the locals need after the price craziness of the mining boom.