It was a genuine ‘choking on my Weeties’ moment. (Is this an Australian expression? Who even eats Weeties, by the way?) There it was in the newspaper – a quote from Boris Johnson, terminal Prime Minister of the UK, telling us that ‘people have the best feel for how to spend their own money, rather than governments’. He added that there is ‘ample scope to get out of people’s way’.

Oh please. If he really believed that, he wouldn’t have carried on like a bossy elitist know-it-all for the entire duration of his premiership. From the restrictions associated with Covid to the instructions on how people must live their lives to meet his barmy net-zero 2050 target, Boris’s leadership was both authoritarian and high-handed. Whatever libertarian instincts he may have claimed to have in the past, over the last several years, his imperiousness knew few bounds.

And I’m not just talking about the multiple restrictions imposed in the name of the pandemic; the actions of the Johnson government were based on the assumption that government knows best and that citizens must be told what to do. It’s for the greater good, of course; in particular, his climate fantasy – sorry, firm emissions targets.

Just think about. People were being told that they must replace their perfectly serviceable gas boilers used to heat their homes with climate-friendly heat pumps. Add in the necessary upgrade to home insulation, we are talking a minimum of 20,000 pounds.

And that’s assuming you can get hold of a pump, the other necessary bits and pieces and an accredited tradie to install the bloomin’ thing. But that’s OK, taxpayers will hand over a few thousand quid to help home owners make the ‘right’ choice. Is this an example of Boris’s view that people know best how to spend their own money?

At one stage, the Conservative government was toying with the idea of banning the sale of properties without installed heat pumps. Gosh, how libertarian can you get?  As a result of the stampede of complaints, this idea was quietly dropped.

And don’t you just love the stories about people with heritage-listed houses being bossed around by the ghost of Stalin barking out orders on all manner of details about the features of dwellings? In many instances, proposals to install heat pumps as per the dictates of the environmental busy-bodies are knocked back by the heritage busy-bodies.

But just in case you think that Poms will be given a free choice on the type of vehicle they want to purchase, think again. Having been incentivised to purchase diesel vehicles in previous years by the hapless Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, citizens are now being told that diesel vehicles are bad. (Expert advice at the time pointed to the lower CO2 emissions of diesel vehicles but forgot to mention the release of particulates and the damage to air quality. Shucks.)

The latest plan is that the sale of new petrol- and diesel-powered cars will be banned in the UK by 2030. By 2035, vans and small trucks will also be covered and the sale of hybrids that don’t plug in will also be banned. The fact that a very high fraction of UK residents does not have off-street parking that would allow charging at home is regarded as unimportant.

The source of the additional electricity required for the electrification of a large chunk of road transport is unclear. But what the heck – it’s the vibe that counts. And let’s not forget the woeful inadequacy of public EV charging facilities that exist in the UK (and elsewhere, including in California, the natural home of the EV) – details, my dear, details.

There are of course parallels all over the democratic world – don’t we expect dictators to tell people how they can live their lives? – where governments think they know better than citizens exercising their free will. It is surely ironic that the Californian government confirmed its future ban on the sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in the same week as EV owners were instructed to refrain from charging their vehicles at home between 4pm and 9pm because of a shortage of electricity.

Or take the brouhaha about our Coalition federal government allowing superannuation members to withdraw limited funds from their own accounts during the height of the pandemic. Who knew what people would do with the money – pay off debts, buy a property, stay afloat?

And it wasn’t just the self-serving superannuation funds that opposed the move. The Labor party made it clear that they weren’t having a bar of people using their own money prior to retirement. Now that Labor is in government, there will no early releases from superannuation accounts no matter how useful access to funds could be for some members.

We also have our own version of bans on certain car purchases in the future – the People’s Republic of the ACT has such a policy. That government also wants to ban the use of natural gas by Canberrans and plans to decommission the large gas pipeline into the ACT at the end of the decade. (That will go down well… not. It’s awfully cold in Canberra in the winter, as I recall.)

There are just so many micro-regulations affecting what we can and cannot buy, what we can and cannot do. I’m totally confused about recycling. And now it seems you can’t buy straws or plastic knives and forks.

There are multiple building regulations that inflate the costs for ordinary consumers, with the latest example being a mandatory 7-star rating. It can take years to have a new fence or gate to your property approved by a local council at which point you are then ‘free’ to bear the construction costs within the designated approval.

So was Boris taking the piss when he claimed to be in favour of people choosing to spend their own money as they wish? Would any politician in Australia even bother to make this claim?

We might expect Coalition governments to favour this approach, but in practice they seem about as bossy and overbearing as Labor. After all, Scott Morrison signed up to net zero 2050 in the full knowledge that it will involve imposing changes to the way people spend their money in ways that won’t reflect their true preferences.