One of the first complete sentences many toddlers utter is ‘You’re not the boss of me’. It was certainly true of my children and now my grandchildren.

You are trying to get the little darlings to do something they really don’t want to do – put away toys, stop jumping in puddles –  and back comes the defiant reply: ‘You’re not the boss of me’. It’s a simple statement of agency, of refusing to take order from others, even a loving mother or grandmother.  Personally, I think it’s great.

In fact, this assertion of personal will doesn’t even require language.  The baby sits in the highchair, strongly opposed to eating something that is being offered. The head shakes vigorously, the lips tightly pursed, the offending food is tossed on the floor. That baby has no intention of ingesting a disliked food. The baby is the boss, make no mistake.

I was thinking of this the other day while listening to Daniel Westerman, head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, complain about the poor take-up of a scheme that allows retailers to take control of the personal electricity of households.

Under the scheme, households with solar panels and batteries can consent to pass control of their electricity to larger system operators. There is a financial reward for doing so but households can see their batteries completely drained.

According to Westerman, ‘Hopefully we can see a world where retailers are able to create a real value proposition for consumers to have their batteries in this case – and EVs in the future – participate in the grid because we know it does result in a lower cost grid for everyone.’

Yeh, right. So, you go to the trouble of installing solar panels and buying batteries, admittedly helped along with government subsidies. You might even have been lured into buying an EV that you can charge at home.

Along comes some wally who thinks you should hand control over to an anonymous third party to drain your batteries just when you might need them fully charged. The EV could get stuck in the garage.

This is not going to work. These retailers are not the boss of these householders.I’m not sure you need to be a behavioural economist to figure this one out.

Don’t get me wrong here: there has been a depressing decline in examples of personal defiance, of taking control, of refusing to follow repressive orders. Having broadcast fearful messages of the pending disaster of Covid, governments around the world happily removed the agency of their citizens on a great many fronts.

Go to work? No fear. Go to the shops?  Only occasionally and fully masked and don’t forget to QR code. Go to the park?  Don’t even think about it. Visit family or friends? Are you kidding? Experimental vaccine? Compulsory.

Perhaps we can forgive the passivity of the citizenry in the first few months of the pandemic. There was a great deal of uncertainty, after all. But where were the phalanxes of people prepared to resist unexplained and just plain bonkers restrictions?

Of course, the threat of arbitrary penalties was a powerful deterrent. Shooting rubber bullets into a small crowd of protestors or arresting a pregnant woman who had posted some mild questioning of the Covid restrictions were deliberately designed to enforce compliance.

As the months passed and the good burghers of Melbourne endured yet another day of hectoring Dan the Man wearing his North Face jacket on the tele, people became restless. There was a quiet revolt going on. Mates would meet for drinks in back lanes.  People didn’t bother to comply with intrastate travel restrictions.Questions were asked about the safety and the efficacy of the vaccines.

Every little breeze seemed to whisper: ‘You’re not the boss of me.’

It is interesting to observe what has happened to rates of vaccination more generally after the Covid vaccine mandate experiment.  They have declined significantly, including for vaccines with lengthy safety records.

Parents are not showing the same dedication to having the long list of shots recommended for their newborn children. Even the take-up of the annual flu shot has fallen. Removing people’s agency, it would seem, has longer term consequences

Of course, the flipside of this equation was the relish that many state politicians exhibited for the highly repressive and dictatorial measures that were imposed. Several of them really wanted the ‘good times’ to keep rolling.

The excuse of protecting the planet by preventing climate change – pause for exasperated laughter here – provides ideal cover for all sorts of officious interventions.

Do you like cooking with gas? Well, forget it. It’s bad for the planet and if you build a new home in Victoria, there will be no option for gas cooking or heating. And if your current gas stove conks out, then you won’t be able to replace it with a new gas stove.

(Actually, the Victorian government under the worst energy and climate change minister in the Western world, Lily D’Ambrosio, had to back away from its strict anti-gas mandates. Evidently, some migrant groups are terribly keen on gas cooking and so there were some exemptions granted.  Commitment to multiculturalism – and the strategic importance of the migrant vote in certain seats – trumps concern for the planet.)

Let’s face it, the illustrious B1, Chris Bowen, would probably prefer simply to force people to buy electric vehicles. None of this faffing around with incentives and fancy schemes with emissions standards.

Gosh, don’t people realise that his emissions reduction targets are based on certain assumptions about the take-up of EVs and people are just not getting on board to the necessary extent? How can B1 be expected to attract the world’s biggest green junket/trade fair to Adelaide if people simply refuse to play ball and buy those damn EVs?

And did I mention the guidelines that attach to the contents of school children’s lunchbox? This is surely some sort of bad joke when educational bureaucrats think they can impose ‘healthy’ options on kids, monitored by interfering but untrained teachers.

More generally, public health advice on food and alcohol is another example of bureaucratic attempts to reduce individual autonomy. The fact that this advice changes from year to year – remember when eggs were bad, now they are good – doesn’t seem to bother the jumped-up officials and academics.

Government plans to jam more people into dog box apartments located near railway stations are also illustrative of the desire to ignore people’s preferences for standalone dwellings with backyards, albeit small ones.  People must be denied their free will to avoid the evils of building on the urban fringe that bureaucrats have determined is ‘not in the public interest’.

So Speccie readers, let’s have a cheer out for that statement of agency, of personal defiance, of independent thinking: ‘You’re not the boss of me’. Let’s encourage its greater use.