Laws and Lockdowns are Making Australians Dull and Dumb

What Australia’s lockdowns say about its culture and people.

Freedom of expression, movement, and the free exchange of ideas. Such liberties underpin a progressive, innovative, and economically prosperous society.

The free exchange of ideas is fundamental to charting the best path forward. As Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman observed in his book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, you can improve decisions by aggregating multiple independent judgments.

Associational thinking or connecting the dots between disparate ideas and disciplines fosters innovation — something Steve Jobs noted in his famous Reed College commencement speech. Frans Johansson too observed this phenomenon in his book, The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation.

At the same time, freedom of expression, movement, and the freedom to act empower us to experiment, to fail, and to learn — hallmarks of the scientific method and innovation.

As the late Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator’s DNA Clayton Christensen noted, challenging the status quo, taking risks, and questioning are vital attributes that underpin innovative thinking and entrepreneurship.

But when these freedoms are suppressed, we stop learning, we stop growing, and as the world marches on, we regress.

One need not look further than the public service for evidence of this.

Give a public servant a problem, and they won’t respond with independent thought and a novel and circumstantial solution. No, they will respond with a process.

“Here, fill out these forms, and we’ll get back to you within in 5 to 10 business days”.

This is precisely why organizations like Netflix and Amazon keep process and bureaucracy to a minimum. This helps these companies attract and keep the best talent, and empowers said talent to make decisions, to take action, and to learn, ultimately fostering a culture of continuous learning, speed, and innovation.

And when you burden an entire society with process, policy, red tape, and rules, you end up with a nation of people who think in…