Paul Sheehan, trollumnist at work, and with all this legal liability, let's kill all the lawyers ... or should that be the trollumnists?

(Above: a nice photo of the decay at work in Enmore where councils allow goths on the street, and old fashioned hearses, willy nilly).

It seems that Tim Blair has discovered "trollumnist", as deployed by Jason Wilson in If I Make You Angry Enough, Maybe You'll Keeping Reading, is not a new word.

You can read this startling revelation in Mystery Solved.

But only if you want to read eight words and click on a link. Blair's idea of snide trolling.

Well it beats reading a lengthy piece of trollumn writing, but hey ho, in our bid to use only the unoriginal language deployed by Shakespeare, off we go to see what Paul Sheehan, trollumnist extraordinaire, is up to, and he doesn't disappoint.

Common sense has no place in our burgeoning bureaucracy, he rants, and out of the gossamer of a school fete, and a parking ticket, he weaves a tale of rampant bureaucracy that would surely make any indignant sufferer from indifferent, callous bureaucrats fall to the ground in a frothing rage (though not on public land, for fear of exposing the council to liability, and no offensive imagery in relation to epilepsy is intended, or intended to be conveyed, and any and all potential liability is explicitly and specifically denied herein).

And whose fault is this seeping, destructive bureaucracy? Perhaps the conservative government of John Howard, well known for instituting policies in relation to fetes and parking tickets, and in power for over a decade, in which it implemented its dark and devious and world dominant desires, from intrusive interventions to war mongering?

No, no, this new lunar landscape of brutality has risen from the mushroom darkness as a result of the government of Chairman Rudd, equally well known for stretching its tentacles into the humblest activities, from organizing fetes to the issuing of parking tickets.

These are no more than a few fleeting examples of the oppressive cultural monolith we are building for ourselves, a monolith whose construction has sped up with the arrival of a genuinely Napoleonic prime minister in Kevin Rudd. All the trends towards the centralisation of control have accelerated and consolidated as the Federal Government seeks to spread its power over every aspect of society in ways the framers of the Commonwealth never intended.

Our very own Napoleon! Responsible for whether we live or die, or even how we breathe. Such power, and of course no breach of Godwin's Law, since we know that Napoleon isn't Hitler. Or is he? But we can't say it for fear of liability and a dollar in the Godwin's Law swear jar!

Remarkable really then that Chairman Rudd can't untangle the traffic on Sydney's roads, curb road rage, or make the trains run on time. I mean, in the unruffled new world of dull Swiss efficiency in which we live - automatons programmed and run from Canberra - you'd think they'd have worked out how to control the anarchistic tendencies of Sydney-siders.

Why only yesterday we had a bout of young people clustered in a public park in an orgy of music and excess, as they littered the streets like empty cardboard wine casks, sauntered across the roads, stuck out their tongues at passing motorists, and got pissed as parrots. And what did the bloody police do? Nothing! Well not much.

No, they stood idly by, totally ignoring Chairman Rudd's instruction that the crowd be made to behave like a Victorian tea party. (scenes from previous orgies available here).

But at any given chance to see the glass half empty, Sheehan will likely as not take the glass and hurl it at the wall in a rage, thereby ensuring it's fully empty. Backed by readings from a book by Jane Jacobs, he sees doom everywhere:

Among her many observations was this: ''Central planning, whether by leftists or conservatives, draws too little on local knowledge and creativity, stifles innovations, and is inefficient and costly because it is circuitous.''

Central planning does not come only from Canberra. It comes from every level of government, and the cost of the bureaucratisation of society is as enormous as it is insidious. As the mother who helped organise next Sunday's school fete told me: ''If I had known in March what I know now, there would never have been any thought of a fete.''

Multiply this by a million.

Ah the hapless fete organizers that. like the robin redbreast in a cage, put all heaven and Paul Sheehan in a rage:

A group of altruistic young mothers has organised a school fete for next Sunday. They want to raise money to pay the salary of a remedial reading teacher at their state primary school.

It's a noble purpose, but the mothers made a grave tactical mistake. They decided to hold the fete outside the school grounds, in a nearby park. This placed them at the mercy of the local bureaucracy, Woollahra Municipal Council, an institution not noted for mercy.

The result, as anyone who knows anything, resulted in a standard set of council conditions, no doubt developed by Woollahra Council since the Napoleonic Rudd came to power in Animal Farm.

Sheehan even seems to have discovered the concept of public liability insurance:

To convey the full flavour of the majestic repressiveness, I quote from the document: ''The applicant must provide a copy of a certificate of currency prior to each event showing public liability insurance to the value of $10,000,000 for each fete ..." That is not a misprint.

Heaven help him if one of his servants falls down the steps of his humble eastern suburbs abode, and decides to take an action against him for not providing safe working conditions. Then he might appreciate the benefits of insurance.

But if you happen to be the person falling down the steps, tripping over a misplaced rug, would you be a kindly, understanding person, and fail to employ a lawyer to nail your employer to the wall?

Of course not, and in this story of people stupid enough to organise a public event in a park, when it seems nearby school grounds might have been available at far less hassle, the real issue is the question of liability.

If you invite people to partake in an event, you become legally liable for their safety, as well as other related matters which expose you to action. Which is why councils have had to devise ever more elaborate precautions, to minimise their own risk, and to make sure those using their spaces are covered - since if they fail to ensure organizers are organized, they can be enjoined in an action.

Let's say, for example, that a drunken punter, unable to avail themselves of a porta loo, decides to upchuck on you. Mad as hell, you decide to make someone pay. Or how about some indigent provider of food, who also supplies you with a healthy dose of salmonella. Mad as hell, you decide to make someone pay.

Now with luck, you might nail the upchucker or the food merchant, but if you can't, there's always the event organizer, and failing that, the council that gave them permission without ensuring all would be safe.

The council's thought police have also been busy. Stipulations have been made about what can be written on any promotional banners and where they can be displayed. The council has provided two pages of instructions about food service. It requires the hire of portable toilets. It also requires ''adequate security measures''. And so on.

No, never! Security? Why that would stop Sheehan from writing a column the following week about how society is breaking down, and people running rampant in the streets, without any effective controls, and how only last week there was a riot at a school fete while organizers stood by helplessly. The very foundations of society are in peril.

I understand, he might write, that there were people pissing on trees because the organizers had failed to ensure a sufficient supply of portable toilets, and the one deployed had clearly not been maintained by Kenny, covered as it was in graffiti and vomit.

Well personally I blame the residents of the eastern suburbs, many of them lawyers, and all of them way too litigious for this state of affairs. But that's absurd you say, a rhetorical flourish about killing all the lawyers, who protect our rights and take appropriate steps when confronted with matters of concern.

Well a pox on that. It's the business of trollumnists to repeat ideas first devised in the days of Shakespeare, so let's kill all the lawyers:

This response is not singular to this fete, this school or this council. It is the way Australia's occupying army of 1.5 million federal, state and local bureaucrats and lawyers see the world - through a prism of risk and legal liability.

Um, is there a lawyer who doesn't see the world through the prism of legal liability, and an insurer who doesn't see it through the prism of risk? With this kind of insight, why next we'll be learning that food caterers see the world through the prism of mouths, bellies and digestive tracts.

I keed, I keed, and as usual I fail to understand that this creeping army of everybody is slowly strangling us in our sleep (who can I sue, is there someone I can sue - no you silly billy, that's what's sapping our strength and turning us into a nation of zombies).

Australians have this outdated idea of themselves as easy-going pragmatists, but we are becoming a nation of petty laws and fearful citizens, too gutless to confront this creeping, productivity-killing, initiative-destroying, community-sapping tide of compulsion and constriction, much of it driven by a corrosive ideology of the need for government control and intervention.

Yes, you see, we're all doomed. No fetes in Woollahra, and the young run wild and feral in a Newtown park and the goths on the street with hearses in Enmore. The natural order over turned, and the end of the world at hand.

Look no further than the volunteer surf lifesaving movement, a totemic symbol of Australian culture and mateship. It is being progressively suffocated by local councils and their obsession with legal liabilities and micro-management. Instead of reforming our ponderous, expensive, dysfunctional, excessively technical legal system, it is the dysfunctional legal system that is colonising the rest of society. Laws pile upon laws, regulations upon regulations. Nothing is repealed, every rule is expanded.

Oh no, not the surf life saving movement, it's totemic. And yes, at last, we get to the point. Kill all the lawyers. Um, but didn't John Howard and Peter Costello and half the Liberals currently in parliament start off as lawyers. And as for that Malcolm Turnbull, didn't he humiliate the British in court and make them change everything about their secret service? Damn you litigious laywers, damn you all to hell.

All the better then, I suppose, to kill all the lawyers, if they're the ones making sure the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

But laws and compulsion do not create civil order. The real moral authority in society comes from community standards, peer pressure, communalism and a sense of natural justice, and all of these elements are under assault.

Well yes, but try telling that to commentariat columnists who spend their columns, week in, week out, moaning about how government and bureaucrats need to do something about some current social evil that offends them, and demanding that the eyes of the offensive be plucked out.

A quick example. Here in the inner west, we have on Halloween's eve, a festival of goths. It's a tragic sidewalk event, so emo and laid back as to be emotionally and practically dysfunctional, but it offers color and movement and a bit of shared joyful unhappiness for tragic people in the grip of wearing black.

The one sour note? Sniffer dogs deployed at the railway station to catch any passing person unwisely carrying drugs.

Deployed as the result of the raging of trollumnists and talk back jocks about the dangers of a drug epidemic raging through the community in an out of control way. Just as the dangers of public assembly gone wrong are regularly hammered by trollumnists with too much time on their hand and a festering sense of anger at councils, governments, bureaucrats and lawyers, and only too ready to shriek at any example of an organizer of an event failing to take care of their flocks.

Yep, Australia is falling down, falling down fast, but the real culprits, the people responsible for everything that's wrong in the world, in Canberra, in councils, in fete organizing, in matters of parking (especially when someone else has taken a trollumnist space), are indeed the trollumnists ....

It's all their fault, not least for their willingness, their design to assign blame and fault whenever they get an opportunity.

The spirit of the country has been ruined by trollumnists, and turned us into an argumentative, erupting fury of legal actions and recriminations. The politicians fear their chattering ways, the lawyers do their bidding.

Chairman Rudd can take it easy, it's all the fault of Paul Sheehan and his comrades. And as proof I cite every argumentative, divisive response and comment produced by Sheehan's column, as people moan about other people and the way the other people are ruining everything ...

Make sense? Well as much sense as Paul Sheehan, which is to say fuck all. But you know, I could multiply the examples and the proof by a million ...

Now excuse me. I have to head out onto the roads of Sydney for an anarchist drive through the streets, wherein no doubt I will break a few laws, and a few others will also break laws, and god willing, no one will be injured, and all this blather about the octopus tentacles of Canberra intruding will be remedied by the reality of the jungle out there ...

(Below: click on the image to get a reminder about your legal rights in relation to sniffer dogs, and remember to sue hard and to sue often. But if you get caught son, then you'd better get a lawyer, a real good lawyer).