Miranda Devine, Lewis Hamilton, speed thrills and end the nanny state now!

(Above: a new role model for Australian drivers, a Shanghai taxi. Is German. Is gut).

How else could you end a piece on the nanny state than this?

Of course, as we get into our cars this Easter we need to take road safety seriously, especially on slippery roads. But driving safely means being competent behind the wheel, and paying attention to the road conditions, not making the speedometer your priority.

Yep, it's that epic nanny, Miranda the Devine, putting on her very best nanny face in Snarl, you're on nanny camera: a cynical lurk to drive us crazy.

In the usual Walt Whitman-esque way of the Devine, happy to embrace contradiction, after doing her bit for nanny-dom, she spends the rest of her column blasting the nanny state and its road safety pieties.

The Devine is most unhappy that Lewis Hamilton was busted for doing a fishtail, a wheelie, call it what you will, on a public road while leaving the grand prix circuit at Albert Park.

To add to the crime of the Victorian authorities, apparently the Roads Minister even called him a dickhead.

The Devine puts on the very best Portia air as she screeches that the quality of mercy should not be strained, and proposes that the dickhead should forthwith be summonsed to appear in a road safety commercial, perhaps to explain how dickheads should not do wheelies or imitate dickheads that do:

So now, instead of a handful of onlookers seeing Hamilton's antics, the whole world knows, vastly increasing the number of copycat admirers, if that's the concern. You may as well arrest the entire cast of Top Gear. No wonder the homegrown driver Mark Webber came to Hamilton's defence this week, blasting Australia as a "nanny state".

Indeed. And let's hope that dickheads doing wheelies are nowhere near cyclists, since you never known when you might get involved in a head-on and wind up with a broken leg. (And for more on Oz's own, Mark Webber, you can wiki him here).

Webber is also consternated that someone should be fined for acting like a goose on the road:

'I think we've got to read an instruction book when we get out of bed - what we can do and what we can't do,'' he said. ''It's certainly changed since I left here. It pisses me off coming back here to be honest. It's a great country but we've got to be responsible for our actions and it's certainly a bloody nanny state when it comes to what we can do.''

Oh it's shocking, and there's no way being responsible for your actions should involve copping a fine for doing things in breach of the law. I mean there's personal responsibility, and then there's onerous, burdensome laws.

Why in the old days, anyone could hop in to a car as pissed as a parrot, ignore the seatbelt, crank up the motor, knock over the odd cyclist or pedestrian, and where was the fucking harm in that?

Sheesh, it's getting so we can't drive on the road in the manner of a Shanghai taxi driver, with one hand on the horn, the other hand on his horn, an abusive word or three, no lanes to follow, and a game of chicken with every other car in the way.

NSW is almost as bad as Victoria. Despite all the promises last year from the Roads Minister, Michael Daly, of a new age of commonsense for drivers, it seems the lunatics are back in control of policy.

Which is way worse than having a lunatic Shanghai taxi driver behind the wheel!

Meanwhile, we can look forward next week to a standard rant by the Devine about how the streets aren't safe in the Arab and Asian districts because of the way the hoons perform wheelies with total disregard for public safety.

But back to Walt Whitman. You see, the Devine is shocked and appalled by the NSW government and its nanny ways, when it fact it should be a wowser nanny instead:

The Premier, Kristina Keneally, doesn't want us to be the wowser state, when it comes to acting on the sensible concerns of a coalition of health and emergency workers about drunken violence outside all-night pubs. But she's quite happy for us to be the nanny state with speed cameras. As one newspaper letter-writer, Joan Moss, of Malabar, wrote: ''Rolling out more speed cameras will only raise revenue from ordinary safe-driving mums and dads travelling a few kilometres over the speed limit … The real culprits - car thieves, drunk drivers, sections of irresponsible testosterone charged youths - most of whom have little or nothing to lose, are let loose with a bit of a reprimand from our legal system to do the same thing again and again."

Yes indeed. What we need is selective nanny state policies, whereby speedsters having a little bit of harmless fun can go about their business peacefully, while the nanny state does its nanny thing about all night pubs, because let's face it, you have to accept responsibility for your actions, but not when indulging in an all night booze up which requires the most powerful and effective expression of nannydom to repress it.

Repeat after me: nanny state is bad, except when nanny state is good.

Not to mention the nannydom required to tell little Kev not to steal cars or drive drunk or worse still become testosterone charged just because they've seen Lewis Hamilton doing wheelies or Jeremy Clarkson acting like a prize git.

We are heading into another double-demerit Easter in which driving 11km/h over the speed limit or not wearing a seatbelt will lose you six points a piece. Do both at once and you've lost your licence.

Yet, despite this punitive regime, and the growing number of speed cameras, the road toll is getting worse, not better, with a 25 per cent increase in fatalities last year.

The response of authorities is to do more of the same that hasn't been working. It's time for new thinking.

Oh indeed. Which is why I'm right behind the campaign to make Sydney's roads like those of Shanghai, and let everyone feel free to drive like a Shanghai taxi driver. It's so invigorating and enlivening, and as your past life flashes before you every moment while you're on the road, you become aware of life, death, immortality, regrets, times of joy, and things you must say to your loved ones before you depart this life.

Replacing flesh-and-blood police in highly visible patrol cars with cameras has been a flop. The more draconian the speed limits, fines, penalties and the more ubiquitous the cameras, the worse the road toll. The 5 per cent of really dangerous drivers speed with impunity, knowing where the cameras are and adjusting their behaviour accordingly.

Oh it's so unfair, so unjust, letting those speedsters get away with it. Where's the nanny state when you need it! Impunity, I tells ya, which is way worse than immunity. As if the roads were there for sharing, and lycra-clad louts like that wretched Tony Abbott had any place on them, at least while being a bicyclist or pedestrian.

As Michael Lane, spokesman for the lobby group the National Motorists Association of Australia, points out, despite the increasingly harsh restrictions on drivers, the road toll has increased, especially in Victoria, the state with the most vigorous camera regime. ''So much for the alleged benefit of speed cameras.''

So much indeed. And just look at the Germans!

In Germany, where autobahns have no speed limits, the road toll has dropped significantly over 20 years.

Yes, and just because autobahns make up just 2% of the road system in Germany, don't you worry about that (but if you want a more interesting insight into the German thinking on autobahns and road fatalities, head off to the wiki here).

On and on the Devine drones, in a way that sounds just like a nanny state bureaucrat. There's the strange notion that speed kills, when we all know that speed is a drug we can't live without:

In NSW, the RTA keeps pushing its mantra of "speed kills", and when the road toll is going the wrong way, it just redoubles its efforts, like any good ideologue incapable of change. Yet the people who are the most dangerous on the roads are good at avoiding speed cameras, or working the system to avoid losing demerit points.

You see! The fiends are cunning, and know how to avoid the nanny state. Resistance is futile, nanny staters, the peasants are revolting and speeding at will with their fox-like clever dickery. Unlike poor old Hamilton, who's such a dumb dick, he did his wheelie in full public view, not even in an industrial estate out in the western suburbs.

In December, the RTA even dropped the speed limit on the Newell Highway from 110km/h in places to 100km/h, prompting the NRMA's regional director, Graham Blight, to claim it was part of a hidden agenda to drop the limit across NSW to 90km/h. Driving so slowly would mean you would spend more time driving to your destination, thus increasing the likelihood of crashes caused by fatigue, not to mention boredom and inattention when you are forced to travel at a speed below comfort level.

Not to mention the boredom and inattention when you force yourself to read through all of the Devine, as the gears grind and clash, and the clutch gets sticky.

Police have been largely cut out of traffic enforcement by technology and have lost any discretion to apply the sort of commonsense which makes our roads safe - the sort of discretion which would have given Lewis Hamilton a slap on the wrist rather than create an international incident.

An international incident! Yes, because a dickhead copped a fine in the long tradition of dickheads copping a fine, but also in the noble tradition of dickhead petrol heads saying 'it wasn't me your honour, and if it was, it was just to test my tyres' and 'in any case, I had to get the pregnant woman to hospital before her baby got delivered in the back of my formula one vehicle and messed up the seats'.

But where are the guardians of the nanny state in all this? The cops, those nannies who insist we always keep our pacifiers firmly in our mouths:

In Queensland, the Police Union has openly scoffed at the latest rollout of speed cameras, saying: ''There has been a big increase in the money collected by speed cameras in recent years, but there has been little discernible positive impact on the road toll. It's time the focus moved more towards increasing traffic enforcement by officers … who are capable of detecting drink-driving, unlicensed or dangerous driving and unroadworthy vehicles.''

Yes! It's time for an elevated kind of nannyism on many difficult and cogent areas, and don't go talking about personal responsibility when it comes to drink-driving, or unlicensed or dangerous driving, like doing wheelies, or deploying unroadworthy vehicles in the manner of a Shanghai taxi driver.

What we need is greater nanny state activism on the part of cops, provided that they leave Lewis Hamilton and Miranda the Devine alone to do wheelies and speed as they like! And run over the odd lyrca-clad cyclist if they irritate the shit out of them!

Amen to that.

Oh it's good to be back in country. And read the Devine. And call on road users to embrace the Shaolin skills of Shanghai taxi drivers. And think of the boost to hair dye as we try to hide our rapidly greying hair ...

Thanks Lewis Hamilton. Dickhead wheelies produce profound metaphysical thinking!

(Below: rush here for your 'end the nanny state now' T-shirt).