There’s one last outpost of the uncivilised world, largely untouched by the machine manicured perfections of the bureaucrat’s ordered vision. We, the cyclists of the world, are still, largely, free to do our thing. Isn’t it wonderful!

You can almost understand why we’ve been left to last. Consider the different kinds of cyclists out there. Granny coaster-riding her way to the shops with bagel basket attached, is a cyclist. That 10 year old wobbling down the cycling track oblivious to the wider world, is a cyclist. Mountain bikers are cyclists. Lance is a cyclist. Even Cadel… Tandem riders are cyclists. So are recumbents(!) Pork bellied dentists riding the latest and greatest from the artisans of Italy and France, are, it is rumoured, cyclists. I am a cyclist too! Even my mate who only ever gets as far as remembering the bike rusting away in his shed, is a cyclist (because he did indeed ride once). Yes, consider the diversity of machine and riders out there who fit the Bicyclism bill. Was there ever such a diversity in the world of cars? It’s a glorious, fabulous untamed chaos of diversity and confusion out there in the land of the pedal powered machine. A confusion that enrages the Lego Land, Swiss clock tick tock of the bureaucrat’s lab-white Matrix model of how the world should and must be.

How long can all this last? We live in a world where the only sign of economic growth is via the perpetual inflation of government bureaucracy. Every day, in every way, we get more and more policies and rules to bandaid us from the anarchy of our unruly policy-confused lives. Like birds need to build nests, bureaucrats need to layer the world with ever more rules. It’s what they do. It’s in their genes (or perhaps it’s the drugs in their OH&S triple-approved water coolers…).

The bureaucrats have to rake the policy compost of their nests. How else can they maintain control over all the other turkeys rooting about in peripheries of their territorial domain?

So, when more and more cyclists take to the roads (as oil runs out and the rules that govern the mobility of cars finally governs all that mobility away), what precisely do you think the bureaucrats are going to do?

They’ll be wanting to save us cyclists from the compounding anarchy of our under-governed confusions, that’s what.

We’re the last Great Promised Land of unclaimed policy paradise for them to explore. There’s a gold mine of policy claims to be staked. A new world of confusion for our bureaucrats to tame! You can see the excitement build. Restructuring plans to make, Departmental re-organisations, policy summits to attend! World fact finding missions to plan. Green Papers and then White Papers to write. Senate reviews, Commissions, Investigations, Policy Councils to set up. Endless fun. It’s Party Time! A cycling-led recovery for a bureaucracy that might otherwise have fallen asleep…

Clearly, when our bureaucrats turn their gaze in our direction, they will feel the urge to do what they have always done before; to do what it is that is in their genes to do: to reproduce a litany of categories, classes and schemas through which to manifest order onto the unruly chaos within which we have wallowed for too long. In a flash, they’ll be convening committee structures all over the land. They’ll be appointing Committee’s with chairs charged to tame this last vestige of free flying chaos. They’ll be charged to deliver a vision of groomed hierarchically ordered landscapes – tick boxed, cog-driven, procedurally accountable, results/outcomes directed … ‘transparent’(!) … audit-compliant pathways to bureaucratic heaven!

In no time soon, there will be categories within categories with manuals of glorious specifications a thousand pages thick through which to define which particular hole within which we each would then be deemed to fit.

In no time soon. I’d become a cyclist Class IV, Category II, Grade V, open-restricted. Log books required. Annually reviewed. Insurance Category 1006b, Annex 1a. All for the one low and terribly reasonable cost of $500 per year. Not including medical and mechanical certification tests, also required – enlightening our prospects for eternal safety for ever more! Hallelujah! Blessed be the enlightenment bestowed by our benefactors to rescue us from our chaotic untamed-policy wilderness…

As a Class IV, Category II, Grade V, open-restricted cycling person, I’d get a series of rights. Right’s I never had before if only because I was too ignorant to know that these are the things to which I should have aspired, instead of the simple crude pleasures of just going for a ride… Please see pages 1004-6009 of the Official Cycling Code book through which to familiarise myself with what I now can and cannot do. Ownership of said Code Book being compulsory. $910.95 please. Payable at any friendly Roads and Cycling Authority Office (please take a number and wait in the queue). Credit cards – or gold bullion – acceptable. A small inconvenience to pay for the enlightenment now bestowed! Ah Men; long may the bureaucracy live forever… and ever… in accordance with the doctrines of policies decreed. Blessed be the rule makers.

Yes. This new orderly world of manicured policies through which to govern us once wild anarchical cycling louts will sing the song of glory to our bureaucratic lords. A sight to behold and admire! The vision splendid for thousands of repurposed bureaucrats once so terrifyingly dispossessed when the oil ran out.

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