The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

Politicians love to signal their virtues. Every new law or program is rolled out under a banner of noble purpose – to protect children, improve public health, save the planet. You name it, it all sounds very nice. But judging our leaders by what they say rather than what they deliver is a dangerous folly.

In Australia, we’ve had many painful reminders that results matter infinitely more than rosy rhetoric. Time and again, well-meaning policies have backfired spectacularly, leaving us with more problems than we started with. It’s not enough for politicians to be nice, or to mean well – they need to deliver.

It’s time we held politicians (along with the bureaucrats behind them) to a simple standard: Did your idea actually work? If not, no hand-on-heart excuses should save them from scrutiny and electoral defeat.

Take the recent social media ban for under-16s – a world-first policy our government heralded as a brave step to safeguard kids online. Prime Minister Albanese called it a “proud day” for families. Well, it took all of one day for reality to give that pride a smack. Hundreds of thousands of teens had their social media accounts summarily deactivated. Some cried, some shrugged, and many others quickly found a way around it. The government’s grand intent to “protect young people from harm” has mostly succeeded in driving them underground. Now, teenagers who once engaged on mainstream platforms (where at least some safety measures exist) either lie about their age or migrate to dodgier corners of the internet.

Similarly, let’s not forget the digital ID scheme being pushed as a convenience. It sounds friendly – “one login for all your services!” – until you consider that it centralises unprecedented power over personal data in government hands. Data breaches or misuse could harm millions. Some experts liken it to a potential surveillance tool ripe for abuse. The intention might be smoother service delivery, but the outcome could be government oversight of your entire life.

Good intentions are worthless – even dangerous – if they create a false sense of accomplishment while the real problem (to the extent a real problem exists) festers or worsens. Our leaders should be less concerned with looking virtuous and more concerned with whether their policies will actually work.

Consider another case: Australia’s ever-rising tobacco taxes. The intent is to price cigarettes so high that people quit smoking, while raising money to fund the health system along the way. On paper it sounds logical and benevolent. Who wouldn’t want fewer smokers and more hospital funding? In practice, we’ve turned cigarettes into a black-market bonanza while tax revenue has plummeted. By some estimates, two in every three cigarettes smoked in Australia are now ‘illegal’. Politicians and bureaucrats passed laws intended to improve public health; instead we ended up with fire bombings and a flourishing underworld economy.

Being a nice or well-intentioned politician means nothing if the policies enacted are foolish. Wisdom asks, “what do we know will actually happen if we do this?” rather than “does this idea make me feel virtuous?”

Let 2026 be the year we start judging policies, and the politicians who push them, by their outcomes. Did the policy fail to achieve its stated goal? Did it cause equal or greater harm elsewhere? If so, scrap or amend it and hold accountable those who failed to think it through.

Thinkers on the right have long championed this mindset. Milton Friedman famously quipped that “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” Thomas Sowell hammered this point home in book after book, and speech after speech – showing with endless empirical evidence how grand government plans often produce the opposite of what was promised. Dennis Prager distilled it perfectly: good intentions without wisdom leads to evil.

Australia needs a hefty dose of this common-sense perspective. That means smaller government and empowered individuals. It means remembering that every law or regulation is a trade-off and comes with unintended consequences, like night follows day. It means erring on the side of liberty – because free people innovating and adapting on their own are better at solving problems than bureaucrats wielding sledgehammer solutions. It also means understanding incentives: if a policy requires people to behave contrary to their own interests or nature, you can be sure it will backfire.

Politicians can stand in front of as many banners and slogans as they want, proclaiming their compassion and good intent. But the rest of us should look at the scoreboard. Are the kids safer, or are they just sneaking around the rules? Are smokers quitting, or are gangs getting rich selling illegal cartons? Are we safer, healthier and happier, or are we trading one set of risks for another? The scoreboard doesn’t lie, even when the politicians do (perhaps to themselves most of all).

So, the next time our leaders unveil a grand plan to fix this or ban that “for our own good,” let’s not be swept away by the warm and fuzzy intentions. Let’s ask the cold, hard questions: What will this really do? What’s the track record of such ideas? And above all, what new mess might this create?

If the answers are shaky, we’d do best to remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions – and politely tell our government, “No thanks, we’ll handle this ourselves.”