There once was a time when we, Australians and Americans, used to have a good laugh at the countries of Western Europe, nanny states all, infantilising and mollycoddling their peoples with an endless array of laws, rules and regulations to supposedly make the everyday lives better and safer. I excluded Canada from the first part of the sentence because Canada has always really been a big piece of Europe in Northern America, rather than a freedom-loving and irreverent Anglo wild frontier society that both the Oz and the US thought of themselves us.