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'A classical liberal': Senator David Leyonhjelm. Photo: James Alcock

Only one official libertarian sits in the federal Parliament, though there are many closet libertarians hidden inside the tax-and-spend big government of Tony Abbott. This week that libertarian, Senator David Leyonhjelm of the Liberal Democratic Party, had a lesson in the treacheries of politics delivered to him personally by The Australian newspaper.

Leyonhjelm had intended to announce on Thursday that he had appointed Helen Dale, born Helen Darville, also known by the literary pseudonym Helen Demidenko, to his staff as a senior adviser.

But a reporter at The Australian, David Crowe, got what the paper called an "exclusive" by simply ignoring the senator's embargo, much to the senator's chagrin, then delivering a cartoon about "a hoaxer" being appointed to the senator's staff. As the headline inThe Australian put it: "Literary hoaxer signed up by LDP."

The woman portrayed as "a hoaxer" is a 42-year-old policy scholar who has left behind a legal career in Edinburgh because she believes in what Leyonhjelm is doing. And what Leyonhjelm is doing, as a cross-bencher in a deadlocked Senate, is trying to slow what he sees as the decline of individual freedom and economic health under the growing weight of government.

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I first met Dale and Leyonhjelm at a libertarian conference in Sydney earlier this year where both were delivering papers. Dale's presentation focused on social changes caused by technology, not expensive social engineering. Among many examples was a correlation between the removal of lead from petrol, paint and cosmetics and a decline in crime. Practising law, she saw government regulation and compulsion as frequently having both adverse and unintended consequences.

"I noticed the extent to which government regulations often had a malicious effect," she said.

"Unlike many lawyers, I do not think the solution to every problem is 'pass a law'. Law has limits."

She arrived at this belief via a circuitous path, having become famous at age 20, as Helen Demidenko, for a novel written when she was 19, The Hand that Signed the Paper. It won the Miles Franklin Award in 1995.

Read more:
David Leyonhjelm calls on the colourful Helen Dale to help fight for libertarianism