William Fotherby, Partner: Meredith Connell, Auckland
Bluey is a popular children’s Australian television show about a New Zealand sheepdog called MacKenzie, although a family of Blue Heeler dogs, Chilli (Mum), Bandit (Dad), Bingo, and Bluey, feature prominently. Such is its cultural capital that Chilli Heeler is now without question the Australian moral centre, a mantle passed to her by Meat and Livestock Australia.
Key themes of the show include family relationships, growing up, parenting, and the pursuit of fairness. This article examines Bluey’s philosophy regarding fairness and its implications for rules and justice.
The law makes a few appearances across the three seasons. In Unicorse (3:7), a sock puppet lawyer seeks to negotiate a resolution to a personal injury claim for his client, another truculent sock puppet called Unicorse, before ending up in a brawl with Unicorse himself. In Family Meeting (3:23), the Heelers act out a trial scene to determine whether Dad committed the offence of passing wind in Bluey’s face as he got out of bed (charge proved; sentenced to an hour of horsey rides).
But in searching for a jurisprudence, the prominent place to start seems like John Rawls, most famous for his 1971 A Theory of Justice, for whom justice was fairness. Much as Bluey meditates on the recipe for domestic tranquillity in a family with young children (so often at large), the focus for Rawls was on the well-ordered society: one that did not just do well on a utilitarian calculus but was interested in advancing the prosperity of all its members. A key philosophical question concerned the relationship between social and individual well-being. It was about the criteria used to make good choices about laws, institutions, and social arrangements.
Rawls is best known for the idea of choosing acceptable social principles by hypothesising a social contract made from behind a veil of ignorance: making rules without knowing how they would apply to you. He reasoned that people behind a veil of ignorance would choose civil liberty and toleration because they might find themselves part of a minority that could otherwise be predated. They would also choose economic equality, where decisions could produce uneven economic consequences, but only if they made everyone better off, because they would not know their earning potential. This latter principle is the famous difference principle.
The most compelling critique of Rawls came from Robert Nozick, particularly in his 1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick saw Rawls’ theory as an unjustified intrusion on individual rights, particularly to the extent it required the redistribution of wealth by the state (in the absence of some historical injustice). This critique seems to be reflected in “Born Yesterday” (3:6), in Bluey and Bingo’s spontaneous articulation of property principles to Bandit, echoing Nozick in saying that a just distribution of holdings arises from legitimate acquisition and voluntary transfer, irrespective of the resultant pattern of wealth:
Bluey: You can’t just take people’s food.
Bandit: Why?
Bluey: Cause it doesn’t belong to you.
Bandit: B-long?
Bingo: Yeah, like everyone’s stuff isn’t everyone’s, you know?
Bandit: Everyone?
Bluey: Look, just don’t take people’s food.
The tension is best explored in Pass the Parcel (3:14). Lucky’s Dad unilaterally reinstates the ’80s rules of Pass the Parcel: one prize in the middle, not a gift in every layer. We might understand it as a confrontation between an ‘entitlement theory’ of game outcomes (you get what the original, un-interfered-with rules of acquisition allow) and a more Rawlsian desire for distributive fairness (where the game is structured to ensure everyone gets a prize, minimising disappointment for the unlucky). This initially leads to tears and frustration from the children, particularly Bingo. And when the children get to choose their rules, a Rawlsian would expect the children to rebel against them. They do not. The episode ultimately champions the value of learning to lose gracefully and demonstrates that not every experience requires a guaranteed outcome. Nozick would approve; children, like citizens, must learn to navigate a world where outcomes are not always ‘fair’ by a patterned principle, but rather arise from just procedures.
Generally, though, as you would expect, Bluey’s jurisprudence skews far more towards leaving moral space for paternalism. The perils of libertarianism are laid out in The Pool (1:22), in which Bandit’s laissez-faire and minimal preparation lead to a disastrous trip to Uncle Stripe’s pool—a trip saved only by Chilli’s subsequent appearance with the many accessory safety items necessary to enjoy it as a family. In those episodes that focus on the relationship between Bluey and her younger sister, Bingo, we often see a consideration of the arbitrariness of assigning rights based on ‘first-ness’, in this case, being firstborn, and why sometimes intervention is required to ensure fair distribution (see Bin Night (2:45), for example).
In the episode that explicitly addresses fairness, Ice Cream (2:47), Bluey and Bingo’s ice creams melt as they both attempt to prevent the other from having a greater lick while swapping flavours; that is, the girls are introduced to the prisoner’s dilemma that a trustless society engenders. The point is made explicit in Promises (3:4), in which Chilli provides the chief rebuttal to Nozick’s Night-Watchman State:
Chilli: You can’t use promises to trick each other.
Bandit, Bluey: Ohh!
Chilli: The whole point of promises is to build trust. If there’s no trust, none of this is possible.
Chilli gestures widely, indicating all of their surroundings.
Bluey: What, none of the whole world?
…
Chilli: No libraries, no roads, no power lines.
Bingo: No power lines?!
Bluey: I’m not sure about that. I think we’d still have power lines.
Chilli: No, we wouldn’t.
A just society requires co-operation, and co-operation requires trust. The overall jurisprudential context is also relevant here. Australia’s most significant piece of jurisprudence, found in the Kerrigan decision and the argument preceding it, concerns the constitutional right to ‘just terms’ should the state compulsorily acquire a citizen’s property.
No surprise, then, is the importance Bluey affords to rule-following. In Shadowlands (1:5), Bluey cautions against changing the rules of a game to make it easier, even when they stand in the way of having cupcakes. As Bluey and her friends conclude, having completed their game, it is the rules that make the game fun. Fair rules, reasonably adhered to, seed prosperity. Rawls, incidentally, believed that baseball was ‘the best of all games’, among other things, because the rules were in ‘equilibrium’ and rarely needed adjustment (‘from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher’s mound just the right distance from home plate, etc.’). The account of his conversation on this point (with fellow legal scholar, Harry Kalven) suggests that he may have accepted many of the same arguments about best-ness applied to cricket. Cricket (3:47) makes this point clear, if there were any doubt, although it also suggests that in the Bluey universe, the underarm incident of 1981 never occurred. Jurisprudence aside, this episode is a work of fine art.
Bluey Jurisprudence Title Card Made with Text Studio
William Fotherby is a partner at the New Zealand law firm of Meredith Connell, specialising in litigation, investigation, and white-collar work. He was Called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2017.
