It wasn't from their drunkenness or Kathmandu backpacks.

It was because they were the only ones wearing bike helmets.

In the university town where I was, almost everyone used a bike to get around. And almost everyone did so without a helmet, unless they were Australian.

Despite the fact the United Kingdom had no laws requiring it, and teasing from riders of other nationalities (who regarded helmets as dorky and a bit repressed), the Aussies continued to wear their cycle hats.

But while the idea that you wore a helmet to protect against brain injury was uncontroversial for Australians abroad, the same cannot be said for the Senate's economics committee, which is conducting an inquiry into "personal choice and community impacts". In layman's terms, this means laws that restrict individual freedoms for your "own good" and add up to what Libertarian Senator David Leyonhjelm calls the nanny state.

Along with bike helmets, the inquiry is also looking at the sale of booze, smokes and other drugs, film and video game classifications and gun ownership. According to Leyonhjelm "harming yourself is your business, but it's not the government's business".

Citizens are certainly enthused about chipping in. So far, more than 430 submissions have been received (compared to 124 for an inquiry on corporate tax avoidance and nine for cutting young people's access to the dole).

One shooting lover has bemoaned the laws that John Howard introduced restricting gun usage, after the Port Arthur massacre.

"A love or fascination for firearms is not itself any danger any more than the love of cars increases the risk of drunk driving," the submitter says. "Many Australians are denied the opportunity to enjoy who they really are."

Others have complained that people are only fined for driving too fast (and not too slowly), while cigarettes are taxed but not unhealthy foods.

And the submissions list is full of angry cyclists who feel that mandatory helmets do everything from creating a "climate of fear" around cycling to causing people to lose the motivation to ride, to generating embarrassment if you bump into friends.

As one teenage girl wrote, "it is basically impossible to look fashionable whilst wearing a helmet".

The Senate's nanny state inquiry will not have the power to change laws in and of itself. Like other committees, it will hand down recommendations that can be totally ignored by government. But it does have the capacity to stir up furious debate along the way (particularly as it is not due to report until next June).

This was in full evidence this week when at a hearing on Friday, inner-city Sydney residents argued that lock out laws must remain because they stopped "social and criminal mayhem" on weekend nights in Kings Cross, while other advocates claimed discrimination against young people and a "lack of nuance".

Through it all runs the Leyonhjelm/libertarian argument that adults should be able to make their own decisions and take adult responsibility for them. If you're not hurting anyone else, why should the government get to tell you what to do?

It's certainly an interesting time for the-government-should-back-the-hell-out-of-our-lives theme to be revived. Because it comes as there's more and more pressure from other quarters for it to back the hell in.

The horrifying attacks in Paris this time last week have not prompted reflection from citizens around the world about what more they should be doing to keep their societies safe and violence-free.

Just as in the wake of the Sydney siege or the Parramatta shooting, Australians didn't focus on what they should be doing to keep an eye on at-risk youths or to involve marginalised groups in society to stop something similar happening ever again.

Individuals grieve and create beautiful, heartbreaking monuments. But the consensus is, it's up to the state to act - and in some instances, take responsibility.

And so this week, the "what next?" focus immediately and naturally shifted to what governments should be doing to step up efforts against terrorism.

Hence, calls for increasing military action against Daesh in the Middle East and the intense interest in what world leaders had to say to each other about Paris at the G20 and APEC. Hence questions about whether Australia's national terror threat rating was adequate. Hence, what is predicted to be the straightforward passage of the Coalition's citizenship-stripping bill when Parliament resumes next week.

Our great expectations are not just limited to national security, either. We also expect the government to be there when anything else goes wrong or awry.

It can be as big as a global refugee crisis, as medium sized as a company going bust and workers losing their jobs or as small as Australians getting caught with drugs overseas.

We want action when young men are punched and killed on a night out and we want action when women are the targets of violence in their own homes.

And we get mighty impatient and seriously unimpressed very quickly if the government doesn't appear right away to stop or ameliorate whatever hideous thing has occurred.

This is not to suggest that total government intervention into the lives of its citizens is in order (this is not 1984, kids).

But whenever the call comes for the government to stay away, it's worth remembering that they will be the first to get the SOS call - and the blame - if anything goes wrong as a result.