People were falling over long before Newton wrote about gravity. A belief in the beneficial power of government action. Typically, they want government to do more, not less. It is not compassion. What distinguishes government is the legal use of coercion.
Democracy is about restraining use of legal coercion by putting some bounds on it.
It does not make it any less the legal use of coercion. If we are talking about expanding government we are talking about expanding the legal use of coercion. Which is precisely what has continued to happen. From 1990 to 1994, the Commonwealth Parliament passed as many pages of legislation as it did from 1901 to 1970. Apparently, rewriting the Social Security Act and passing the Native Title Act and the myriad other great public issues of the first half of the 90's took more legislative output than setting up the Commonwealth jurisdiction, WWI, the Great Depression and WWII combined.