Australia card re-born?
There is a new push for an identity card in Australia. All previous attempts at introducing a perminent ’Australia card’ or similar have fallen over but with the growth and growth of government power it is not surprising that these ideas keep coming back like the walking undead.
This time around lawyer, libertarian and all-round good guy Tim Warner is taking up the fight against the government by starting the ‘Access Card No Way’ campaign, and the ALS supports his efforts.
Tim outlined his opposition to the re-named ‘Access Card’ in his speach to the Adam Smith club (pdf) in June this year. He points out that despite the supposed voluntary nature of the new card it will replace the current Medicare card (which is already used by 101% of our population) and would be required to receive all manner of benefits.
He goes on to outline the philosophical and practical problems with an identity card — the importance of privacy, potential for misuse & identity theft, its impotence in the fight against crime/terror, the costs of the scheme ($1-3b benefit, $15b costs), ballooning of entitlements, hiding government waste and function creep.
More information on this fight against government can be found at the Electronic Frontiers Australia and the Austrlian Privacy Foundation, and in the UK context at No 2 ID.
P.S. Merry Christmas & happy summer solstice 
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Tim contacted the LDP a few months back. He was planning some sort of public forum in Melbourne. I recommended he contact Sukrit and Steve.
I remember when I was a young kid that the Government tried to introduce this card. It was probably in the 1980′s or there abouts. My mother was completely against them and now so am I.
I agree that there are serious privacy and more importantly breach of privacy issues. We all know that technology no matter how snazzy can let us down. The Government’s line that it is completely voluntary reeks of spin. If one must have this card to access medicare as you state then offcourse we will all be forced to take up the card.
This Government has been given an excessive amount of power. I really question their motivation for introducing such cards. The next thing they will want to do is label us at birth. OK. Thats a bit out there but I think you get my drift.
Classic piece of graffiti on an overpass when I was a kid: you’ve already got an identity, you don’t need a card. This reeks of the standard government boondoggle, and if introduced would be very difficult to pull back. If this guy’s got a mailing list, put me on it.
The next thing they will want to do is label us at birth. OK. Thats a bit out there but I think you get my drift.
Just for you, Miss Politics.
That’s really, really disturbing, Yobbo.
Guys
I don’t thnk we’re thinking straight here. If we’re running a welfare state the idea of an information card isn’t all that bad. In fact it helps with efficiencies.
We already allow the banks to hold a lot of information with our debit and credit cards.
One’s medical history can be at a doctor’s finger tips with such a card.
Dismantle the welfare state and the reason for such a card becomes obsolete.
If medicare was optional then the card might make a bit more sence. The current medicare levy is about 1.5% depending on circumstances. However the medicare levy does not cover the cost of medicare funded services. In order to fully cover the cost of such services the levy would need to be set at something more like 8%.
The medicare levy should be increased to 8% with the regular levels of income tax cuts by 6.5% to compensate. Then anybody that does not want to be covered by medicare should be free to opt out of the service and get the medicare levy removed from their tax liability. And of course if you opt out of medicare you should be free to opt out of any associated identity card. As an interum measure I would tolerate the requirement that people take up a compulsory alternative form of medical insurance if they opt out of medicare.
My personal experience on the evil of mandatory identity cards is this. In refugee law, the commonest item of human rights abuses all over the world is being taken into custody by police and tortured during short-term incommunicado detention without charge. I know because I have had literally hundreds of cases from all over the world: Turkey, China, Sri Lanka, Syria, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, you name it.
Almost without exception, these states require their subjects to have an identity card, and it is then a short step to requiring that it be carried, or that police be able to stop a person and demand to see the card as a precondition of personal freedom.
The idea that Australia has some kind of natural or god-given freedom from this kind of excess and abuse is hubris. The reason we have such freedom as we have is precisely because the part of our culture’s liberal heritage that was not extinguished by socialism in the past century has prevented governments from having the power to do this sort of shit. There is not some kind of innate goodness to the Australian character that prevents Australian police from abusing their powers of arrest and detention. The people they abuse are and will be those who are most powerless to do something it: the classic socialist ‘victims’ such as poor people, illiterates or people with low literacy, Aborigines, immigrants, people with disabilities and so on.
I think these cards are evil, and the people who advocate them, no matter how well-intentioned they are, are advocating evil.
Remember Mises motto: ‘Do not give in to evil but proceed ever more strongly against it’.
If the best that can be said for this latest attempt by the state to register and license and control the population like dogs is that it helps in the administration of the welfare state, that is an argument against the welfare state, not against personal liberty.
I guess these cards are another step in the direction of branding new babies. Clearly, my comment was not as out there as I originally thought.
Thanks for that yobbo. You rendered me speechless. Something which is rather difficult to achieve.
If the best that can be said for this latest attempt by the state to register and license and control the population like dogs is that it helps in the administration of the welfare state, that is an argument against the welfare state, not against personal liberty.
Well said, Justin.
This wouldn’t bother me half as much if supporters weren’t now using terms like “terrorism” to justify it.
[...] against ID card Late last year I blogged about the Government’s latest attempts to re-introduce an ID card, under the friendly sounding name of “Access Card”. Concerns about the card lead to the [...]
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