overview

This profile considers the Australia Card and the 2006 national government services Access Card, abandoned in December 2007.

It covers -

• the overview on this page
• identifiers - making sense of cards, registers and identifiers
• precursors - national registration and identifier schemes in Australia prior to 1986
• the 1980s Card - the emergence of the Australia Card scheme and the shape of support
• surrogates - opposition to the card, the 1988 federal Privacy Act and development of the Tax File Number (TFN) and other sectoral identifiers
• the 2006 scheme - an introduction to what has variously been hyped as the benign 'smart card' for access to government services and damned as the 'Australia Card Lite'
• claims - making sense of hyperbole and hysteria among ID card advocates and opponents
• costs - can a national ID card scheme be costed?
• models - recent developments overseas
• private - non-government use (and misuse) of the Access Card
• plastic - what will be on the card
• register - the Access Card Register and the registration process
• UHI - the Unique Health Identifier and Individual Health Identifier
• TFN, ABN and other identifiers - the public and private sectors already have your numbers?
• police - access by federal/state police forces and other law enforcement agencies
• attitudes - what do responses to the schemes say about Australian perceptions of privacy, responsibility and risk?
• futures - will we see a 'national identity card' in future?
• FAQs - questions about the 2007 government services Access Card
• Studies & reports - pointers to academic studies, government reports, industry papers and other writing about the 1980s Australia Card, national registration schemes, ubiquitous identifiers, security and health management systems
• landmarks - a detailed chronology of the Australia Card and developments since 1900

The profile supplements other resources on this site, including discussion of Privacy, Security & InfoCrime, Identity Theft and Forgery & Forensics.

It is complemented by a note identifying major government registers and personal data collections.

     making sense

People tell stories to make sense of the past, to impose an order on the presence and to shape the future. Stories are useful for reinforcing a group's identity and damning its opponents. It is thus unsurprising that much of the writing about the Australia Card and subsequent developments has taken the form of hero-tales.

One narrative has featured the emergence of an unprecedented peril, with a small band of prescient activists valiantly gaining the attention of the media and a sleepy community in what becomes a successful crusade to defeat opportunistic politicians, ambitious bureaucrats and greedy technology vendors who treat privacy as a low-value commodity.

In that tale the Australia Card is vanquished but the danger remains: vigilance is necessary if sinister identity cards and data-matching initiatives are not to rise from the grave.

A counter-narrative, which has not had the same acceptance by the mass media, featured the Australia Card as miracle-worker or hero. Proponents of the Card argued that it was an essentially benign and evolutionary initiative. It would address a plethora of evils such as tax and welfare fraud, usher in a new era of improved health service delivery and have collateral benefits such as reducing identity fraud in the private sector.

Although the initiative was defeated by unfounded suspicion - even hysteria, in some versions of the narrative - proponents claim that sound public policymaking will eventually triumph. That triumph will be incremental, with community acceptance of surrogates such as Tax File Number (TFN) identification, comprehensive health networks and cards that address security needs.

The following pages of this profile suggest that neither narrative is wholly convincing.

Rather than being unprecedented, the 1987 Australia Card, proposals in 2005 for an Australia Card II and development of an Australian government services Access Card (aka 'Australia Card Lite') are situated in a history of registration, personal identification and data collection within both the public and private sectors. Much of the rhetoric against the 1980s Card - and the vision of immeasurable benefits - was as american as apple pie, as was concentration by its critics on government rather than commercial data profiling.

Activism against the Card was important for establishment of the 1988 Privacy Act. However, that legislation reflected overseas developments: establishment was arguably a question of when rather than if.

Triumphalism in bureaucratic accounts of incremental adoption of the TFN, 100 Points identity verification under the Financial Transaction Reports Act 1988, Australian Business Number (ABN) and other schemes is also problematical.

It is unclear whether most benefits claimed for those schemes have indeed been achieved and whether recent identification initiatives on the 'electronic frontier' such as the 2004 Maritime Security Identification Card are in practice much more than placebos.

Demonisation of biometrics and RFIDs - an idee fixe afflicting some online policy fora - is inappropriate. However claims from some enthusiasts that once a smart healthcard is in place

we can add Medicare details, tax file number, driver's licence and police data, superannuation details, all aspects of social security – the basis of a truly multifunction card. It will rapidly become an apolitical issue, and it will not be a very difficult task to convince society on the question of civil liberty.

or that an Australia Card II will prevent terrorism are as romantic as the pronouncements of some info-anarchists. Official announcements about the 2006 Access Card have been disingenous and will impede community acceptance of identity card schemes.

From our perspective a salient feature has been the narrowness and self-serving (or even self-indulgent) nature of much of the debate, reflected in both the weakness of post-1988 privacy legislation and its application.

Schweik Action Wollongong for example lamented in 1995 that it was unfortunate that the Card was defeated

If the Australia Card had become law, almost certainly there would have been civil disobedience and an escalating struggle, which would have mobilised the population even more effectively in defence of privacy protection and civil liberties ...

One cannot, it seems, have too much struggle. Schweik continues that

The Australia Card was a potent symbol. At first it was a symbol of the government's attack on tax avoidance. But, due to the efforts of many individuals and groups, it became the symbol of government snooping into the lives of Australians. The campaign against the Australia Card was an amazing success, especially in bringing together people from different parts of the political spectrum. ...

Although the campaign was diverse, it never penetrated the government bureaucracies. Therefore, the same bureaucratic pressures for comparing computer databases remained. Furthermore, the campaign did not create a strong continuing organisational base. It was, perhaps, too successful too soon. When the symbol of what it opposed was removed, the campaign dissolved. The enhanced tax file number scheme was introduced without much controversy.

Activists, they suggest, should accordingly 'maintain the rage'.

A revisionist account would question the supposed potency of the symbol in the wider community (the ALP was for example re-elected after the Australia Card legislation provided a trigger for a Double Dissolution) and suggest the need for action regarding a federal Bill of Rights or other mechanism that addresses concerns about privacy protection and redress in both the public and private sectors.

     Australian identifiers in a global economy

From an international perspective the 1987 Australia Card (and subsequent developments) is of interest because it has been recurrently highlighted by overseas observers as an example of successful opposition to a national identity card.

Activists, vendors, journalists, government officials and politicians have listened to different accounts of the same events or adopted different interpretations.

Those conflicting versions include -

• Australia shows that Britain and other states should not (and need not) establish a national identity card
• abandonment of the Australia Card is not significant, as the Australian government has achieved many of the objectives (albeit at perhaps greater cost) on an incremental basis and can continue to do so through measures such as the 2006 government services 'access card'
• defeat of the Australia Card is an instance of 'Australian exceptionalism' akin to the unsuccessful referendum on establishment of a republic
• the Card was a victim of poor marketing, unlucky timing and "political jellyback" - it would have succeeded if wrapped in the flag and linked to the 'war against terror' (eg after the Bali Bombing)
• defeat of the Card was a manifestation of citizen wariness about government intrusiveness or a sign of political anomie
• defeat was instead a sign of the vitality of government, with citizens perceiving that they can influence public policy (whereas they are powerless to contain most private sector privacy dangers) and politicians appropriately responding to their calls.

     a national identity card?

The Howard government went to some pains to emphasise that the government services Access Card would not be "a national identity card".

That is correct if a 'national identity card' is taken to be the equivalent of an internal passport, a proof of indentity document issued to all citizens, that must be carried by all citizens and must be produced in dealings with agents of the state.

Government disavowals (including the Human Services Minister's bizarre claim that the Access Card will be "an anti-Identity Card") were, however, somewhat disingenuous.

Most Australians were to be enrolled in the national Access Card Register. The Card was likely to replace drivers licences as the de facto standard national proof of identity document in private sector transactions.

There would not be a single, central and comprehensive database covering all aspects of an individual's interaction with government. Irrespective of civil society concerns, such a database is not necessary, as use of a common identifier would underpin matching of information in databases maintained by the competing bureaucratic empires in Canberra. It would complement existing identifiers such as the TFN and ABN.

     an informed debate

Debate about the Australia Card was inhibited by polemic, opportunism, unwillingness to grapple with issues and incomprehension. Sadly, we did not see much more informed and reasoned debate in 2007.

One health sector contact lamented that

it's 1987 again ... technologists are defining and driving project development, ministers and their advisers are looking for and being given a basket of silver bullets, community advocates are waving the privacy version of the red flag, journalists are quoting sound bites without much understanding or just much sense and yet again we're all fixating on the bit of plastic rather than the boxes.

That is of concern given what appears to be

• under-recognition of privacy, functionality and cost challenges within the federal government and parts of the technology community regarding the Access Card
• a willingness to uncouple system development from meaningful consideration of policy objectives and regulatory needs.

It is also of concern because that card is likely to be a major step towards integration of disparate government databases.

The Australian government Access Card Consumer & Privacy Taskforce in its June 2006 discussion paper (PDF) indicated that consideration would be given to ways of preventing the card "evolving into Australia Card Mark II".

The paper commented that

Obtaining the card will be voluntary, and some people will not need to have a card. However, most Australians are eligible for Medicare, so even those who do not make regular use of Medicare services are likely to find that at some time in their lives - when they start a family, reach a certain age or degree of infirmity - they will need to access Medicare. To this extent, at least, the Taskforce recognises almost every Australian will need a card and as such will need to be registered.

As of December 2006 it was unclear whether national enrolment and data use would be embedded within strengthened public/private sector data protection legislation and practices. Government planning for the Card seemed entirely isolated from the Australian Law Reform Commission's major examination of the Australian privacy regimes.

In December 2007 the Rudd government announced that it would abandon the Access Card project, closing the the Office of the Access Card and shuttering its website.

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