overview

This note considers the scope, scale and basis of official registers in Australia regarding individuals. It also highlights other data collection.

Some of those databases are maintained by government agencies. Others have an official basis but are maintained by non-government entities.

The note covers -

• BDM - registers of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, adoptions and wills
• citizenship - passports, naturalisation, electoral rolls and pecuniary interests databases
• ownership - land, vehicle, firearm, pet and other ownership or use registration
• professions - medicine, law, accounting and other professions
• trades - technical trades and occupations
• justice - criminal convictions, watch lists, fingerprint databases, security clearance and 'child worker' identification schemes
• health - epidemiology, immunisation, organ donor and other databases
• business - identifiers such as the ABN and TFN and bankruptcy registers
• services - pensions, education, mail and other services
• officials - government employees and the armed forces
• other - perceptions of the census and other mechanisms

The page supplements discussion elsewhere on this site regarding privacy, security and the Australia Card.

     orientation

Debate in 1987 and 2005 about the Australia Card has recurrently featured claims that the Card

• is an unprecedented move to establish national registration of all citizens
• fundamentally erodes the patchwork of federal and state/territory legislation and industry codes at the heart of the Australian privacy regime
• is inconsistent with international privacy principles
• embodies a 'surveillance state' in which all activity will be recorded by government officials.

One perspective on such claims is to examine the patchwork of databases (including formal registers) maintained by federal, state/territory and local government agencies or by nongovernment organisations on their behalf.

Those registers are significant because they have a mandatory basis.

Australians for example are required to notify the government of births and deaths, international travel involves a government-issued passport, owning/using particular types of property involves provision of information for a government database, some professions require formal certification, if you have a dog (or more than a certain number of chickens) you require a licence, if you have a federal government job your name is likely to be on an intelligence agency database and so forth.

That has led some skeptics to echo Scott McNealy in asserting that "your privacy is already gone, so get over it", provoking the rejoinder that citizens (and others) have a legitimate expectation that information provided for official purposes will be effectively safeguarded and not misused.

That expectation is reflected in the federal Privacy Act 1988 and in a range of other legislation, with the Census Act for example featuring prohibitions against release of 'identified' personal information; census data is typically published in an aggregate and de-identified form.

     what does government know?

What does government know about you?

As the following pages demonstrate, the answer is quite a lot ... more than many people imagine.

Public sector agencies (at the federal, state/territory and local government levels) collect a broad range of information. Collection of some of that information has a mandatory basis: individuals and other entities essentially do not have a choice if they wish to access some services or engage in particular activities.

However, although government knows a lot about you it often does not know very well.

Collection is not the same as understanding. The existence of collections is not the same as ease of access. It is also no guarantee that information is accurate (at the time of collection or afterwards) or complete.

It is important to note that much information is not systematically provided to or accessed by other agencies. There are no detailed whole-of-government statistics about what information is collected, which entities access that information, how frequently they access the information, why they access it or its accuracy.

Much appears to remain in discrete 'silos' that are not systematically data mined although information could be retrieved for law enforcement or other purposes on a request by request basis. Some registers, for example major epidemiological databases, are essentially statistical in nature: personal-level information is held offline.

Common identifiers such as the Tax File Number (TFN) facilitate aggregation of information about particular individuals or other entities that is found in different data collections. Anxieties about misuse of such identifiers, including the invisibility of much data matching by government and appropriation by private sector bodies, lie at the heart of much criticism of Australia Card schemes.

     registration outside the public sector

Another perspective is to note the pervasiveness of commercial referencing services, including businesses specialising in residential tenancies, those with a broader interest in financial services and those profiling consumer behaviour.

This site features a detailed note on such referencing, complementing this note.

     studies

There is no comprehensive readily-accessible academic study that itemises all the registers/databases and provides a detailed analysis of associated legislation.

One reason for development of this note, which should be regarded as an ongoing work in progress rather than a definitive statement, is our interest in scoping what information government collects and making sense of community awareness of that collection.

     the following pages

The following pages of this note highlight particular registers, databases and data collection rationales. Over time we will be adding information about the custodians/creators of that information and about the legislation that provides for maintenance of the registers.

     next page  (BDM)