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Australia Scraps National ID Plan
IPU = Imaginary Property Unicorn writes "The proposed Australian 'Access Card', a universal ID that would be required for any Australian wishing to use Medicare, Centrelink, the Child Support Agency, or Veterans' Affairs, has been scrapped by the incoming Rudd Labor Government. The card would have contained an RFID tag with the person's name, date of birth, gender, address, signature, card number, card expiration date, and Medicare number, but there were also provisions to add more personal data later on. It seems that Rudd Labor is not eager to copy the American REAL ID Act."
I distinctly remember that John Howard actively campaigned against the National ID Card with Bob Hawke was in power. Then he was for it. Bloody hypocrite, I'm so glad he's gone.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It wasn't really an ID card anyway. Most people who access Government services (usually some kind of welfare) need a card of some sort it identify themselves. For most Australians this means taking a Medicare card along to the doctor, and then to a Medicare office to get a rebate on the doctors fee.
For older people who access multiple services it would be better not to have to carry three of four cards around. There is nothing to stop the federal government from integrating their databases anyway. You don't need a common card for that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Check out the following for more in-depth information to this national ID system.
http://www.privacy.org.au/Campaigns/ID_cards/HSAC.html
I am pleased to see Rudd taking responsibility and listening to Australians, something Howard refused to do which ultimately lead to his demise.
Australia actually copied the system that California used to determine power distribution and pricing despite everyone with a clue pointing out that it was a train wreck in progress. Show us your worst and we will copy it.
For all non-Australians: At the moment here in Australia has a points system, where you need to provide a certain number of points of identification depending on importance. So you can get, say, 40 points from a passport, 40 points from a birth/citizenship certificate, 20 points from a drivers license, etc, and you need to provide 100 points to apply for a credit card, 50 points to get a Medicare refund, etc.
You need to identify yourself when you get Medicare refunds or pick up licenses, and this verification thing means that when you want to do this you need to carry around a bag of important documents to identify yourself. You don't even want to think about what would happen if you lost the bag with all your most important documents, you just better hold on fucking tight.
An ID card system would basically just clean this mess up. We live in the age of the digital database, we can centralize our data, it's more efficient for everyone, it's just common sense.
And I just don't see how this gives the government extra powers to spy on you. Even if you enter into the make believe world of Enemy of the State where the government will change your stuff around on a whim to destroy your life it's still hard to see how having a centralized ID system would help them. "They" can already track you with video cameras and credit card transaction lists. Why do people have a problem with this but no problem with having an IMEI number on their mobile phone?
This might make it easier for the government to stop you being able to identify yourself. So looking at a worst-case Enemy of the State scenario; they cancel your credit cards, steal your briefcase, post incriminating pictures of you and get you fired and kicked out of your home, frame you for murder, put bugs all over your body and wire tap your phone, hunt you down and force you into hiding, but now they can also stop you getting Medicare refunds if you didn't bring your passport with you!
I think this is just another of Rudd's cowardly policies of appeasing the loud minority of people who oppose this (the Tin-foil-hat lobby), rather than doing what's right.
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The reason he stayed in so long is that labour fell apart, and stayed fallen for most of his term. Their leadership changed every few years - and really, even Howard was better than Latham.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I agree that this mess of documents is messy, but once you have a Medicare card you don't need to carry around all that ID. Your driver's license and Medicare card should be enough for almost any medical care you need.
You generally carry enough ID around in your wallet/purse on a daily basis anyway. Usually you know when you're going to open a bank account or replace your Medicare card, etc.
Centralising data the way the government wanted to gives them much more power to spy on you. Currently your medical records are contained with your GP. Medicare just gets the type of consult rather than a complete detailed record. As I understand it the new scheme was trying to store the full record on a centralised computer. That's great if you're ever in an accident and can't pass on details of your regular GP(s) but other than that people can simply pass on the details of their previous care providers and the new one can get access to the medical record.
The Child support thing always shits me. They use your Australian tax file number to identify you. They print it in letters to you and your ex and pass it around to anyone who asks for information from them like it's your fucking name. Your TFN is kind of like your passport for the tax office. It's not the holy grail, but if someone who wants to fuck you up has it they can use it to access the tax office and pretend to be you or falsify tax documents to really mess you up. I can't see how a national ID card will help there. What really shits me is that a lot of this national ID card crap is to further strengthen the (already far too extensive) powers that the CSA has (for example, they can already ignore a court order on the grounds "we don't feel that it's beneficial to...").
Going to a national ID card will allow the government to better and easier centralise their tracking and profiling of you. Currently it's a little harder because they have to go digging around different sources to find it. I'd prefer to keep them digging for it because then they need to have a reason rather than profiling everyone automatically.
I drink to make other people interesting!
You obviously don't read very well, I pointed out that ALTHOUGH HIGH SCHOOL MIGHT BE STATE RESPONSIBILITY, HIGHER EDUCATION IS FEDERAL. Every report has shown that spending is down on this as well as other areas, you want to go around turning a blind eye to things, looking at your obviously precious Liberal party through your rose coloured glasses. Spending has not increased in comparison to the rest of the developed countries, this is another story, there are plenty but you obviously are only interested in seeing things that agree with you. Health is the same, just google it and read a bit, it might be enlightening for you. Oh government debt was around for a lot longer than Labor was in power, we had debt in the sixties, it actually started taking off in Fraser's era (Howard was Treasurer). I still maintain both are only interested in one thing - their own little club. You think Howard was great, good luck to you, our infrastructure is falling apart, there is no plan for the future of our country (apart for THE FUTURE FUND!! YIPPEEE), water resource management (gets a good run every election - remember last election when they were going to fix the Murray?), rail always gets a mention as well, all forgotten within a few months. These things are obviously not important to you because like your reading, your vision is selfish and self serving, blind to anything else.
By the way, why don't you check your facts before making rash statements about the National debt? We owe more than when Labor was in power The Age, Howard has shifted the debt to the public (by not providing what was previously provided) and people as ignorant as you believe they have fixed the debt problem, so long as we keep running a balance of trade deficit, we are heading for troubled times. Neither party has an answer for this.
BM3
If you visit a few of the better US universities -- especially those with good science & engineering programs -- you'll find little of the fundamentalist "science-is-bad-everything-we-need-to-know-is-in-this-book-right-here" mentality. Its not really as prevalent as the media makes it out to be. My experience has been that the West coast and the North East have less of that nonsense than other places, while the South and Midwest have more of it (the section referred to as the "Bible Belt" especially). Those are generalities, and there are exceptions, of course. Huntsville, AL has a decent engineering university, and is basically a city full of engineers. Rolla, MO is squarely in the middle of the bible belt, but because of the engineering university there is fairly sane (just don't go too far out of town). I'd suggest visiting a few schools with your son, deciding if you like the area, and explaining to your son that the Americans you'll find at engineering / science universities aren't *quite* as crazy as the media makes the typical American appear. Besides which, better than half of the students at most science & engineering universities are foreign students as well - predominantly from China, Japan, India, former soviet-bloc countries, and of course other countries as well, although not nearly as many.
There's been a mass revolt in public opinion of this administration, and many people voted for democrats for the first time in their lives last year to give us a democrat-controlled congress with the hopes that they'd move towards impeachment and would use congress' power to put the brakes on Bush's policies and power grabs. What they received in return was a democrat controlled congress that's happy to continue to act as a rubber-stamp while making a few speeches to give the appearance of resistance.
At this point, I think most people are a) too scared of the government* to do anything and b) holding out some hope that there's only a few months left and we'll have someone else in charge before too much more damage can be done.
*"Too scared of the government" doesn't mean an armed uprising, but merely people are beginning to watch what they say, lest they be deemed an "extremest" and marked as a "potential domestic terrorist", since there have been bills passed to study the "problem" of dissenting opinion (although its phrased "radical extremism" it is fairly clearly an attempt to find way to hang the "domestic terrorist" label on those that disagree with the government). To me, that is far more troubling than the guy with his hunting rifle being afraid the police or army would kick his ass in an armed revolt. I won't make any tinfoil-hat claims that the government is going to be sending random people to Guantanamo because of what they posted on the internet, but they can make things like air travel virtually impossible for people, based on no evidence that would hold up in our courts, and no chance of a day in court ever happening because they won't answer to anyone about why someone's on the no-fly list, all in the name of "national security". While I have no personal experience with, nor have I heard any first-hand accounts of, life in the former Soviet Union, the squelching of dissent and the fear of being seen as "out of line" sounds as if we're heading towards a situation very much like what I was told the former Soviet Union was like.
Actually, I think many European countries are very much "police states" compared to Australia or North America. In the supposedly liberal Netherlands, police can stop anyone for 'preventief fouilleren' (preventive search) without any probable cause; in practice this is mostly used to harrass ethnic minorities. Anyone over the age of 14 who is not carrying an ID card can be fined or arrested. One of the victims of the Schiphol fire was a Bulgarian tourist who was picked up for not carrying his passport while shopping (http://thevoiceforum.org/node/390.) The U.S. RealID act standardizes the look of state-issued cards and requires them all to contain certain information, but it doesn't require anyone to carry or present it at particular times.
/required/ by the EU Directive on Mandatory Retention of Telecommunications Data (http://epic.org/privacy/intl/data_retention.html). The system that guarantees the rights of U.S. citizens can occasionally be frustrating, particularly because it can take years for a case to work its way through the court system. But it's still miles ahead of those countries that don't even have a written constitution (United Kingdom), supreme court with a power of judicial review (Netherlands), or clear constitutional statements of individual liberty (Italy).
Similarly, the extension of telephone logs to the NSA by the major telephone companies without specific judicial warrants was a major scandal in America and ultimately held (by the Supreme Court of the United States, the ultimate arbiter) to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In Europe, the free extension of telephone and email data to law enforcement agencies is actually
The historical ability of European countries to resist fascism or populism is pretty checkered; I encourage you to pay a little more attention to the world around you.