Your ID? It's on the card

Recent history has shown how ineffectual such regimes are with data misuse scandals in the Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink, the NSW Road Traffic Authority and the Victorian Office of Police Integrity. The greater the opportunity for data misuse, the greater the temptation.

By creating a national identity register, with links to various other government databases, the proposed ID card will vastly increase such opportunities. Thus the incidence and seriousness of data misuse - and the consequent loss of privacy - will inevitably increase.

Finally, the Government's propaganda almost certainly oversells the benefits of its proposed ID card. For example, it says the single card will replace 17 existing cards. In fact, most people carry only one such card - the Medicare card - and few would carry more than two or three. Why not simply add some of the enhanced identification features of the new card to the existing ones? If the Government is so sure of the billions of dollars in savings from the card, why not release the KPMG report in full and permit independent scrutiny?

One thing is certain, though. The Government will not be dissuaded from its course of introducing the ID card. There is little point in seeking to engage it in debate over the precise form of its legislation. The campaign must look beyond that to ways of frustrating its implementation. That, by the way, is what stymied the last attempt to introduce a national ID card.