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."

Good riddance.

[by Anonymous Coward]

I always did prefer anonymity.

Re:

[Trailwalker (648636)]

The real name for a national ID card is "internal passport." It will be used to control movement of individuals from one part of the country to another and to prevent undesirables from entering designated areas. Really handy for controlling voter demographics and keeping protesters away from events. Papieren Bitte!

Re:

[kestasjk (933987)]

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 verific

Re:

[thegrassyknowl (762218)]

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.

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 acco

Re:

[nomorecwrd (1193329)]

Maybe it'a a matter of country size, but here in Chile we implemented a national ID number decades ago, ONE number and one ID card for almost everything, my ID number is the same as my passport, same as my driver's licence, same as my Medicare, same as my social security, etc. Even private companies, like banks, insurance, telephone, cable, etc. identify you with this number. Easy! and very convenient. The number is given to the new born when registred. Our IRS (SII) tracks your taxes with this number

Ah, the irony

[ta bu shi da yu (687699)]

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.

Oh, and proof of this.

[ta bu shi da yu (687699)]

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2005/s1416572.htm [abc.net.au] is a transcript of what was said:

Bob Hawke: ... The Australia Card legislation, which my Government sees as essential to our continued campaign both to finally eliminate tax evasion and fraud in this country and also to the elimination of welfare cheating.
.
.
.
John Howard: When you realise that the assumption of the Australia Card legislation is that every Australian is a cheat, when you realise that it involves establishing a level of intrusion of a draconian kind into the day to day activities of many people and when people really read and understand the legislation, I believe that the support that some people feel, particularly in the ranks of the Government for this proposal, is going to disappear.

That was always the way with John Howard, slippery bastard. He said one thing and then did the other. Thoroughly untrustworthy. How he stayed in power so long, heavens only knows.

Re:Oh, and proof of this.

[syousef (465911)]

That was always the way with John Howard, slippery bastard. He said one thing and then did the other. Thoroughly untrustworthy. How he stayed in power so long, heavens only knows

Sadly the reason is that Australians were more interested in low interest rates on their home loans than in any kind of social justice. The real reason he's out is simply that interest rates started going up despite his assurances. Once people realized they weren't going to get their low interest rates (and that the new industrial relations laws were really going to hurt them) they threw him out.

He didn't just suddenly become a "slippery bastard". He always was one. He continually did backflips. He continually failed to support Australian interests in the international arena. He continually sided with big business and against unions which given the working class population is ridiculous.

I do hope Rudd's a better PM. He's a politician, so he's only going to go so far when his own neck is on the line, but it got so bad with Howard that almost any change is welcome.

Re:

[Nazlfrag (1035012)]

Let us pay tribute to a great man. [youtube.com]

Re:Oh, and proof of this.

[LordLucless (582312)]

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.

It was just a wedge politics stunt

[dbIII (701233)]

It was old fashioned wedge politics and not really meant to be implented seriously. Put up a thin end of the wedge policy and then make fun of the opposition for over reacting, making them look stupid and incompetant. Another classic piece of wedge politics this term was actually martial law "for the children" - sending the army into remote area with child abuse and removing many rights of the residents there, but the opposition did not take the bait and martial law was not really taken advantage of.

Good.

[fotbr (855184)]

A request for the rest of the world:

DO NOT COPY US. It will take years to undo the damage this administration has done to the US, and most of the damage will likely never be completely undone. Point and mock if you must, but PLEASE learn from our mistakes.

Re:Good.

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

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.

Re:

[fotbr (855184)]

My request still applies.

Re:

[Nomen Publicus (1150725)]

There are plenty of ways to provide identity to a pretty high level of confidence that do not require a huge centralised government database (which from recent evidence, will quickly leak all the data because governments seem to be clueless about data security.)

Re:governments seem to be clueless

[zmollusc (763634)]

Governments are clueless about most things. They don't need to worry about how or if things actually work, because as the ruling elite they can fix any problems that directly affect them with a phone call to one of their friends.
For example, if John Q Public needs a visa or a passport there are all sorts of hurdles to overcome, if a minister wants something similar for an employee they just ask a buddy in the relevant department to sort it out.
If the 'entire government database of everything' got leaked and

Re:Good.

[arivanov (12034)]

Actually not quite so.

There are plenty of ways to provide identity that do not require online access to a database. X509 at your service. Tried, tested, works, scales to the size of a population (most continental EU ID cards are actually smartcards wich hold an x509 cert). The only thing the ID reader needs to do is verify that the cert on the card is correct and show the information. This can be done by a sub-10$ mass produced device nowdays. It can also be completely standalone for less important apps and for the more important it needs to check for revoked certs via OCSP. It does not really need access to a centralised database. In fact it is better for an ID like this to hold your photo and your biometric because the verification is done through cryptographic integrity. If it holds them it does not need central database access in 99.99% of the cases.

Issuing the ID is a completely different ball game. There you need a database if you want to avoid identity fraud. The bigger, the nastier, the more comprehensive - the better. As a matter of fact such the databases already exist in most countries, they are reasonably well maintained and they work. These are the taxation system databases and all countries with successful ID systems use these as a primary source of information. A good example of database nations like this is any Scandinavian country and Bulgaria out of the ex-Soviet block.

There is a crucial difference here - the database is accessed only on issuing IDs and on updating/checking tax records. It is not accessed by every wannabie wanker in a small quango office who has declared himself the supreme owner of your identity. This is also the crucial difference between RealID, The UK ID, the Australian ID and working ID projects. These all aim to sneak a provision for tens of thousands of wankers to access your data and they do not try to build on the tax system data (which the tax system office rightfully denies them access to). This is also doomed to be abject failures long before they have even been started because they have to build a database for the whole country from scratch.

Re:

[swillden (191260)]

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.

This is true. I actually spent a couple weeks working on IBM's bid, mostly reviewing the security and privacy aspects of the design, so I got to understand the focus pretty well. The primary purposes of the card were to replace some 17 different government-issued ID cards with a single card, and to reduce benefit fraud. It was really about efficiency, not increasing government control. Not only that, the Howard government's RFP did take the privacy aspects pretty seriously -- they wanted strong guaran

Re:

[Z00L00K (682162)]

It's actually about time for an internationally recognized ID standard, national ID:s are sooooo last century...

The reason behind this? - Yes, if you are trying to do something on an international basis some kind of nationally recognized ID is required for some transactions - and if you have an ID card for one country it won't work in another. It's a business issue more than a privacy issue.

The ID is also to prove that you actually are the person you claim that you are. If you want real privacy you can

Re:

[mjwx (966435)]

It's actually about time for an internationally recognized ID standard

We have one, its called a passport, its issued by your nation of origin or current citizenship and is recognised the world over as proof of identity.

You do have other forms of useful internationally recognised ID's such as International drivers licenses which are issued in your nation of residence and allow you to drive in nations which co-operate (Australian IDL's are recognised in most countries, I'm not sure about US IDL's as you chaps

Re:

[Heir Of The Mess (939658)]

It's called a credit card, and look how secure that has been. Yes I know a passport also counts, but I was also making a point about security.

Re:Good.

[dbIII (701233)]

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.

Re:

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

Australia actually copied the system that California used to determine power distribution and pricing

Do you have any references for that?

My experience with power generation and distribution is that it's a state role and varies widely depending where you live.

Re:

[zsau (266209)]

The Kennet Liberal Government during the 1990s privatised power generation and distribution in Victoria. Originally the private distributors had a monopoly over different parts of the city or state, but now they all compete everywhere. (They use the same powerlines, you just pay different people.) I've never bothered myself to understand it, but I've heard as your PP said that it was modelled on the Californian system.

Re:

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

The Kennet Liberal Government during the 1990s privatised power generation and distribution in Victoria.

The Kennett Government privatised power in Victoria about the same time as California did, however they were the only state which went down that path. The Victorians were unable to learn from California because much of their privatisation predated California's.

There is a free market [nemmco.com.au] for electricity in the eastern states of Australia, but state owned power generators compete with private industry on a

Re:Good.

[rucs_hack (784150)]

but PLEASE learn from our mistakes.

The thing with the US is no matter how bad it gets, your culture has within it a tendancy to say 'screw you' to anyone that's in power, and throw them out. Either that or make things so tough that people quit.

I've been surprised at the no-cons apparent ability to just take over and start the conversion to a police state (facism?) though. Why there hasn't been soime sort of mass revolt is beyond me. You're apparently just sitting back and letting them re-institute a pro rich/powerful people nation.

I have a lot of respect for Americans, but as a country your starting to look a bit, well, stupid. Quite aside from the political situation, its what, 80% of your population beleive the earth is less than 10,000 years old? This does not fill me with confidence. I was considering paying for my son to spend his univeristy years in the state, now I have a doubt.

How long is this going to go on do you think?

Re:

[fotbr (855184)]

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)

Re:

[jcr (53032)]

Fill us in. What do the Germans have to put up with?

-jcr

Solving real-world problems?

[Nomen Publicus (1150725)]

It is interesting to see that not one western government that has claimed that ID cards are essential for the war against fraud, terrorism, crime and quite possibly global warming, has been able to present a viable case to the public.

As costs rise (the UK ID card scheme is now expected to cost between 10 and 20 BILLION pounds over 10 years) the government arguments become more and more vague and frantic rather than more solid and sensible.

ID cards seem to be more about giving huge IT contracts to the us

Re:

[Brian Gordon (987471)]

My jaw absolutely drops to see how horribly inefficient and corrupt corporations/the government/capitalism/EVERYTHING is for it to cost 20 billion pounds to just give everyone an ID card. Lock the guru in the closet and pay him $100 an hour for a solid week to build the entire system. Then run 50 million $0.01 ID cards off the printers and laminate them for $0.10 each. Holy crap, it's not that hard!

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting the costs of updating all systems to recognize the card. The card would probably not be used only as a substitute for driver's id, but also as an electronic ID for lots of different systems

More personal?

[fahrbot-bot (874524)]

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.

Hmmm..

• more personal-data: height, weight, hair & eye color
• more-personal data: penis size

Go here for more information

[nighty5 (615965)]

Check out the following for more in-depth information to this national ID system.

http://www.privacy.org.au/Campaigns/ID_cards/HSAC.html [privacy.org.au]

I am pleased to see Rudd taking responsibility and listening to Australians, something Howard refused to do which ultimately lead to his demise.

Nice, but watch out for those tasers

[vandan (151516)]

I'm not really surprised that Labor has pulled back from this. It's not exactly a popular move. And they did just get in thanks to a massive working-class movement that rose to overthrow their 'workchoices' industrial relations bullshit, so they know they can't smack people with this kind of thing at the moment.

But only a couple of minutes ago, I watched an ABC ( the public broadcaster in Australia ) news report on the push for widespread use of tasers in policing. It will be interesting to see if they cave

Making me proud to be an australian again

[mahju (160244)]

I'm and Aussie, lived overseas now for more than 5 years, and have lived with people's attitude of Australia sliding down with stuff like this, us back peddling out of the Kyoto agreement that we helped set up, not simply saying sorry for things we have done wrong, and taking asylum seekers not to civilised facilities in Australia, or straight back to where they came from, but rather to dump them on a legally convenient little island made of bird crap in the pacific for more than a year.

Since then Rudd has

Can't wait for this in the UK

[MadMidnightBomber (894759)]

Next election we can return a Labour government who will get rid of all this ID card silliness. Oh, wait...

Ob convict joke

[Bloke down the pub (861787)]

Can't we just tattoo or brand a number onto everyone, like we did with their grandfathers?

I don't get this

[Majin Bubu (455010)]

As an European, actually Italian, I don't really get this. I have been carrying my ID card (which is just a piece of stamped paper, by the way, and very cheap) since I was 15 or so, and it allows me to travel the whole EU (which is some 26 countries, by the way) without passport or visa. It certainly has no "police state" connotations in our culture.
I can understand why a RFID-card would be dangerous to privacy, but our cards have nothing like it. I, for one, would welcome a chipped card (not readable at a

Belgium has had it for ages

[Govannon (944336)]

In WWII the Germans introduced the mandatory ID card here in Belgium and in several other countries too. With the liberation of Belgium our government decided to keep the ID card as they thought is was a good idea.

A few years ago the "Eid" was introduced, which is an ID card with limited personal information (name, address & picture) digitally stored onto the chip. Till this day I am not aware of any mayor privacy rights being broken, or identities being stolen or whatnot. Mind you I am the typical p

The problem is not ID card themselves

[loopkin (267769)]

Most of Europe has ID cards, and nobody ever heard it's police states.
The thing is to emit cards, you need a database. So the card becomes a key to your entry in the ID database. So far, so good.
Now, if you use it also to pay your taxes, the same card has become a key to your tax records and earnings. The same if you use it for your medical insurance, and so on.
Here's the privacy breach: the "one card does all" scheme is really very bad, because it allows easily to retrieve personal data from different databases.

Take France. There is one of the most advanced computer-related privacy law (IT and Freedom Act):
- there is a "national" ID card, that is connected to nothing, except maybe the passports database
- there is a medical state insurance ID card (Vitale card), that is connected to nothing, except other medical insurances, and your record at your doctor's
- for the rest (taxes, ...), where you don't need an ID card, there aren't ID cards.
All the systems have different unique identification numbers ("national" ID card number, medical state insurance number, tax payer number, ...) and it is disallowed by the law (for anyone, including the state), to make a database that references all those id numbers.
So where's the problem there ? (except that it's for sure more expensive that having a "one card does all", but privacy has its price).

Do us a favour....

[mormop (415983)]

Can you get your man Rudd to phone Gordon Brown and talk some sense into him please. Either that or we'll do you a swap but I don't think you'd be that stupid.

Re:What exactly is your problem with ID cards?

[Zey (592528)]

What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?

Too convenient, less intrusive and far less paperwork for the bureaucrats to shuffle when compared to the existing 100 points of ID check [nsw.gov.au] ;-). Seriously though, a card with RFID deserved to be killed dead: highly dodgy for anyone to be able to scan your ID from a distance (and potentially steal it).

ID cards and government database sharing are useful to governments for clubbing individuals who've messed up their paperwork. An ID card which works in our favour by reducing the red tape and paperwork we must deal with by auto-filling in the data they already have... now that would be a winner.

So what do you want?

[bruce_the_loon (856617)]

An RFID card that can be read can fill in all that data for you, but is also intrusive. Can't have the best of both worlds.

I prefer the manual filling in of forms. Makes sure I get it right. Can you see the unwashed hippy behind the counter saying that the CARD says I'm a female lion trainer because some tit miscaptured the data? And refusing to change it because "the computer can't be wrong"

Given the magnitude of errors South Africa already comes up with, changing gender, ethnic group, wrong photo to wro

Re:

[Zey (592528)]

An RFID card that can be read can fill in all that data for you, but is also intrusive. Can't have the best of both worlds.

Of course you can. It's currently called the magnetic strip. Can't be read from a distance, just with a reader. Go high tech with the basic principle and you'll use NVRAM or a DVD-RW optical stripe. Go high tech/low tech and you can have the data written in highly miniaturized bar codes, too small for the naked eye but, again, visible to readers.

Government will know what it wants

Re:

[mrmeval (662166)]

http://www.cardtechnology.com/article.html?id=20061117ST7IODKW [cardtechnology.com]

Re:

[JohnBailey (1092697)]

Many countries have implemented national ID card schemes. In the US, where many people don't even have a passport and credentials required to get state drivers licenses (and other forms of state ID) vary widely. What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?

Where do you get the word "reliable" from?

Re:What exactly is your problem with ID cards?

[jimicus (737525)]

What exactly is the problem with having some reliable method of identifying a particular person?

I suspect you're trolling, since a similar question comes up every time the ID card debate is raised.

Nevertheless, I'll bite.

You're asking the wrong question. When a government wants something, the correct question is "what benefit does this offer to me as a citizen?" and measure it up against the costs. This is because government exists for the benefit of the citizens.

As soon as you start saying "I don't see why not", you're essentially accepting that you should do something for the benefit of the government. While this isn't in and of itself dangerous, it has a lot of potential to be. For instance, the UK government is currently making noises about ID cards - yet in the last month there have been no fewer than 3 major instances of personal data being lost by UK government departments. (Google for Revenue Child Benefit data loss, DVLA data loss and NHS data loss if you don't believe me).

Over 26 million records have gone missing and for most of those records there was more than enough data to carry out fraud. And we're supposed to trust this government with a single database which contains all of this and more?

Re:

[MichaelSmith (789609)]

The difference between Australia and most other countries is that Australians firmly believe that the Government works for them, not the other way around.

Re:What?

[Admiral Ag (829695)]

The usual answer is that people protect their privacy by revealing select information to different entities. For example, you'll tell your bank some stuff, the health system some other stuff, the welfare agency some other stuff, the stores where you have an account some other stuff and so on. In no case is there one entity that has all your personal information. This means two things. First, it means that if one of them is compromised (as has happened in Britain), the information about you that will be compromised is far from complete. Second, it means that any agency or company that has your personal information only has fragments of it and so has less power over you. Knowledge is power, and the ability to selectively reveal information about yourself to differing persons is necessary for the preservation of privacy.

There's a really good SF novel called "Shield" by Poul Anderson that explores this idea. Unlike a lot of SF novels, it actually has something profound to say.

Re:What?

[The Master Control P (655590)]

In short, when it comes to the government having information about you the best policy is "deny unless explicitly allowed." Now, if they just wanted to put a (secure) rfid chip in your driver's license that says the same thing the license says, fine.

But whenever this comes up it involves all of your identifying information being on one chip that can be read by any government agency's scanner. It also tends to involve a similar centralized database that's just begging to be abused. Remember: If supporters of a law, when confronted about possible abuses that it would permit, angrily deny that such will occur then you have discovered exactly what the law will be used for as soon and often as possible.