House of cards

The renewed Identity Card push will be covered in other blogs, by better minds than mine, but I do want to make a few observations. I think I'll actually enjoy watching the Opposition and the media - whose natural disposition, as social democrats, is to support an ID card - tying themselves in knots trying to criticize Howard for putting it back on the agenda. They're already at work, bashing Howard for introducing a measure he opposed 20 years ago, when the Hawke Labor government tried to bring in the Australia Card.

I'll also be interested to observe the puzzling amnesia which seems to prevail regarding the historical circumstance under which the Australia Card was finally scuttled. In the end, it was only sunk by the last-minute discovery of a crucial drafting error in the legislation, realized by a retired senior public servant, Ewart Smith, early one morning while he was being kept awake by the carolling of magpies. This flaw would have required the legislation to be re-drafted and re-submitted to Parliament. Modern-day commentators rarely mention this, and instead vaguely refer to the legislation being 'rejected'.

For the moment, I'll just wait and see. At least we've moved on from the days when a government minister - Dr. Neal Blewett - could advise a Labor Party conference that:

It is the interests of the community that should come before the individual right…we shouldn’t get too hung up on privacy because privacy, in many ways, is a bourgeois right that is very much associated with the right to private property.