overview

This page considers personal identification (eg passports, national identity cards and DNA registers).

It covers -

• introduction
• national identification before 1987
• the rise and fall of the Australia Card
• studies

Subsequent pages in this profile consider debate about the Australia Card and the future of national identification schemes in Australia.

     introduction

[under development]

     studies

Salient works are Graham Greenleaf's 1987 paper The Australia Card: towards a national surveillance system and 1988 paper Lessons from the Australia Card - deux ex machina?, Roger Clarke's Australia Card paper, Simon Davies' Big Brother: Australia's Growing Web of Surveillance (Sydney: Simon & Schuster 1992) and 1987 Privacy International note on Campaigns of Opposition to ID Card Schemes. Ewart Smith's The Australia Card: The Story of its Defeat (Melbourne: Sun Books 1989) is an account by a protagonist.

For the development of Medibank and Medicare see Richard Scotton's 2000 account Medibank: from conception to delivery and beyond and The Making of Medibank (Kensington: AHSA Books, UNSW 1993) with Christine Macdonald, Gough Whitlam's The Whitlam Government, 1972-1975 (Ringwood: Viking Penguin 1985) and successive parliamentary committee reports. For health benefits fraud see in particular Russell Smith's concise 1999 Electronic Medicare Fraud: Current & Future Risks (PDF). Recent health network and national identifier developments are highlighted in the National Electronic Health Records Taskforce 2000 report A Health Information Network for Australia (PDF) and HealthConnect Project Plan (PDF).








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