studies and reports

This page highlights studies regarding the Australia Card and national identifier and registration schemes in Australia.

It covers -

• introduction
• national registration and ubiquitous identification
• 1980s debate and the TFN
• Medibank, Medicare and health payment identifiers
• identifiers and the 'war on terror'

     introduction

[under development]

For context salient works are John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship & the State (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2000), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2001) edited by Jane Caplan & John Torpey and Mark Salter's Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder: Rienner 2003).

     national registration and ubiquitous identification

There have been no major academic studies of the evolution of Australian or New Zealand national registration schemes.

Cecil Rolph's Personal Identity (London: Michael Joseph 1957) is useful for the 1950 Willcock case and demise of the 1939 National Registration Act in England.

For the US see in particular Joseph Eaton's Card-Carrying Americans - Privacy, Security & the National ID Card Debate (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield 1996) and Robert Smith's Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy & Curiosity From Plymouth Rock to the Internet (Providence: Privacy Journal 2000), A National ID: A License to Live (Providence: Privacy Journal 2000) and 2002 Social Security Numbers: Uses & Abuses (PDF).

Two outstanding assessments are the US National Academies' 2002 report IDs – Not That Easy: Questions About Nationwide Identity Systems and 2003 report Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy.

     1980s debate and the TFN

Consistent with the paucity of major studies on the shaping of privacy legislation, policy, practice and community attitudes in Australia there are only a few works regarding the Australia Card.

The major items 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.

Most of the major federal parliamentary committee reports are unfortunately not online. They include -

• Report of the Joint Select Committee on an Australia Card, Commonwealth Parliament Joint Select Committee on an Australia Card - May 1986
• Report on Feasibility of a National ID Scheme: The Tax File Number, Commonwealth Parliament Senate Standing Committee on Legal & Constitutional Affairs - October 1988
• Numbers On The Run, report of the Inquiry into the Management of Tax File Numbers (Review of the ANAO audit report No 37 1998-99), Commonwealth Parliament House of Representatives Committee on Economics, Finance & Public Administration - August 2000
• User friendly, not abuser friendly, report of the inquiry into the integrity of the electoral roll by the Commonwealth Parliament Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters - April 2001
• Management and Integrity of Electronic Information in the
  Commonwealth, report by the Commonwealth Parliament Joint Committee of Public Accounts & Audit - 2004

Reports by Commonwealth and state agencies include -

• Privacy Issues & the Proposed National Identification Scheme - A Special Report, NSW Privacy Committee - March 1986
• Establishment and administration of a national identification scheme: the Australia Card program, Health Insurance Commission - August 1985
• Management of Tax File Numbers, Australian National Audit
  Office (ANAO) Report 37 1998/99
• Audit into the ATO's Administration of Australian Business Number Registrations, Australian National Audit Office Report 59 2002/3 - June 2003
• report on The cash economy under the New Tax System, Australian Taxation Office - September 2003

     Medibank, Medicare and health payment identifiers

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 in Australia 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).

     identifiers and the war on terror

[under development]

Government reports include -

• Inquiry into the Review of Aviation Security in Australia, report by the Joint Committee of Public Accounts & Audit - 2004
  
  
  
  
  
  
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