This note considers the scope and scale of Australian government registers about individuals.

It covers -

• introduction - many intersections with government involve the provision of information but much of that information remains in discrete silos
• citizenship - BDM registers, passports and electoral rolls
• revenue - the Tax File Number and other databases
• welfare, health and education services
• epidemiology and donors - CJD, immunisation, organ donor and other databases
• property - land, pet, firearm, vehicle and other ownership registers
• occupation and activity - certification of medical practitioners and other professionals, drivers licenses
• crimes and anxieties - fingerprint databases, sex offender registers and 'child worker' identification schemes

The page supplements discussion elsewhere on this site regarding privacy, security and the Australia Card.

     introduction

Debate in 1987 and 2005 about the Australia Card has recurrently featured claims that the Card

• is an unprecedented move to establish national registration of all citizens
• fundamentally erodes the patchwork of federal and state/territory legislation and industry codes at the heart of the Australian privacy regime
• is inconsistent with international privacy principles
• embodies a 'surveillance state' in which all activity will be recorded by government officials.

One perspective on such claims is to examine the patchwork of registers maintained by federal, state/territory and local government agencies or by nongovernment organisations on their behalf.

Those registers are significant because they have a mandatory basis.

Australians for example are required to notify the government of births and deaths, international travel involves a government-issued passport, owning/using particular types of property involves provision of information for a government database, some professions require formal certification, if you have a dog (or more than a certain number of chickens) you require a licence, if you have a federal government job your name is likely to be on an intelligence agency database and so forth.

That has led some skeptics to echo Scott McNealy in asserting that "your privacy is already gone, so get over it", provoking the rejoinder that citizens (and others) have a legitimate expectation that information provided for official purposes will be effectively safeguarded and not misused.

That expectation is reflected in the Privacy Act 1988 and in a range of other legislation, with the Census Act (CA) for example featuring prohibitions against release of 'identified' personal information; census data is typically published in an aggregate and de-identified form.

It is important to note that much information is not systematically provided to or accessed by other agencies. There are no detailed whole-of-government statistics about what information is collected, which entities access that information, how frequently they access the information, why they access it or its accuracy. Much appears to remain in discrete 'silos' that are not systematically data mined although information could be retrieved for law enforcement or other purposes on a request by request basis. Some registers, for example major epidemiological databases, are essentially statistical in nature: personal-level information is held offline.

Another perspective is to note the pervasiveness of commercial reference services, including businesses specialising in residential tenancies, those with a broader interest in financial services and those profiling consumer behaviour.

     citizenship

'Citizenship' registers include -

• births, deaths, marriages
• passports
• electoral rolls

Civil registration of births, adoptions, deaths, marriages and divorces (BDM) commenced in Australia in 1838. The various registers - discussed in more detail elsewhere on this site - now operate under state/territory legislation rather than federal law. There is no single federal BDM register, although one was proposed in 1987 as part of moves towards the Australia Card. Access to some information, notably regarding adoptions, and regimes for recognition of gender reassignment thus vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Registration does not provide a unique identification number.

The Passports Act 1938, discussed in more detail here, covers issue and use of Australian passports. It has resulted in a national database of those people who carry/have applied for an Australian passport. Data is shared by Australian and overseas government agencies.

The passports database is complemented by a range of travel databases. International carriers entering Australia from overseas for example must comply with obligations under the Migration Act 1958 and Migration Regulations 1994 regarding the identification of each aircraft/vessel and all persons on board. That data feeds the Advance Passenger Processing (APP) system, accessed by Australian and overseas agencies, and migration databases.

Official registration of eligible voters forms the basis of electoral rolls maintained by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and state agencies. Enrolment is compulsory for Commonwealth purposes for Australian citizens who are 18 years of age or over and who have lived at their current address for at least one month. The states and territories have joint roll agreements with the AEC: electors need complete only one form to enrol for federal, state/territory and local government elections.

The electoral rolls provide a 'weak identifier' that features name, date of birth and address rather than a unique identification number. That weakness is of course reduced when the information is combined with one or more public/private data sets such as HIC records, ATO records and commercial reference service databases. Since 1925 federal electoral enrolment has been compulsory for all Australian citizens over the statutory voting age. Federal agencies with special access to the electoral roll under the Electoral & Referendum Regulations 1940 include the Defence Department, Department of Employment & Workplace Relations, Australia Post, Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, Australian Crime Commission, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Centrelink and Director of Public Prosecutions.

     revenue

[under development]

• tax file number

    welfare, health and education services

[under development]

• medicare
• health service provider
• tertiary student

    epidemiology and donors

Australian epidemiological registers include de-identified and person-specific information.

• Australian Childhood Immunisation Register
• National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System
• National Centre for HIV Epidemiology & Clinical Research
• Australian National CJD Registry
• Human Pituitary Hormone Recipient Database

The Australian Childhood Immunisation Register (ACIR), established in 1996, covers almost all Australian children, with some 15,000 immunisation providers notifying over 3 million immunisations annually. Children under seven years of age and enrolled in Medicare are automatically listed on the Register.

The National Centre for HIV Epidemiology & Clinical Research collects data relating to HIV and AIDS notifications from the states and territories. That data is not de-identified to the same extent as other national epidemiological collections: experienced data analysts familiar with the centre's coding could potentially ascertain the identity of some individual data subjects.

The Australian National CJD Registry, established in 1993, provides a comprehensive epidemiological database on Bovine Spongiform Encephalopthy (BSE) and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). Data is coded to ensure the confidentiality of the patient's identity.

The Human Pituitary Hormone Recipient Database maintained by the federal Department of Health & Aging holds data relating to people who applied for or received treatment with human pituitary derived hormones, including address, treatment details, doctor details and information supplied as part of the Pituitary Hormone Recipient Survey conducted in 1995. As of 2004 the database holds around 3,000 records.

The Australian Organ Donor Register (AODR), administered by HIC on behalf of the federal Government, provides a national mechanism for people to formally record their consent (or objection) to becoming an organ and/or tissue donor. It is envisaged that the Register will ensure that consent/objection to donation can be verified on a 24/7 basis by authorised medical personnel anywhere in Australia. Participation is voluntary; as of July 2005 around 5.28 million people had supplied information for the Register.

    property

Registration of tangible property is of interest to government as both the basis of commercial activity and as a source of revenue, with state/territory and local governments for example gaining substantial funds from taxes on realestate values/transfers and from a plethora of licenses such as dog registration. Much of that registration involves identification of individuals.

Some databases include -

• land registers
• pet registers
• firearms registers
• vehicle registers

    occupation and activity

Certification of particular practitioners (eg of medical practitioners and lawyers by professional bodies on behalf of governments) and of activities (eg driver licencing) is similarly a foundation of civil society - individuals are authorised to perform particular roles and held responsible for that perfgormance - and a mechanism for raising revenue.

Registers include -

• law
• medicine
• maritime and air services cards
• driver licensing
• fishing

As official documents that incorporate a photograph (and are now held by over 50% of adult Australians) drivers licences have served as the de facto standard identity document in many private and public sector transactions.

Driver and vehicle registration is a state/territory rather than federal government responsibility, with state governments maintaining discrete driver license registers. There is thus no single integrated database or manual register covering all Australian drivers.

The scope for regulatory arbitrage led to implementation in 1999-2000 of a national driver licensing scheme under the auspices of the National Road Transport Commission, with uniform requirements for key licensing transactions such as licence issue, renewal, variation and suspension/cancellation. The scheme provides that people who reside continuously for over three months outside the state/territory in Australia in which the licence was issued should transfer the registration to the new jurisdiction.

Individual states are exploring development of smartcard systems, some of which would move beyond authentication to provide electronic access to government services.

    crimes and anxieties

[under development]

• criminal convictions
• fingerprints and other biometrics
• 'child workers'

The federal and state/territory spent conviction regimes are broadly similar, providing for expungement of many juvenile convictions and offences punished with under six months prison sentences (subject to a crime-free period).

There is no specific spent convictions legislation in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia. In New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia legislation provides that most offenders do not need to disclose the conviction - and the public records are sealed - after a specific period of time. Some discrimination is also prohibited.

More detailed information about the different 'spent convictions' regimes is featured elsewhere on this site.

Law enforcement agencies have moved towards sharing of biometric databases that encompass information from people who have been arrested and those who have merely undergone probity checks for particular positions. The Australian AFIS database contains around 2.6 million fingerprint records from individual State and Territory Police Agencies, including what are claimed to be records from all people arrested since 1941 and records from a range of official probity checks (eg police applicants for appointment as a police officer).

Exclusions to the spent convictions regimes reflect major crimes, notably those involving children, with law reform bodies grappling with concerns regarding employment of sex offenders (evident in suggestions for strengthening of the NSW Child Protection (Prohibited Employment) Act 1998 and proposals in Victoria for photo ID and registration under that state's Working With Children law).

Australian regimes for the registration of sex offenders have developed from state/territory criminal conviction recording arrangements. There is considerable variation across the jurisdictions and, as of 2005, no 'community notification' schemes. The Federal government CrimTrac agency operates a National Child Sex Offender System, including notification of overseas peers when convicted paedophiles report an intention to leave Australia, but it does not monitor movement of individual offenders within a state/territory as that is the responsibility of the respective Government. A non-public register of child sex offenders was for example established in New South Wales in 2001 under the Child Protection (Offenders Registration) Act 2000 and in Queensland in 1989 under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1945. Australian and overseas police and community notification schemes are explored in more detail elsewhere on this site.

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