Australia Card
Australia - 7/08/2005
The Australia Card is back on the agenda for discussion. Under this proposal, every Australian would receive an Identification Card with a unique number to identify who they are.
Civil Libertarians are claiming it would be an invasion of privacy - that it would be too easy for the Government to keep track of everyone.
My view comes as someone who works with information about people. I have been responsible for data cleansing and data matching.
When I was working for TAFE, we had a lot of "duplicate students". This was where a student who had previously studied at TAFE was issued a new student number in error. This usually occurred after some details about the student had changed, making it difficult to determine whether they had already been issued with a TAFE Student Number.
I was also asked to report on TAFE staff members who had undertaken courses at TAFE.
In both cases, I used a number of methods to identify when two different records could be for the same person. Of course that was only part of the process. Manual checks were then required to confirm whether or not it was the same person. For staff/student matching, I had to manually maintain a student/employee matching table.
If every person had a unique number that was provided and stored, it would have eliminated "duplicate students" and made matching two sets of data a breeze. There would be little doubt that two records were for the same person. (The only doubt would be the possibility of a data entry error.) Having an Australia Card would make life so much easier for people like me.
So what about privacy issues?
I honestly don’t know what the issue with privacy is. Perhaps it’s because there will be a central register of numbers. Perhaps it’s because it would make data matching so easy. I don’t see the argument with data matching. It can easily be performed now with just a few details such as name, date of birth and something like a phone number. If the government or a law enforcement agency wanted to do data matching, they could do it now – assuming they could legally obtain the data. The only people they couldn’t match are those who provide incorrect details or deliberately change certain information to avoid matching. In such situations, one has to ask, "What are they trying to hide?"
| Others' Views: Based on 14 votes |
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| Totally agree: | 
(57.1%) |
| Mostly agree: | 
(28.6%) |
| Mostly disagree: |
(0%) |
| Totally disagree: |
(14.3%) |