In the early 1980s, there was considerable publicity and concern in Australia about people and companies who evaded tax. In 1985 at a national meeting to discuss tax, a few individuals suggested the use of identity cards to reduce tax avoidance. Senior bureaucrats in several government departments saw this as an opportunity to achieve an objective they had had in mind for some time.

The idea was that every Australian would have a unique identification number. It would be used for taxation, national health insurance, welfare payments and potentially many other purposes. The Health Insurance Commission was to administer the system because it had the most developed computing expertise. Data on everyone in the country would be held in a central databank. As well, it was proposed that every Australian would have an identification card, which the government called the "Australia Card."

After being quickly developed by a committee with members from several government departments, the scheme was backed by the government. At first it was included among several other taxation measures and did not receive much attention. Because it was portrayed as a means to stop cheating on tax and welfare payments, most people supported it initially.

A few individuals made significant criticisms. For example, prominent judge Michael Kirby warned about the implications for civil liberties. Information systems academic Roger Clarke wrote several critical assessments, pointing out the possibility for invasion of privacy due to the collation of data about individuals from different aspects of their lives. He pointed out that an identity number system would have little impact on tax revenues or cheating on welfare payments. Sophisticated criminals could easily beat the system. What the identity card system would do best of all was increase the power of government bureaucrats over the lives of ordinary Australians.

The Australian Labor Party held government federally. Although Labor had a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, in the Senate it did not. The government was determined to press ahead with the Australia Card, but the opposition parties in the Senate used their power to set up a parliamentary committee to investigate the proposal. The majority of the committee opposed the Card, but the government pressed ahead anyway on the basis of a minority report. The Australia Card bill was twice passed in the House and twice rejected in the Senate, at which time one Labor Senator voted against the legislation and resigned from the Labor Party. The Labor government used the repeated rejection in the Senate as the basis for calling a general election in 1987, which it won. This meant it could call a joint meeting of the House and Senate and pass the legislation.

While the government pressed ahead resolutely, popular opinion moved against the Australia Card. Civil liberties groups took strong stands against it, and civil liberties arguments became more and more prominent. Members of the public began writing letters. Newspapers were inundated with letters. It was by far the biggest issue in the country, with 80 to 90 percent of correspondents opposed to the card. There were numerous petitions to parliament against the scheme, with a greater total number of signatories on this issue than any other in Australia's history. The media, which at first had generally favoured the card, gradually became more opposed.

In September 1987, as the government moved towards passing the Australia Card Bill, popular opposition escalated. The Australian Privacy Foundation was set up. Among its founding members were prominent personalities such as pop star Peter Garrett and cricketer Greg Chappell. There were rallies in several parts of the country, bringing together unlikely allies, including civil libertarians, left-wing trade unionists and conservative bankers and industrialists. There were demonstrations in several cities. In Western Australia, an anti-card rally attracted tens of thousands, the largest number since protests against the Vietnam war. Many individuals, in their letters to newspapers, announced their intention to refuse to cooperate with the scheme.

All this pressure began to cause cracks in the government's ranks. Many Labor parliamentarians privately pressured the Prime Minister to withdraw the legislation.

Ewart Smith was a retired public servant (government bureaucrat) with long experience in the law and legislation. The mounting concerns stimulated him to investigate and then to join the chorus of opposition by writing letters. He also closely inspected the proposed legislation and found a technical feature that no one else had noticed. Even if the legislation was passed, the Act's commencement date had to be passed separately, and the government would have been unable to get it through the Senate. Smith pointed this out to members of the parliamentary opposition, who raised the matter in parliament to the disbelief of the government. Smith's assessment was supported by other legal experts. The government took the opportunity to withdraw the legislation. It was never reintroduced.

Around the country, many people had tremendous satisfaction and relief at the defeat of the Australia Card proposal. Ewart Smith was hailed as a hero. On the other hand, it was perhaps unfortunate that the proposal was defeated in this way. If the Australia Card had become law, almost certainly there would have been civil disobedience and an escalating struggle, which would have mobilised the population even more effectively in defence of privacy protection and civil liberties.

What it couldn't achieve directly, the government achieved indirectly. In 1988, the government expanded the uses of the existing tax file number system. Every taxpayer is assigned a unique number. People are not obliged to state the number to employers, but if they don't, tax is withheld at the highest rate -- a strong incentive to provide the number. When introducing the enhanced tax file number scheme, the government promised that it would be used only for taxation purposes. Yet within two years it was being used for nearly every payment of pensions or benefits by any Australian government agency, with the sort of meshing of computer databases that critics of the Australia card had warned about. In other words, the tax file number is really an identity number. The measures that have been implemented go a long way towards achieving what the senior bureaucrats set out to do, except that there is no actual card.

The Australia Card was a potent symbol. At first it was a symbol of the government's attack on tax avoidance. But, due to the efforts of many individuals and groups, it became the symbol of government snooping into the lives of Australians. The campaign against the Australia Card was an amazing success, especially in bringing together people from different parts of the political spectrum. The campaign also attracted a range of experts, including Ewart Smith.

Although the campaign was diverse, it never penetrated the government bureaucracies. Therefore, the same bureaucratic pressures for comparing computer databases remained. Furthermore, the campaign did not create a strong continuing organisational base. It was, perhaps, too successful too soon. When the symbol of what it opposed was removed, the campaign dissolved. The enhanced tax file number scheme was introduced without much controversy.

References

Roger Clarke, "Just another piece of plastic for your wallet: the 'Australia Card' scheme," Prometheus, Vol. 5, No. 1, June 1987, pp. 29-45.

Roger Clarke, "The resistible rise of the Australian national personal data system," Software Law Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 1992.

Simon Davies, Big Brother: Australia's Growing Web of Surveillance (Sydney: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 30-47.

P. Graham, "A case study of computers in public administration: the Australia Card," Australian Computer Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2, May 1990, pp. 51-58.

Ewart Smith, The Australia Card: The Story of its Defeat (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1989).

(We thank Roger Clarke for helpful comments. This account is drawn from a larger study, Challenging Bureaucratic Elites, currently being considered by publishers.)