John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed. The previous minister has already mentioned that the card would only be used to 40 per cent of its capacity and that it can store a wide range of additional information. We have heard the current minister suggest that his department is already in talks to explore opportunities for state involvement in the card’s roll out. Where will the use of the card stop? Rather than arrogantly taking a stick to the concerns of Australians, the Howard government must explain the reasons for and the limits of this Department of Human Services card.

The minister and his department have repeated that this card will combat fraud and that it is not a national ID card—indeed, this appears to be enshrined in the legislation. However, when Australians run the risk of having the finger of God follow them everywhere, they naturally speculate as to whether the scheme will remain limited for long. We all should be wary that this card does not become a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If the bill remains in its current form without Labor’s amendments, the scheme may be relatively easy to expand. I have grave concerns, which I will mention in further detail later, about the unique identifier proposed by the government and rejected by the task force into the access card headed by Professor Fels.

The minister’s claims that the card will be used to fight fraud and that it will not be an ID card may be a tactical move designed to lessen opposition to the scheme’s introduction, with the intent that it will be expanded later. There seems to be a sense of getting the infrastructure in place by selling a popular message now and worrying about the card’s unpopular uses later. The question my constituents are asking is whether the so-called benefits of this card to taxpayers outweigh the risk that the boundaries of the card will be expanded to their detriment at some point in the future. It is a question that the Howard government has done an appalling job of answering and it is question that no amount of Work Choices style advertising can conquer. Why has the government only released a heavily censored version of the KPMG business case study on the access card?

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