Page 1652 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 18 May 1994
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MR KAINE: There are some people who do. A lot of us do have a drivers licence and in the ACT it now has on it a photograph that can be used as proof of identity; but there are many people who do not have that. I suggest that at the other end of the age spectrum when people reach the later stages in life they very often do not have a drivers licence because they have no need for one, even if they have had one at other stages in their life. They do not have passports because they do not travel much, if at all. In any case, even if they did, like the rest of us they would not carry their passport around. We do not habitually carry our birth certificates around with us. There are many occasions when it is useful and necessary that you have some form of identification, and it has to be a form of identification that carries some authority with it. An identification card issued by a senior citizens group might be useful but it does not carry any authority. It does not say to the person who wants to have a look at it that the person has established their identity in order to get this document, whichever it is.
I happen to be one of the probably very few non-American citizens who have an American social security number. I have my card and I carry it with me to this day. The reason I have it is quite unusual because social security cards are not issued in the United States, except to American citizens or to people who have permanent resident status in the United States, and I have never enjoyed either of those statuses. I went to enrol in a postgraduate course at the University of Virginia on one occasion and they could not process my application because their whole student record was based on the social security number, and I did not have one. There was the unusual situation that the university went to the State Department and obtained a social security card on my behalf, and I had to give a written undertaking that I would never use it for anything else except to enrol in the University of Virginia. I still carry it. That is an interesting little anecdote. The fact is that in the United States almost the basic form of identification today is the American social security card. If you do not have one you have to produce some other form of identification. Even a drivers licence with a photograph on it is accepted as sort of secondary proof of evidence of who you are.
There is a big danger, of course, and I am sure that other people in this Assembly will talk about this at greater length than I want to. Mr Moore says, and I agree with him, that this card scheme should be voluntary. If you feel that you have a need you can go along to the Motor Registry and they will give you a card like a drivers licence. It has your photograph on it and it carries the imprimatur of the ACT Government that says, "This person has established their identity to our satisfaction and we vouch for the fact that this person is who he or she says he or she is". The problem with that is that it is only one further easy step for a government to say, "Now that we are doing this and 40 per cent of the population have these things, we will make it compulsory that everybody have one". We have been through that argument at the Federal level with the health card, with the identification card based on the tax file number and all of those things, and they were rejected on the grounds of privacy. Once you set up a national scheme with an individual identification it is very easy for government to start accumulating information from their files about that individual, whoever it is, and that is not considered to be acceptable.
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