Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

PM becomes a true believer on ID card

So the dreaded Identity Card is back on the agenda, put there by John Howard of all people.

Howard, of course, led the hysteria that killed off the proposal some 20 years ago when it was mooted by a Labor government. In 1984 the so-called Australia card, designed to catch tax and welfare cheats, was a sinister totalitarian device aimed at giving a remorseless government unfettered control over every detail of the lives of its hapless citizens. Now, designed to catch terrorists, it is a legitimate weapon in the hands of a caring, protective administration.

Or at least it might be; Howard, perhaps with his previous victory in mind, is playing things very cautiously and some of his colleagues have very serious reservations. ID cards are, as they all know, potential political suicide bombs. The very term conjures up pictures of bleak Eastern European regimes where people are stopped in the street by threatening men in black who demand to see their papers before dragging them off into indefinite incarceration, much as Australia treats asylum seekers in fact, but let's not go into that right now.

This is definitely not the image most people have of Australia, but that may be because they haven't given it a lot of thought. These days almost everyone has a Medicare card and a tax file number. Most people also have a driving licence and at least one credit card. Add to these passports, mortgage documents, superannuation membership, bank accounts, library cards, NRMA, frequent flyers, supermarket discounts and dog registration, not to mention the four-yearly census form, and there really isn't much little Johnny couldn't find out about you if he set his mind to it. A universal ID card would certainly simplify the packaging, but unless it included a retina scan or a DNA sample (fiendishly expensive and not always reliable) it wouldn't add a great deal to the sum of human knowledge.

And of course, for that very reason it wouldn't be much help in the so-called war on terror. Imported terrorists would, by definition, not carry it; locally grown ones would already be on a number of data bases, but the hard job of picking them out of the crowd would remain one for the police and intelligence services. The fact that they would now have shiny new ID cards - perfectly genuine ones - might help to identify those suicide bombers who were carrying them when they blew themselves up, but this is unlikely to be a big selling point with a suspicious public.

My guess is that the ID card will remain where it has reposed for the last generation, in the too hard basket. The benefits it could produce are strictly hypothetical but the political pain of introducing it is all too real.

Our Prime Minister has returned from yet another triumphant world tour, his pockets bulging with piss from George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and, last but not least, Rupert Murdoch.

Praise from the Dirty Digger elicited the following sub-literate slobber from our glorious leader: "When speaking of citizens of the planet, few people qualify so fulsomely for that description than Rupert Murdoch." Fulsomely indeed; if Howard ever gets round to looking the word up in a dictionary he may find it an apt description for the whole embarrassing exercise.

Murdoch's eulogy for Howard included the observation that relations between the United States and Australia were now closer than they have ever been, which in the narrow sense is probably true, and also the claim that when Howard came to power in 1996 they were at their lowest ebb, which is definitely not true - in fact the Hawke-Keating years, while by no means as grovelling as the Howard regime, produced few ripples. If Murdoch wants to go back to times when the alliance was seriously strained (or, as some might say, Australia most strongly asserted its independence) he needs to look at the early days of the government of Gough Whitlam, which he had vigorously (perhaps even fulsomely) backed.

But Murdoch is just the latest conservative to attempt a rewrite of history to minimise the achievements of Labor governments. The process started with Alexander Downer's preposterous assertion that Labor's wartime prime minister John Curtin was an isolationist and an appeaser while his own hero Robert Menzies was a patriot in the Churchill mould; the records, both official and unofficial, show the reverse to have been the case.

Then Howard chimed in with the claim that it was really the Libs, not Labor, who had ended both sectarian politics and the White Australia policy. In a technical sense he was correct, but again the record shows the Libs' initial moves on both fronts to have been both grudging and political; they were far more interested in using sectarianism, in particular, as a wedge against Labor than in a commitment to social justice. It was left to Whitlam to make the real breakthroughs. Even then sections of the Liberal party resisted to the end; Howard himself, it will be recalled, continued to rail against Asian immigration for another 15 years.

It's a bit like Howard's triumphant boast that real wages have increased faster under his government than they did under Hawke and Keating. Sure they have. And they would have increased faster still if he had not argued against any increase at all at every possible opportunity. And of course, once he gets his new industrial system into place, there'll be no more of that nonsense. As always, his actions speak louder than his words, if not quite as fulsomely.