Ihre Papieren, bitte.

So Ian Campbell puts down his crackpipe for just long enough to talk to a Senate Estimates Committee, and demonstrates why freebasing is bad.
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So, what precisely do you think it is about "actively hiding her identity" and "unable to force use of the card" that confused him, d'yer think? The part about Rau being a paranoid schizophrenic? The part about his own department's propaganda about the use of the card not being compulsory?

Or has he accidentally given us a glimpse into what Cabinet really wants out of this? If the Australia Card Not Compulsory At All Card was actually compulsory, and failure to produce was a crime, then -- hang on, that wouldn't work either, because she still wouldn't have carried her ear tag Card. But, ah! Then the department of Immigration and Expulsion could just do a search for her fingerprints. Like they should have anyway in the first place but didn't. *cough*.

The only way his statements make sense is if the Card was meant to be compulsory, universal, and freely searchable by any government department or authorised subcontractor. And even then, it doesn't make any sense. Or, the third alternative, if, as I said at the beginning, Senator Campbell has spent the last month or so on a crack binge.

The thing that has really shit me about the Australia Card is that the government expects us to not think about the consequences. The elephant in the room is that any subsequent government can trivially change the legislation: the hard part is collecting the data. Once that's done, we're fucked at a penstroke.

That's what the normally completely bugnuts Senator Bishop was talking about when she said that this thing failed the Nazi test. Had it existed, they would gleefully have used it to do what they did. As it was, they had to invent the technology, and that slowed them down enough for people to escape. Not enough people, alas, not nearly enough by many orders of magnitude, but it was a start.

The argument that this is needed to curtail fraud is a furphy. The amount of fraud won't be affected by this, the fraudsters will just find another way to continue as before: they always do. And anyway, is the amount of fraud comparable to the amount that will have to be spent on this monster? The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the whole thing is being designed from the start to be a universal identity card, to become compulsory as soon as they've got our details. (Labor, Liberal, irrelevant. It's a wet dream of Power, and whoever is in power.)

If RatBastard gets his way on this, start expecting "Ihre Papieren, bitte." Sooner or later, you'll be hearing it.