Since the 1980s, Australians have shifted from fighting against a national ID program to now accepting a digital ID system mandated by the government. The famous Aussie spirit of insubordination seems to have been replaced by compliance with government orders. The introduction of the Digital ID bills signifies a change in the attitude towards government control and surveillance. The shift from rejecting the Australia Card in the past to embracing the Digital ID now raises questions about individual freedom and government control in present-day Australia.
Is it too far-fetched to think that could happen in Australia?
The government says these concerns are absurd. The digital ID card is “voluntary” and will only link records to the person, not link them together, and records will be encrypted. It also claims that it will protect against cyber-attacks.
The voluntary aspect is laughable.
You may be able to access your Centrelink welfare benefits without it, but you will need to physically go down to the Centrelink office, even if you live in Oodnadatta—a remote outback town in South Australia—and if the office is in Perth, Western Australia.
And if you are a company director, you will need one, full-stop, because of the now-mandatory “director IDs” introduced by the Morrison government in 2021.
If “voluntary” doesn’t mean voluntary for all people and all activities, then it doesn’t mean voluntary at all.
Believe It or Not, the Slippery Slope Is Real
So why are we acquiescing to this scheme?
Perhaps it is because we’ve become too compliant—that the irreverent generation were the original immigrants and their sons and daughters, and now we are onto third, fourth, fifth generations and more, the spirit of adventure that brought people here has dissipated.
Or maybe it’s the case that the frog has been swimming in digital waters that have gradually risen in temperature.
First, we allowed social media companies to monetise us in return for the free use of their platforms, and then we allowed them to cross-reference our online activities to create profiles to then be used for other unrelated sites.
And how is that working out? They abuse their power.
We know that, come election time, they will be putting their thumbs on our scales and showing us material that they deem suitable, rather than allowing us to make our own decisions.
We also know that they work hand-in-glove with unscrupulous administrations to sell us lies like “safe and effective” and to suppress embarrassing facts, such as the high probability that viruses escape from laboratories more regularly than from pangolins in a market (particularly when the market didn’t have any pangolins for sale).
I don’t believe that governments are any more trustworthy than social media, especially if they are staffed with Bruce Lehrmanns and Brittany Higgins’s.
Democracy is meant to be government by the people, for the people. And Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil.”
But one seems to be converging on government by anyone but the people, and the other seems to have dropped the motto, maybe ashamed of their hypocrisy.
Either way, human institutions seem inexorably to head towards dissolution, so the less they know about you and can link together, the better.
So I’ll probably pass on my Digital ID.
Whoops, I’m a company director. Looks like they are closing in on me already.
Looks like I’ve already learned the true, government-approved, meaning of “voluntary.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
