ID?

I have a few thoughts rolling around in the back of my head about the proposed national ID card thingy. Now, I'm a little short on hard facts for this one: I don't know who's proposing it or how it'll work. But...
I figure i'll blog about it because andrew did.

my initial response to the idea is 'no thanks'. i mean, 1) how could you possibly implement this thing? 2) what possible use could it serve? and 3) what will be done to manage the scarier invasions-of-privacy stuff?

the latter point worries me, though not in a hugely massive way. i mean, the richer you are, the more 'privacy' you have, basically. a case in point: when i was on the dole (way back there in the 90s when we called it the dole and before dole diaries were invented), i could be visited at home by any dole person whenever they liked and there was nothing i could do about it. further, they paid attention to who you lived with: if you had been living with the same person of the opposite sex for a while (esp if they were on the dole or a gov payment too), you could be home-visited by the DSS (or Centrelink, whatever it was called then) so they could have a poke about in your house to see if you were actually 'cohabiting' (ie de factoing) with this person.
talk about invasions of privacy.
they do this because they'll take some money off your payments if you are de factoing, because - they reckon - two people de factoing can live on less money than two people living together who aren't de factoing. i know, it's kind of bullshit logic: why would i suddenly start eating less food, using less electricity, using less gas just because i was actually rooting my housemate? i can see how you might pay less on rent (if you happened to live in a share house where the rent was paid by room - which hasn't been the case in any of the houses i've lived in in the > 20 years i've been share housing), but otherwise... a neat example of Howard government logic. may it rot in hell.

so i'm thinking: if you've been on the dole or some other government payment for ages, if you've been in the health care system as a consumer for ages (think mental health, long term illness, etc), you're probably kind of clued into the fact that privacy is pretty much a luxery of the rich.

and now i'm thinking: will john howard have to get an ID car?

having just finished catching up on some over due tax returns, i'm also thinking 'does howard do his own taxes?' to which i respond 'of course not! he probably doesn't even pay tax!' And then i think 'so john and i finally have something in common'. if only our commonality was something to do with us both being employed, rather than our both getting $$ from the state. and i'd really rather it was more to do with us earning an income that was some how a little less disparate in scale: i'm sure john gets a little more than $16 000 a year.