The mean girl just got meaner.
Fresh from her strategic involvement in the low rent Brittany Higgins scam – I read that Higgins is now claiming that she is Indigenous, just to round things out – Labor Minister Katy Gallagher is now setting out to rollout a digital ID system for Australia.
To be operational by mid-2024. Yep, next year. Around the time that Daniel Andrews is planning to bake in a ban on the use of gas in new home builds. The Albanese Government is not content with shutting down free speech through its freshly announced ministry of truth bill, it wants to ensure that all Australians are to be surveilled by all governments across the land and by its corporate cronies as well.
The Epoch Times reports:
Australians could soon have their personal details stored in a centralised, economy-wide system that would bundle together their driver's licence, Medicare card, passport and other credentials.
The national digital ID was initially a plan of the former Coalition government that aimed to gather different licences and documentation under a government-run platform that external organisations can access to verify their customers' information.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher told the Australian Financial Review's Government Services Summit that the plan is due to be rolled out within a year.
She said the scheme has got cabinet approval, and the next stage will kick in by September, and she'd like to get it into the federal parliament this year.
Gallagher says, “it will be a bit contested”. I would hope so. But by whom? The Liberals, who (in the form of former NSW Minister Victor Dominello, a key member of Gladys’s cheer squad) were already marching down the digital ID road at pace? As were Dominello’s Canberra colleagues. The media? Our intrepid, independently minded scholars in the academy? Don’t make me laugh. The right-of-centre alt-media? One has hopes.
No, Gallagher herself anticipates the push-back will come from … conspiracy theorists!
The Finance Minister noted that there was already pushback against the scheme while criticising "theories" "coming out of COVID" that she characterised as "conspiracy theories about what government's trying to do."
Theories coming out of Covid? Really? What, that governments lied? That they foist dangerous, experimental all-but-compulsory drugs on unwilling people? That they locked whole populations down based on no science whatsoever? That they banned perfectly fit-for-re-purpose drugs that would have saved lives? That they covered up – and continue to cover up – excess deaths caused by the vaccines they made us take? That they ignored our constitutional rights and freedoms? These are not conspiracy theories, and, even if they were, they would be conspiracy theories proven to have been one hundred per cent on the money.
No, Ms Gallagher, just as you covered up and obfuscated over your up-to-the-armpits involvement with the Higgins-Sharaz-Wilkinson show, so now you are engaged in more lies, diversions and false narrative construction.
Whatever the source of any likely opposition, the Government’s free speech killing laws, if passed, will ensure that any opposition to digital ID will never be heard by the sheeple. The same sheeple who took with fervour to all the contact tracing technology rolled out during the plandemic. You could see, quite clearly, the sheer enthusiasm in the (masked) faces of those who strode with purpose towards the tracing devices set up out the front of shops and other servile institutions. They loved it all!
If you think of any cohort of people as consisting of a quadrant – enthusiastic adopters (about a quarter of people), about half in the middle who go along without much reflection, and the other quarter of refuseniks, dissidents and questioners, the digital ID will be loved by the first group (aka Branch Covidians) and most likely accepted without demur, without the remotest analytical thought, by the large middle.
As always, the proposed “reform” is sold dishonestly as benefitting consumers of government services. It is, on this view, all about making our lives more “convenient”. This has been the mantra of the tech sector to justify every innovation they have thought up since the dawn of the internet age. It mostly works. It is funny how new, apparently benign technologies just about always end up being used by bad actors to inflict grievous harm on the people who didn’t even blink when being “signed up”.
Digital ID is of strategic import to the ruling class. It is the missing link in the creation of social credit in Australia, in which wrong-thought will be punished and obsequious obedience rewarded. As The Epoch Times notes:
In April 2022, a petition called Stop The Digital Identity Legislation (Trusted Digital Identity Bill) gathered over 46,000 signatures.
The petition, which was published on the parliament's website, warned the national digital ID would be "a threat to every Australian's privacy and security" and risk becoming "a Western version of China's social credit scheme."
The petition raised questions about the use and sharing of citizens' personal or biometric information to third parties, the lack of clarity about how the private sector will use the scheme, the ability to gather detailed profiles of individual Australians, and potential misuse, fraud and discriminatory practices.
The risks are enormous, the convenience gains minimal. I mentioned the Liberal Party’s potential position on Labor’s bill. Chillingly, we should note from a Parliamentary Library research piece:
During the recent [2022] election campaign, some minor parties (for example Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the United Australia Party) advocated against proposed digital identity legislation. The Digital ID system was initiated by the Coalition Government in 2015 as a ‘safe, secure and convenient way to prove who you are every time you access government online services … entirely voluntary and controlled by you’. In October 2021 an exposure draft of a Trusted Digital Identity Bill 2021 was circulated, but the Bill was not introduced before Parliament was prorogued in April 2022. The Coalition’s 2022 election commitments included ‘expansion of the Digital Identity system’, but the Australian Labor Party did not announce a position on the System.
Initiated by the Coalition Government in 2015? Hmmm. Coincidentally, it was the same year and the same Government that gave us the Biosecurity Act. That would be the one that enabled the entire Covid dictatorship …
The aforementioned Victor Dominello, not content to have slithered away after the NSW election to reflect on his many political sins, is still out there spruiking the coming digital dystopia, at the same Financial Review conference at which Gallagher revealed her plans:
Former NSW digital minister Victor Dominello said success with the ID would be among the most important policy developments in the country.
Mr Dominello said success with the ID would address the growing concern among citizens about their privacy when dealing with companies and government agencies.
He said elsewhere in the world, where such digital IDs exist – such as Estonia – it gave citizens greater transparency of when any agencies were accessing their details, and reduced the dangers presented by data breaches.
Among the most important developments in the country? If so, important for the wrong reasons. Estonia? Let’s do it! Now, there is a country worth emulating.
Dominello is still lying. Still spinning. Still naïve nerd at best, compliant servant of Big Tech at worst. And we haven’t even mentioned so far the links between digital ID and the also proposed digital central bank controlled currencies, the other pillar needed to build the social credit system.
Paul Gregoire at Sydney Criminal Lawyers suggests there is hope, based on Australians’ nervousness about these things going back to Bob Hawke’s ill-fated Australia Card in the 1980s.
Both major parties in Australia have been keen to establish national identity schemes going back decades. However, the public has consistently rejected them, especially once the privacy-minded inform the broader constituency of their potential to undermine rights and enhance social control.
The go-to example of such a scheme is the Hawke government’s failed Australia Card: a proposed system that could identify every individual and corresponding information, via a rectangular piece of plastic.
Indeed, so controversial did the Australia Card become that it led to the dissolution of parliament and an early election, prior to its ultimate rejection.
But Gregoire also alerts us to a danger:
However, much of the public is unaware of this [proposal]. And while there’s been many attempts to establish such schemes that have all fallen over, it continues to be essential to campaign against these all-pervasive monitoring systems, otherwise the government could slide one in under the radar (emphasis added).
This is why distractions like the Ukraine War and the Voice are so handy for evil governments bent on crushing freedom. The real harmful stuff gets tip-toed in via the side door while few are watching. No one is marching in the streets demanding digital ID. No one. This is a top-down thing. A government-wants-it thing. A Canberra thing. A technocracy thing. Thought up by unelected bureaucrats in thrall to two things in life – technology and control. Anything that the State tries to sell you – don’t buy it.
Another danger is the symbiotic linkage between government and corporates in this Tower of Babel-like, empire building exercise. Dr Roger Clarke of the University of New South Wales and Xamax Consultancy, interviewed by Sydney Criminal Lawyers, explains:
During the last 15 years, NTIF (the Trusted National Identity Framework) and TDIF (the Trusted Digital Identity Framework) have been the buzzwords.
Those have been attempts by central government to achieve some kind of federated system, where the many players in the game, across nine jurisdictions and half-a-dozen industry sectors, can all cross-leverage one another’s infrastructure and personal data collections.
Note the use of words like “trusted”. The benign narrative. Mike Yeadon, who as a former executive at Pfizer, knows a little about corporatist threats to liberty, has said of the proposed digital ID:
If you sign up for digital ID, it’s all over.
The perpetrators NEED you to accept a digital ID, in order to install the ultimate control system.
It is that serious. Eternal vigilance is the order of the day. And beware the word “voluntary”. Roger Clarke again:
Schemes are always trumpeted as being voluntary at the beginning and are always designed on the assumption that they will become mandatory soon afterwards.
In the private sector, this technique is called “bait-and-switch”.
As Investopedia explains:
Bait and switch is a morally suspect sales tactic that lures customers in with specific claims about the quality or low prices on items that turn out to be unavailable in order to upsell them on a similar, pricier item. It is considered a form of retail sales fraud, though it takes place in other contexts.
Morally suspect, indeed. One final note, as per the estimable Paul Gregoire:
It [the Coalition’s ID scheme] was dressed up not as a loyalty thing, like the Australia Card was, but as a service. And it was devised by the same people that brought us Robodebt.
Ah, Robodebt. I’ve heard of that …
Paul Collits
30 July 2023
I am old enough to remember the lefties objecting to this sort of control. Control freaks rule over us from both sides. Heaven help us.
I’m on a pension, and tried to connect to the myGov app about 18 months ago. The app I had no longer worked. When I tried to download the app I was confronted by heaps of questions- everything from details on my original birth certificate to passport number licence number and on and on including facial recognition and or fingerprint. I elected not to download the app. It isn’t just the CBDC remember that meeting in Asia G 40 or something like that when Albo committed to handing all this information which includes Centrelink, Medicare and ATO over to the WHO for their pandemic treaty and international health regulations. Given the timeframe I’m talking about there must be a lot of IT newbies who signed up for the convenience. Like with Apple and Google wallets. Add to that when they rolled out my health records it was an opt out system that was then sold to an investment company called Iron Mountain. Then there’s Services Australia, a different name for Serco having control over a lot of our information. - Saudi’s I believe our governments have been selling our unfit for years.