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John Howard and the Boiling Frog

Thursday, 27th April, 2006

Some people call it the boiling frog syndrome. Put a frog in to boiling water and it will try to jump straight out. Start it off in cold and gradually heat the water and the frog will rationalise that it is only a little bit warmer and stay put until the heat finally kills it.

In Britain they are calling it "function creep". Last October Charles Clarke, the home secretary, explicitly ruled using planned identity cards to store medical records saying "no medical details will be on the database". At the weekend, just three weeks after identity card legislation was finally passed after a lengthy dispute between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, Andy Burnham, a junior Home Office minister with responsibility for promoting ID cards, said there was an "impressive benefits case" for use of the cards by the National Health Service. While health information about individuals would not be visible on the cards themselves, said Mr Burnham, it would be kept on the central identity card database. The London Times reported that "pressure groups condemned the move as 'function creep', while the British Medical Association (BMA) said it was 'sceptical' of the benefits."

Yesterday in Australia Prime Minister John Howard announced that his Government has decided to proceed in principle with a new access card for health and welfare services. Not one of those nasty ID cards, mind you. A friendly "access card" to "enable people to obtain Government benefits in a straightforward, convenient and reliable way without having to re-register and repeat the same information each time they visit a different Government office."

And this certainly will not be a Big Brother making every one carry one. It will not even be compulsory to have one. A purely voluntary access card. A card with a photo on it for those people wanting to deal with the Commonwealth Government. Who will be? Well, every Medicare user. And who might they be? Well the PM did not go into details but the Australian Bureau of Statistics puts it this way :

In theory the Medicare population base is all Australian usual residents plus non-Australian residents granted temporary registration. In practice a variety of Australian usual residents who are eligible to use Medicare are unlikely to do so consistently because of access to alternative health services (for example Indigenous persons, defence force personnel, prisoners and persons eligible for Department of Veteran's Affairs Health Services). Conversely Medicare's population base is expected to exceed the ideal population base (i.e. all Australian usual residents) with regard to registrations relating to international visitors and former Australian usual residents who have died or are now permanently resident overseas but have not as yet been deleted from the register.

Which is a lengthy way of the ABS saying that Medicare is so close to covering everybody that it uses the Health Commission's figures to estimate the Australian population between censuses.

John Howard has made an art form over 10 years of hiding his true intentions. He has learned to avoid saying where he is going or why when it is inconvenient to tell the truth. The man who led the opposition to an ID card back in 1987 thus now disguises his change of heart by changing the name. But nothing he or any other minister says will change the reality that Australia is about to have what is for all intents and purposes a compulsory identity card system.

In Britain they are calling it "function creep" as the role of the ID card is expanded.