It should be pointed out that the Australia Card of the late 1980s was proposed by the Labor Govt and opposed by the Liberals (who blocked it in the Senate twice until the policy was abandoned in '89).

It's not a matter of Liberal bad, Labor good. Australia Card II was proposed by the Liberals and (kind of) opposed by Labor. Australia Card I was linked to the rollback of the welfare state and the abandonment social democracy, Australia Card II was part of the security pantomime the Liberals were putting on.

I don't think the article linked is correct at all. There was little opposition to Australia Card II, particularly because it was eclipsed by the Liberal's fucking satanic industrial relations policy. At a guess, I'd say it is more to do with the current government's need to reign in spending in order to keep interest rates at politically managable levels.

There's not much Americans opposing the REAL ID regime can take from that, as the outcome in Australia was down to local issues. Maybe the author is confusing it with the massive and wide opposition to Australia Card I?

I'm really surprised that people can dismiss privacy concerns as paranoia. Why should cops automatically have access to my medical data? Who benefits from that?

National ID systems are notoriously bad at their assigned task. The technology to keep this data safe just doesn't exist. If you don't believe me, just look at the way Tax File Numbers (TFNs)currently work in Australia (TFNs are the de facto national ID system). As the technology and infrastructure are inevitably outsourced to nongovernmental bodies, the amount of people needed to keep the technology secret will expand. For example, 20 000 external organisations in Australia were required to sign confidentiality agreements to keep the algorithm for checking TFNs secret: this algorithm is now common knowledge, making TFNs useless.

It's a lot of pointless risk and privacy sacrifice to make your wallet less cluttered. I'm not sure those who supported the card in these comments are actually aware of the info that was proposed to go on the card, either.