THE PRESS TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1987. Beware the State

Press, 22 September 1987, Page 12

THE PRESS TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1987. Beware the State

The Prime Minister, Mr Lange, is said to be backing away from his support for identification cards for New Zealanders. He has not yet retreated far enough. His comments on Australian television on Sunday in favour of a national identity card were a blunder. Mr Lange obviously realises this and seeks to limit the damage — hence his explanation on an Auckland radio programme yesterday that too much had been read into his television interview. He is not prepared, however, to elaborate further on his views, or on his comment that there is strong support in the Government caucus for such cards.

Nor is he prepared to discuss the issue with other branches of the New Zealand news media. Mr Lange, it seems, considers that Australians are more entitled to be privy to his musings about the diminution of New Zealanders* civil liberties than are New Zealanders. Mr Lange’s deputy, the AttorneyGeneral, Mr Palmer, was prepared to say .. only 12 months ago that a national identity /; card would not be introduced; Mr Lange, having raised doubts by his Australian interview, has not been willing to dispel them with the same assurance. What is to be made : of his belated reticence?

Mr Lange showed no hesitation in adopting -the well-worn pretexts for identity cards. He is upset that some of his taxes “go to pay for bludgers” who cheat the welfare system and is bothered by people “avoiding their responsibilities by assuming false identities.” Imposing an identity card system on these grounds is taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and a distasteful sledgehammer at that. To curtail the liberties of law-abiding individuals because law-breakers abuse theirs is a perversion of legal principle, as Mr Lange, a lawyer, must know. It is a strange notion indeed that the innocent should be penalised because of the delinquencies of the guilty. It is pointless for Mr Lange or any other proponents of an identity card system to pretend that it would not be a curtailment of individual liberty and a threat to individual privacy. To be fair, very few people are prepared to take this line — Mr Lange has not said one way or the other — but most try to excuse the introduction of an identity card as being the lesser of two evils. It must be doubted whether the vendors of such a fallacy have paid much mind to what extent they would be giving extra powers to the State, and how much they can trust the State, including the public servants in its employ. The State already holds a great deal of information in various, separate files; even more is contained on the files of private organisations such as banks, insurance companies, and the like. The very advantage for the State in assigning its citizenry individually coded cards and numbers is that this makes it easier and cheaper, especially with the use of computers, to correlate and draw together the information about individuals held in different sets of records. The system enhances the creation of dossiers on individuals; it links existing databases into a web of personal information in a way that poses potential dangers to individual privacy, to freedom of movement, and to freedom of action.

However benign may be the intentions of an administration that introduces a national identity card system, the system must ever be open to abuse. New Zealand’s limited experience of a central computer network holding information on individuals — the Wanganui police computer — has shown that no system is secure and none is ever entirely accurate. Even under a righteous Government, others can abuse the system. And the system is open to abuse by future administrations of quite different colours in

circumstances entirely unthought of at present It is not enough to say such events are unlikely; until May, this year, a military coup in Fiji seemed unlikely. A moment’s thought is instructive. Great Britain introduced identity cards during the Second World War. They were deemed necessary in the emergency — an emergency in which many other freedoms we take for granted were also suspended temporarily — and were formally abolished in 1951. Why, though, were -they considered necessary? Because they make it much easier for the authorities to ration goods, and to monitor and control people, and to put the, purposes of the State above the civil rights of the individual. . . ’ . Perhaps it- was considerations such as these that encouraged Australians to review their ideas about the Australia Card, as their scheme has been labelled. About 15 months ago, when the Australian, Prime Minister, Mr Hawke, was floating the idea — as a cure-all for tax rip-offs and welfare cheating — public opinion polls consistently showed about 70per cent of Australians were in favour. In recent months there has been a great aboutface, fewer than 40 per tent still endorsing the idea and mbre than 50. per . cent against When Mr Lange, talks ,6f the notion “becoming more fashionable in New ■ Zealand” he had best be aware that the more ordinary Australians learned . of the - ramifications, the less "fashionable” the idea became. . -■

> The Australian experiment is not a very gdbdmodel for - New Zealand ? anyway. The Australians do : hot : have a broad-based indirect tax like GST which, as any reader of Government literature knows, was introduced as . the most effective weapon against individual tax avoidance yet The Department of Social Welfare in New Zealand last year estimated that cheating by 5 per cent of welfare beneficiaries cost the taxpayer about $14.1 million — less than one half of 1 per cent of the $6OOO million spent on benefits and superannuation. The Australians are being asked to believe that the introduction of an identity card will result in a $9OO million saving on tax fraud and welfare cheating.

The proposition is dubious at best. Other countries with identity cards still have tax evasion and a black economy. Sweden, for instance, has identity cards but still loses, on its own estimation, up to one-sixth of total possible revenue through evasion. The notion that the cards would in some way prevent people assuming false identities is laughable. Indeed, evidence to an Australian Parliamentary Select Committee was that the cards would be of great potential benefit to organised crime. The proposed introduction of the card there has, of course, meant the drafting of a whole new range of offences against the law — such as the failure by a banker or stockbroker to check a customer’s identity, or the failure of a farmer to present his card to any agent engaged to sell stock or produce, or the failure of a person to present the card to a real estate agent when leasing a flat, and so on.

The validity or otherwise of the economic justifications are really a red herring, however. They are a symptom of a society long on accountants and economists, but short on constitutional lawyers and philosophers. History is littered with examples of careless populations who gave away freedoms they never should have relinquished. Any increase in the power of the State over individuals should be permitted only with the full and informed consent of those who will be subject to that power. As America’s twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, put it: “The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.”