Aust. Govt will press on with I.D?

Press, 25 September 1987, Page 6

Aust. Govt will press on with I.D?

NZPA Sydney The Australian Government said yesterday that it would continue with its contentious national identity card legislation, in spite of Opposition moves to exploit a loophole that would render the card useless.

The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, took steps to shore up his Administration’s position by moving a successful, though nonpunitive, censure motion in Parliament. The motion censured the Leader of the Opposition, Mr John Howard, for failing to follow parliamentary convention.

Mr Howard on Wednesday scored the Opposition’s biggest coup since the July election when he revealed a legal loophole that would leave the Australia Card “dead, stone dead.”

The technicality was discovered by a former public servant and involves the need for Parliament to ratify regulations covering the date when the card would come into effect.

The Labour Party has the numbers to push the Australia Card bill through a joint sitting of the House of Representatives and the Senate early next year. However, the regulations then have to be passed by each House separately. This passage is unlikely in the Senate, since that House has already twice voted out the bill.

It was this double rejection that gave Mr Hawke the constitutional power to call an early election. The Minister for Community Services and

Health, Dr Neal Blewett, the cabinet member at the centre of the latest furor over the card, said the Government had no plans to dump the bill.

He said the Government was seeking legal advice on the situation. “There is no intention of withdrawing the legislation at this stage,” he told reporters in Canberra.

“But we are looking at the question of Parliamentary vandalism.

“This is the first time in the Australian Parliament — 87 years — where a bill has ever been threatened with being inoperable simply through the use of this little-known power.” Mr Howard, in his reply to the censure motion, told Parliament that, if convention were to be followed, Dr Blewett should resign.