“Papers please” used to be the ostinato of totalitarian systems, at least in the movies.
A few things have surprised me over the last few years, not the least the way the famous Aussie spirit of insubordination has been subsumed into a goody-two-shoes compliance with whatever capricious orders the authorities made.
I can’t imagine our forebears accepting lockdowns and forced vaccinations, and I certainly couldn’t see them accepting an identity card linking not just government accounts but private sector ones as well.
In 1984, the Hawke Labor government introduced the Australia Card, and for the next three years, the government and opposition parties tussled over it to the extent that it triggered a double-dissolution election in 1987.
Objections didn’t just come from the federal Opposition either.
Queensland Labor Senator George Georges resigned from the governing party in 1986 over the issue, and in the lower house, Labor backbencher Lewis Kent said:
“Nothing can be more un-Australian than the need to provide one’s identity on the call of an official, be it a policeman or a bureaucrat. It would be more appropriate for the proposed card to be called a Hitlercard or Stalin-card.”
