Who needs the Australia Card when you can do a Xi Jinping?

My. How soon people forget.

In 1985, at the national tax summit, the Labor Government proposed the Australia Card:

The card was to amalgamate other government identification systems and act against tax avoidance, and health and welfare fraud.

The proposal died but the idea never went away. It has just crept up. It moved to tax file numbers and then Austrac reporting of $10,000 cash transactions (a threshold that as not increased in 30 years). Now state licences have photos on them which go into a national database. Australian passports have biometric features and passport control officers are slowly being replaced with face recognition systems. Then the privacy and free speech fools that keep on giving, Tony Abbott and…