This Government is Seems to be Very Keen on Numbering People.

The following has received a bit of publicity today.

Gillard flags national ID scheme for schoolchildren

February 24, 2010

The Federal Government plans to assign every schoolchild an individual identity number to track their academic progress.

Education Minister Julia Gillard is expected to unveil the plan in a speech at the National Press Club today.

Ms Gillard says the program will allow parents to monitor their children's development, even if they move schools.

She says the Government will ensure privacy is protected.

"If we have a way of tracking we can obviously have better measures of how schools are going in developing student performance," she said.

"And then for individual parents it obviously would be of assistance to be able to track the records of a child's schooling."

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says he has doubts about the plan.

More here:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/24/2828706.htm

So it seems all those lucky students will now have a both Health Identifier and a Student Identifier. I wonder which other sort of person they will think of next to number – people who are unemployed to see who gets work, people who are blond to see whether they are actually dumb or have more fun and so on.

One really wonders whether the cost of introduction and maintenance of such a system will actually return some real community benefits. Has anyone seen the business case and privacy impact statements?

That the Leader of the Opposition seems unkeen on this makes one wonder how the Opposition – with their Senate control – will approach the HI Service Legislation.

David.