We have to protect the government’s revenue, the hard-earned money of the honest tax-payer. That is why we have to match up information in the Land Titles Office, the Companies Office, the Departments of Social Security and Health and the Tax Office to see who is cheating.
If you are honest, you have nothing to worry about.
Well, there is something to worry about. Government surveillance is a subtly increasing method of general control of the population with shuddering implications for our liberty. Author Simon Davies has done Australians a great service with the publication last month of üBig Brother@ (Simon and Schuster) pointing some of this out.
In the past 20 years in Australia, increased surveillance has caused the reversal of the onus of proof in thousands of dealings between citizen and government. And we have very little benefit to show for it.
About 200,000 reports have been made to the Cash Transaction Reporting Agency. These are cast under immediate suspicion. They are suspect until shown otherwise. Surely, they are not all drug-dealers and tax dodgers. Do we know if this large collection of private information by government has resulted in any real crooks going to jail, or do all the drug dealers simply employ someone to spread it about in smaller amounts in suburban branches, giving governments a further excuse to collect even more information when you open an account.
Large scale data-matching in government departments reveal thousands of mis-matches. These are then under suspicion until proved otherwise by investigation. Yet nearly all of the mis-matches have innocent explanations, for example by people and departments using different words in different ways (child, dependant, de facto, income, permanent and so on).
Extravagant promises made about the tax-file-number system and data-matching have not been fulfilled. The Government is pressing ahead with the Law Enforcement Access Network, connecting the computers of different departments to check up on people.
When citizens give governments information for one purpose and they use it for another it is a bit like a police search of the home without a warrant.
The private sector is in on it, delivering huge amounts of data to government and setting up their own databases.
And once you get on the wrong side of these databases, however innocently, you’ve had it. You are under suspicion. You have to prove your innocence, otherwise credit, government benefits and your tax return are denied.
The trouble is, despite the Australia Card’s defeat, governments just keep on going, collecting and matching more data and relying on computer technology more. And apathetic Australians care little about the issue.
It is all very well if you trust governments. But history shows that you can’t. When governments get more information, they misuse it. Despite 92 years of continuous democracy, there is no reason to believe that Australia is somehow immune from the general propensity of governments to control more of their citizens’ lives.
It is a gradual process. If you said 20 years ago that governments in Australia would collect all the information they now do, you would not have been believed. Australians wouldn’t tolerate it, just like we wouldn’t tolerate now the following chilling possibility for 2012:
The government stops issuing notes over $10. The economy would still run. Every purchase would be electronic and its amount and nature recorded on computer. The banks would be required to pass the information to the government for the perfectly reasonable requirement that people who smoke or drink too much should not get health benefits. And what better way of deciding that than through the purchase records. Also, spending patterns would reveal whether all income had been declared. In such a nightmare world, income tax and GST become the same thing.
Fines, taxes and money owed for government services could just be extracted from accounts. And the government would, of course, be within its rights to freeze accounts of people revealed as having an irregularity in their files during a computer data-match. The citizen would have to prove the mis-match was innocent before the account was unfrozen. In such a world a frozen bank account is death. There is no cash; cash is for criminals.
The politicians of this generation are too scared to challenge the technology that promises to solve their budgetary problems; the next generation won’t be able to.