Australia’s Digital ID: Another Piece to the WEF Puzzle

Australia’s Senate passed the Digital ID bill which expands their digital identity verification scheme through a centralized process.

April 1, 2024

By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

The inglorious response by some governments during the pandemic is not soon forgotten. It might not have been televised, but it was still memorialized on social media, and plenty of people chronicled the ensuing events (including Tom Woods in his latest book, Diary of Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania).

When you search for “Australia’s Pandemic Response”, a myriad of links pop up talking about the benevolent bailouts and emergency funding the government mustered up. When you search “Were Australians arrested for leaving homes during the pandemic”, you get a very different result.

All the “dot-gov” links disappear, and you start seeing links to stories from regular news outlets covering arrests, fines, and protests.

This is an important precursor to what is happening now.

Human Rights Watch in September 2020, flagged enforcement abuses just on curfew mandates alone. The justification was, as Premier Daniel Andrews put it, “it was not about human rights, but rather a matter of human life“. Yet, serious concerns about the harassment and over-zealous enforcement emerged. The interactions were bad enough but the article went on to say:

Data reported by the ABC as of September 3, showed the Victorian police had issued 1,762 fines for breaking curfew, totaling A$2.9 million (US$2 million).

Hundreds were arrested and fined the summer after this article came out for protesting the persistent lockdowns and mandates.

Australia went as far as internment camps at places like Howard Springs. And one of the most explosive cases surrounding the vaccine mandates was when Novak Djokovic was turned away in Melbourne when he arrived to compete in the Australian Open in 2022.

The mandates would later be found to be unlawful by the Australian high courts, but not before over two years of madness was allowed to unfold on its people.

This was all rushed through with little to no debate in the name of safety. And THAT is the lesson Australia either has or hasn’t learned: rush jobs in the name of safety are no good.

Breaking news out of Australia is the recent passing of a bill for Digital ID in their Senate on March 27. The controversy isn’t just the bill itself, but the fact that is passed with ZERO debate for what will ultimately entails a biometric component.  Moreover, they fast-tracked corporate participation in the scheme:

Banks, credit card operators and Australia Post will be among the first to offer online identity verification services.

The amendment comes after several industry players, including Australian Payments Plus (AP+), Equifax, NAB, the Commonwealth Bank, the Australian Bankers Association (ABA) and the Australian Retail Credit Association, advanced submissions to the senate inquiry advocating for earlier access and a more definitive schedule of when private sector entities could enter the scheme.

It’s off to the House next.

The selling point, naturally, is identity protection. Senator Babet of Victoria believes differently:

I’d argue that the Australian people – given the experience of the past few years – have a far greater need for protection from their government than from ID theft.

A digital ID, if combined with a central bank digital currency, is the perfect platform for government to track a citizen’s every move. Add in the climate ideology and you’ve got the prefect mechanism to restrict movement and consumption.

He argues digitization and centralization of that data is not actually a safety mechanism because everyone becomes hackable. And while that is deleterious unto itself, the biggest threat as a perpetrator would be the state.

This isn’t an unfounded concern, by the way. It’s rooted in very real hacking events that took place very recently, leaving users highly vulnerable. Upguard listed off the thirteen biggest data breaches most recently in Australia, and it’s not good. It has some private entities, but also includes government entities such as the second largest telecommunications company in Australia, Optus, government services provider Service NSW, Australian Parliament House, and Northern Territory Government.

There are currently amendments that make digital ID voluntary and require all who institute this process offer an analogue solution for ID verification.

People were also free to leave their homes, go to work, and gather for social functions… until they weren’t.

The push is to get the Digital ID feature through the legislature. How it gets there doesn’t matter, and the terms under which it passes can be dealt with and reconfigured later. The proponents of this bill catered to every contention and holdout issue. Those accommodations include:

Which sounds like a safeguard. But the issue the detracting senators have with this is the centralizing mechanism. Once it’s there, the matter of voluntary or compulsory becomes moot, because it’s voluntary until it’s not. One “emergency” or fear-based propaganda piece and that goes out the door.

How hard would it be to declare “Climate Change” a national emergency? And how often have we seen emergency policies become permanent fixtures (*cough* PATRIOTACT *cough*)?

If it can be mandated in the law, then it can be revoked in the law. The voluntary and compulsory nature of the bill are in the hands of the legislature rather than in the hands of the people.

And when combined with Central Bank Digital Currency, what you have is an inordinate amount of centralized economic and social control. This appears to be the concern of Senator Alex Antic of South Australia.

The global discussion of digital currency, digital IDs, centralization of banking, fifteen minute cities, owning nothing, has its pieces swirling for now, but they are coming together, one piece of legislation at a time.