Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union reached a final agreement on a law to create the European Digital Identity or eID, the EU's first fully digital identification system. This law will provide Europeans with a digital wallet containing digital versions of their ID cards—their drivers licences, their academic certificates, their medical records, their bank account information and so on. The next major step in the EU will be to create a digital euro and a central bank digital currency, which is currently being developed by the European Central Bank. I've been warning about digital ID for some time, and it wasn't so long ago that, like many of these issues which turn out to be correct, it was considered to be nothing but a conspiracy theory.

Closer to home, the Labor government will soon introduce an Australian version of the digital ID legislation. Consultation on that bill has recently closed. You can see how it's going to happen: we'll get a digital currency and, once those steps are in place, a digital snare trap will have been created. We saw how that worked a couple of years ago with the financial cancellation of the Canadian truckers when they were protesting COVID lockdowns and restrictions. The advancement of technology is inevitable, but this push towards a digital ID future is another step towards a Chinese Communist Party-style social credit system, which will force you to support the current thing at the risk of total cancellation. We must reject a digital ID future, and time is running out for people in this place to understand that they are playing with fire.