Access Card Briefing, Sydney, 13 December 2006

The Australian Government's Office of the Access Card (also known as the Government Smart card or Health Card) will hold a Consumer and Privacy Briefing on 13 December 2006:

"... three main aims.

• Inform the IT industry about the project prior to tenders being released.
• Provide privacy and consumer advocates with further details about the project.
• Release an exposure draft of the access card legislation for public consultation."

Also available is the Government's response to the Consumer and Privacy Taskforce Report on "Issues and Recommendations in Relation to Architecture Questions of the Access Card".

The Government's response is a model of brevity being only 59kbytes of PDF, compared to the report's 1.83mb. The original KPMG Access Card Business Case is still available on the Office of the Access Card publications page.

There is also a web address for public information about the Access Card, in accordance with the Government web branding policy. This also has an RSS Feed.

ps: The Government has responded to criticism of the project by increasing safeguards and decreasing its scope. But assurances as to the proper running of the system are less credible after the Office of the Access Card sent out the wrong attachment with their invitation to the briefing. If they have trouble working e-mail, how will they go with a highly complex access card system? ;-)