Joanna Pennyfeather
Christopher Luxon and the National Party have recently started pushing for digital driver licences. It is hailed as a progressive decision: making things more convenient for you.
I am sad to tell you that it has nothing to do with convenience.
Whenever governments or politicians tell you they are making something “more convenient”, your first instinct should be one of deep suspicion. The people running the show do not and will not care about you or your convenience and they don’t want to help you.
They care about power and they care about control. If it looks like they are doing something for you, assume they are doing it for themselves and/or the state.
We have recently seen this in action. I still remember the early days of Covid when the government decided to upgrade their vaccination database. It was hailed as a progressive thing to do and something that would be good for you because it would make it more convenient for you to access your own vaccination records online. I can count the number of times I’ve needed to access my vaccination records on no fingers at all. It was obvious that this move was to make it more convenient for them to access your records in real time. We later saw that play out with the roll out of vaccination IDs across the country.
Another way to put it is in the words of Albert J Nock, the 20th century American libertarian and social critic, when he said that:
in proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you; and... the state invariably makes as little as it can of the one power, and as much as it can of the other.
This simple rule of thumb will help keep yourself grounded and capable of seeing through what is being said and promoted. The latest push for digital driver’s licences is a case in point.
On the surface, it’s marketed a modernisation that saves you time, saves you hassle and makes your life ‘easier’. In short, it is convenient. But we cannot look at things in isolation and risk missing the forest for all the trees.
At the same time, we need to look at what’s happening in parallel: more specifically the push for age verification on social media. Supposedly that is being pushed in order to ’protect the children’, but let me refer to the rule of thumb explained above: these people do not care about you; they care about power.
That issue is not at all about ’the children’ and the push for digital driver licences is not at all about ‘modernisation’ or ‘convenience’. What’s more, the two issues are closely connected.
Think about it.
A law requiring an age limit for social media companies doesn’t mean that only underage users have to submit proper identification. It means that everyone has to submit proper identification.
With this context in mind, it’s easy to see that the push for digital driver’s licenses is an easy and quick way to get the vast majority of New Zealand adults on digital IDs and to accept them ahead of the age verification law for social media.
There is no need to spend money to propagandise people into signing up for a new digital ID to access social media. That’s expensive and can backfire. It is much better to make it convenient enough for people to do by tying it to something that most New Zealand adults already will have, i.e., a driver's license.
This is by far the fastest and easiest way to normalise and institutionalise digital IDs across the population.
Once every major platform starts requiring you to log in with a state-approved digital ID, that won’t be a problem since a huge part of the population would already be onboarded onto the new digital ID regime.
Any opposition to this will no doubt be met with the standard slander: that you hate children, you are against freedom or justice or fairness, or you are regressive, a luddite or spreading misinformation. And, worst of all, that you must have something to hide.
It’s all nonsense, of course.
In the end the result will be exactly what the state wanted from the very beginning: the ability to trace, restrict and control you.
Let me be clear: none of that benefits, or is convenient to, you.
The convenience excuse is only the candy coating that hides the bitter pill.
Whether it’s digital IDs, digital licenses or mandatory verification schemes, they all belong to the same architecture of power and control. They aren’t solutions to your problems, they are solutions to their problems. They are tools for authority. Tools that allow the government to tighten their grip on what you say, where you go, how you live and what you buy.
It is worth keeping in mind that these policies and others discussed are not unique to New Zealand. They are driven globally. That’s not conspiracy: it’s simply fact. Even a brief look at international media shows the same things being proposed in multiple countries at once, e.g., in Canada, Australia and UK.
That is not a coincidence, but by design.
It might seem like futile business trying to fight legislation like this, and in my opinion it is largely futile in isolated cases. These things have a momentum of their own, and once set in motion they are hard to stop.
So what can you do?
Politics is ultimately downstream from culture. You might be able to change things politically for a while, but whatever direction the culture pushes things in, that is ultimately where things are going to go. With this in mind, the main thing you can do is to commit to speaking truth. Help people lift their eyes from the single trees they are focusing on so that they can see the forest that is slowly encircling them. Help them see the cage, because to see the cage is to escape it. As it is said, the truth shall set you free.
And in closing, the next time you hear talk about a new government programme being pushed for the sake of convenience, remember this:
The road to hell is paved. Isn’t that convenient?
