Three days after Attorney General Philip Ruddock said that the government is not going to introduce national ID cards, Prime Minister John Howard has put the cards back on the agenda.

“This is an issue that ought to be back on the table,” Howard told reporters in Sydney.

Howard has argued that circumstances have changed since he opposed Labor’s plan to introduce a similar card in the late-1980s and that, in the wake of the London bombings, the cards should be considered as a way of better identifying Australians.

Civil libertarians argue that the introduction of such cards would make it easier for computer hackers to perpetrate identity fraud.

Queensland Council of Civil Liberties president Michael Cope said the creation of a single identity database would be a target for hackers.

“It makes it easier by accumulating all the data in one place and if you’re sufficiently technologically sophisticated you break in from a computer system and you can pinch anybody’s ID,” Mr Cope said on ABC radio today.

“Whereas at the moment it’s at least split up and to access the variant databases you have to break into a number of computer systems,” he said.

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone has said that any national identification card with a biometric element, such as fingerprinting, will be beneficial.

“In the past, we’ve looked at fingerprinting as happening if you’re a criminal,” she said.

The government is starting to realise that keeping the fingerprints, or other biometric information of the rest of the nation may help to prevent crimes like identity fraud, she said.

“But you do need to be able to say the person who’s got this card, standing in front of me, is the person to whom this card was issued,” she said.