The feds are playing dumb with smartcards. You know. The ID card that isn’t an ID card – but that you’ll have to carry to get the government services all Australians are entitled to.

No one really knows how much the project will cost. The London School of Economics has famously found that the Blair government’s ID card scheme cost between £10bn and £19bn over 10 years? Our beloved Finance Minister Nick Minchin’s admission in Question Time last week that it’s “impossible to eliminate” problems with major Government IT projects doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence.

Then there’s also the issue of whether the thing will work or not. Joe Hockey, the Human Services Minister, is the bloke carrying the can. He’s got a lengthy business case justifying the whole project produced by suits-for-hire KPMG up on his departmental website.

Oddly enough, it’s not searchable. Just you try. There’s a whole bunch of other papers up there. You can search them.

Does Big Joe want to force us to plough through the whole 105 pages of the KPMG report? What’s he trying to hide? Is the Government playing dumb on smartcards?