The opportunity for licence holders, (i.e. pilots and LAMEs) to engage in some gentle civil disobedience has sadly been lost.
If - when aviation was booming - there had been an organised week where every licence holder turned up for work with a passport (for the photo) and a professional licence (for validation of occupation) while leaving their ASIC at home, it could have forced the authorities to capitulate on the requirement for certain sectors of the aviation industry to hold an ASIC.
The authorities' climb down face-saver could have been to link licences to police records, Kiwi style.
But now the aviation industry is trashed anyway, civil disobedience or industrial action won't work. In lean times history shows that there are always those willing to comply with whatever onerous hurdles are put in the way to put food on the table. When we come out the other side of this current pandemic, expect more, not fewer, limitations to our freedoms dreamed up by Big Brother - for our own good, of course.