Australians could soon be using a national digital ID that would hold all of your information, acting as a Medicare card, driver’s licence, passport and holding Centrelink details.
A universal ID was first planned by the Coalition and has now been taken up by the Albanese government.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher said the ID, which would allowing licences and other forms to be verified online by external organisations, could be rolled out within a year.
There has already been backlash towards the proposed ID, but on Wednesday Ms Gallagher told the Australian Financial Review’s Government Services Summit that the program should be up and running by mid-next year.
‘That’s a pretty tight timeframe, so I don’t want to be held to that. But that’s kind of my roadmap,’ she said.
The Finance Minister said many Australian states are already using digital services to access IDs such as driver’s licences and a nationally-regulated service would be an extension of that.
‘We’ve got the system, it’s just not regulated and not in a shape I think that will allow us to drive it forward and give the interoperability and the economy-wide benefits that come from having a national system, but we’re very committed to it,’ she said.
Ms Gallagher said the service would not be a new card or number but ID forms will be compiled into one system in an ‘easy, secure, voluntary and efficient way’.
Existing state and territory apps would all work together with the new plan, she said.
The minister did, however, admit that the idea is a ‘contested’ one, with petitions already circulating in opposition to it over cybersecurity and data retention concerns, and from anti-government groups.
The plan is also likely to be controversial given it is coming after several major cyberattacks in Australia in the past 18 months, including at Optus, Medibank and financial services provider Latitude.
‘We’ve seen this, particularly coming out of Covid-19 you know, theories, conspiracy theories about what government’s trying to do,’ Ms Gallagher said.
But she said the plan was to allow Australians to have control of their information.
‘It is about securing your information and protecting your information and ensuring that you know, when that information is shared, it’s done under a regulated system,’ she said.
In the UK last February, former prime minister Tony Blair was accused of pushing a ‘creepy’ plan for every Briton to be issued with a digital ID as part of a ‘reshaping of the state around technology’.
Former Conservative Party chairman Jake Berry branded the proposal as ‘a creepy state plan to track you from the cradle to the grave’.
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