Australians could travel without passports

Staff submitted and voted on up to 392 pitches, in what was called the “DFAT ideas challenge” with the top 10 being presented to a panel of judges which included the foreign minister. Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop said while the pilot project would need to meet a few key security requirements before proceeding, she predicted the passport-less travel system would eventually go global.

Australia is in discussions with New Zealand over the possibility of ditching physical passports and storing the same identifying data electronically instead, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has confirmed.

“One of the ideas was turning a passport chip into a purely digital one”, Bishop said today.

It would reduce the 38,000-odd passports that are registered as lost or stolen each year, the department said.

Cloud passports would simply move this local information to the cloud – and ditch the paper booklet, too.

Biometric identification is increasingly being used around the world with countries such as Malaysia, Japan and the United States relying on fingerprints to identify travellers, and Australia and New Zealand on a computer algorithm that analyses a traveller’s facial features against their passport photograph via SmartGate.

“So we are embracing new ideas not for the sake of it but in order to grow our economy, to make it easier to do business in Australia, to create more jobs”.

The department is yet to detail how it plans to address security and data sovereignty concerns.

EPassports now allow travellers to pass through an automated customs machine without speaking to a border control officer.