Australia digital ID needs cost analysis and better communications: ASPI

Australia’s new digital identity system could be great, but implementation is key: so says a new policy brief from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Authored by the ASPI’s Dr. Rajiv Shah, “Australia’s new digital ID system: Finding the right way to implement it” makes the argument that “a digital ID system will succeed only through widespread adoption.”

“Customers need to know that their data will be kept private and secure, and free from attempts to monetize identity data,” writes Shah. “Businesses need the confidence and market incentives to invest in providing digital ID services.”

“After many iterations, the Australian Parliament has finally passed the Digital ID Bill into law. The proposed digital ID system is ambitious, but, as the Australian Government moves from primary legislation to implementation, it now needs to address some daunting technical and governance challenges for the system to succeed.”

Among the author’s proposed solutions is “a fundamental reset of the government’s communications strategy – engaging with the public to better explain the proposals, and deeper engagement with stakeholders to gather all points of view and find the right answers to complex questions such as the right balance between security, privacy and usability.” This has been a recurring theme in Australia’s development of a national digital ID, as the government goes live with technology it still struggles to describe.

The lack of a clear business case is also concerning to Shah, who says “a core requirement of corporate governance is a clear and credibly costed business case that provides objective confirmation of the cost-benefit trade-off.” That, he says, is missing – along with clearer delineations of regulatory responsibility among states, territories and the private sector.

Moreover, the technical requirements are incomplete and overly complex. There is no system-wide approach to cybersecurity. There aren’t enough restrictions on how relying parties can collect and use personal data. “The new digital ID system appears to be designed to allow users to set up multiple digital IDs,” enabling identity theft. The privacy and security trade-offs might not be worth it.

“The governance and technical requirements show good intentions, but they’re incomplete, too complex, and difficult to understand,” Shah says, clearly not impressed with how phase one of the staged digital ID rollout is transpiring.

Still, there is hope for Australia’s digital ID.

The brief concludes with ten policy recommendations for the decentralized, opt in identity scheme. Number one is the bottom line: “present a realistic cost-benefit analysis, with a credible baseline and sensible assumptions.” Two is the line of communication: “the department should initiate a public engagement and education campaign to improve Australians’ understanding of the system across 2024-25.

Another key recommendation is to establish a taskforce that includes private-sector companies “to identify how the integration and interoperability of public and private digital ID systems can be accelerated to avoid fragmentation in the market.”

Victoria shenanigans could scupper whole digital ID ecosystem

An equally dismissive article in The Mandarin argues that the digital ID system could be a non-starter thanks to some tomfoolery by the Victoria premier Jacinta Allan. The piece sniffs at “a secretive plan by the Victorian government to potentially hand the day-to-day operations of its Births, Deaths and Marriages (BDM) registry offices to private commercial operators.”

In reaching out to the investment community to “come and kick the tyres with a view to an offer on running the public registry of hatches, matches and dispatches,” the Labor leader has caused a mess that threatens to “fracture a nascent nationally interoperative digital identity ecosystem across several government jurisdictions and their agencies.”

A pilot for Australian digital birth certificates is currently underway in New South Wales, where global consultancy firm Thoughtworks is providing support on design and deployment of the architecture needed to deliver the digital certificates.

The rush to digitize public services in Australia, which also includes the recently announced Trust Exchange (TEx), has led some observers to compare Australians to “guinea pigs in an untested digital experiment.”

Article Topics

Australia  |  birth registration  |  civil registration  |  cybersecurity  |  data protection  |  digital government  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  government services