If you clock up another speeding fine that tips you over the 12-demerit point limit anywhere in Australia, a proposed new digital system will register that - and share it with every interstate police force and transport authority.
A significant step in having separate state and territory-issued driver's licences share a common digital "credential" recognised around the country and used for personal identification will be revealed next month.
This would allow immediate information-sharing across the country, scooping up more drivers who seriously offend in one jurisdiction but cross the border and keep driving in another.
Austroads, the body that provides policy advice, information, tools and services to all transport agencies across Australia and New Zealand, has developed a pre-production/beta digital trust service, which it says "will host a range of credentials, and not just mobile driver licences".
Digital driver's licences are used in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia - but not in Canberra.
In the ACT, priority has been given to moving other government services online and rolling out the new MyWay+ public transport ticketing system. The government is also unconvinced of the cost savings in a small jurisdiction like the ACT.
The ACT government said that it was "collaborating closely with other states like Queensland and Victoria to understand the implications from their trials before making a decision to invest in our own system".
There are currently 349,730 driver's licence holders in the ACT.
The Austroads-backed system is similar to that used by the US Department of Homeland Security to enable mobile driver's licences to be used as a "pseudo domestic passport for air travel".
The key mechanism involved is known as VICAL (Verified Issuer Certificate Authority List). It is a trusted list of public digital keys which, "when paired with a customer or user keys allows verifiers/relying parties to have confidence the claims and attributes made within a digital credential was asserted by a trusted issuing authority".
The digital identity program is claimed by Austroads to represent "a significant leap forward in digital credential verification".
It is claimed to "harmonise wallets and credentials not just nationally but internationally" and will streamline and secure digital transactions without the need to store or exchange customer data.
Chris Goh, who has led the Austroads team working on this digital identification harmonisation, said that unlike a data exchange "a trust service does not need to store any data in a central repository as the keys that are exchanged have no identifying information, making it safe for relying parties and customers/credential holders alike".
An Auckland-based tech company, MATTR, has been working with Austroads on the digitisation program that will link driver's licences to other forms of identification, which its says "can be used to further enable their technology-centric lifestyles".
MATTR says it has developed "tamper-evident, phishing-resistant digital equivalents to today's physical licensing and [vehicle] registration documents".
Agencies, like transport authorities, that sign on can choose from "selective disclosure features for consent-based data sharing".
The Australian government is well progressed in its MyGov digital identification using similar technology.
