National ID Scheme: It's time to ask the hard questions

Digital identity is in its infancy in Australia. While we have seen great strides recently in collaboration between federal and state ministers announcing the National Strategy for Identity Resilience, collaboration is the first step towards building an effective solution that will be trustworthy and fit-for-purpose for all Australians.

In a remarkable first step, all Australian governments have agreed to adopt 10 shared principles that will guide their approach to identity. This will be underpinned by biometrically anchored digital identity credentials for all Australians.

However, getting governments to collaborate is only the first hurdle in building a successful national identity scheme. While the government has promised a consultation process with industry later this year, now is the time to ask the hard questions before going down the path of a single identifier of Australians’ identities.

We need to draw upon lessons learned from other nations and consider a scheme that allows citizens to present themselves in the most convenient manner. This needs to be supported by a system that can ingest wide sources of data and verify at speed with the least amount of friction.

It’s a trust thing

A key challenge for the Australian Government is overcoming citizens’ lack of trust in implementing a national identifier and their ability to manage personal data. While the issue of citizen trust is not necessarily targeted at the current government (as it has developed over time), it should be a key factor to consider in the implementation of any scheme. Trust is only derived through understanding. A key shortcoming has been the lack of a simple explanation of how a national identity scheme would work in Australia that clearly outlines the benefits.

Without delivering these simple, transparent benefits and risks for the layperson, the scheme will continue to drive uncertainty, which leads to assumptions, and ultimately fear and mistrust.

What does a ‘next step’ look like?

It all starts with consumer-focused consideration, which uses simplistic language that makes it transparent for the layperson what the scheme does, how it will operate, what is connected and the benefits for them to participate — assuming there is an option.

In my view, a national digital identity scheme should aim to drive greater access to services for its citizens, and better connections between government and business, with the ability to connect faster and with less friction.

Any such scheme should remove barriers to accessing valuable services such as health, medical and financial services as well as a variety of different government schemes and initiatives.

It’s important that such a scheme does not create a further barrier for anyone vulnerable due to being disconnected from technology, which would create further disenfranchisement and a potential new set of challenges.

From a business perspective, the scheme should aim to drive greater efficiencies and deeper understanding of customers. Greater understanding should improve communications, offers, and products or services.

Failing to provide these benefits will result in a low rate of adoption and will risk making access to government services harder for citizens.

Avoiding the honeypot risk

The third challenge to implementing a successful scheme is overcoming the risk of cybersecurity and data breaches from collecting and storing a honeypot of Australian citizens’ identity data that would prove irresistible to cybercriminals.

Scams and identity fraud in Australia are becoming industrialised at a rapid rate. According to our Global State of Digital Identity 2023 report, more than nine in 10 (94%) Australians surveyed are concerned about fraud attempts in the future.

We also discovered that 56% of Australian consumers consider biometric information to be private data that is integral to their identity. Considering the scheme will incorporate biometric information along with other personal identifiers, it will require careful thought to mitigate Australians’ fears around the risk of cybersecurity attacks and data breaches involving their identity.

Even if the trust and perception issues are addressed, creating a single source of truth that contains 24 million Australians’ biometric and identity data will require a bulletproof technical solution in the current landscape of rising data breaches and increasingly sophisticated socially engineered scams.

This issue will require the government to engage with the technology and consulting ecosystem to execute an effective solution that is implemented with these risks front-of-mind.

Bringing it all together

Sophisticated challenges require solutions that span three categories — technology, people and data. At a minimum, we cannot address the whole challenge without well structured and well understood solutions for all three of these areas.

The technology will underpin the solution to drive efficiency of the system and create service connections. There are great technology vendors that today already provide and deliver systems that can be leveraged to continue investing and maintaining the platforms needed to drive this part of the solution.

On the people side, Australia abounds with consultancy-led organisations, as well as cross-industry and cross-segment experts, that can advise and provide insight into how citizens access services, with policy drivers to ensure the system can gain the efficiencies today and solve tomorrow’s challenges. These experts need to be brought into the consultation process to distil and drive consistency of a national approach.

The data piece requires advice on how to access repositories of data, rather than building a honeypot of data on Australian citizens. This means solving the challenge on a business scale to verify not just an individual’s identity, but also collating and providing data on behaviours and fraud actors. It must also provide data regarding risk at any point in time during transactions, identities and personas.

A deep knowledge base is required to inform the government’s approach, building a system that facilitates understanding of access and transactions that continuously inform and improve processes.

You can’t achieve this state of nirvana by consulting on just one of these areas — technology, people or data. We need a holistic approach to address trust and understanding, and to deliver benefits for citizens, industry and government.

These are not easy challenges to solve. But if we continue to set a single pathway without addressing these real issues, we will face the same outcomes that other countries have and end up with another white elephant that does not deliver the service outcomes we set out to achieve.

Image credit: iStock.com/Iaremenko