NSW will soon digitise high-risk work licences, says Victor Dominello

New South Wales Minister for Customer Service and Digital Government Victor Dominello has flagged high-risk work licences are being prepared for the state’s well-liked digitisation treatment, as his all-out push against paper before stepping down from politics continues.

Taking to his preferred forum of LinkedIn, Dominello said that around 5300 “High Risk Work Licences are renewed every month – that is more than 63,600 a year”.

Trade tickets and licencing, especially those requiring repeated medical, legal and background checks, are regarded as one of the cut-through opportunities in the case for digital credentials and identity documents because they usually create savings for licence holders and businesses alike.

“To renew a High Risk Work Licence, you need to print out and complete a paper renewal at Australia Post. Paper forms and in-person renewal lodgement are time-intensive, labour-intensive processes and take time away from you doing your job and spending it with family,” Dominello said.

“It also requires a new photo — that is an additional cost. This would be a better, faster and cheaper customer experience as a digital experience,” Dominello said, adding there would be more information on plans soon.

The Queensland government has already successfully trialled digital verification of various work credentials; however, the progress and future of that initiative are unclear after its champion, Chris Fechner, left the Queensland government to take up a role heading the federal Digital Transformation Agency.

There are also major decisions looming for both state and federal governments in terms of creating a nationally interoperable digital credential and identity system.

That endeavour got a major push forward yesterday when the federal minister for government services revealed the new myGov app launched on Monday contains both a digital wallet and can generate QR codes to verify identity and bypass businesses hoarding identity credentials.

It is well known that Dominello and the NSW government are open to the idea of white-labelling or open-sourcing their digital credential and identity smarts with both Canberra and other states as well as councils to expedite the government digitisation push.

While there is always a degree of political and jurisdictional friction in creating any national system, both the states and Canberra are confronting the rapid withdrawal of many over-the-counter and retail services from regional and metropolitan areas like the closure of bank branches.

Those closures, especially around various bill payments (where the government is a critical stakeholder), are upping pressure on enterprises like Australia Post to become multi-function transactional service centres, a model already bedded down by Service NSW that has become a government one-stop-shop.

Less clear is what the federal government intends to do around controversial plans to shutter the banking direct entry system — that is, the direct deposit of funds into accounts — in the wake of the forced merger of EFTPOS, BPAY and the New Payments Platform, the latter of which was recently hit by a crippling outage.

Plans to shut down BPAY are also causing quiet reflux in governments because of the potential reputational and political risk inherent in any attempt to force customer migration to infrastructure that has yet to attract comparable transactional volume to either card schemes or bill payment platforms.

Meanwhile, the federal digitisation push continues, with Bill Shorten’s hand-picked audit team reviewing the myGov portal expected to deliver their assessment soon, especially now that the core app has been released, albeit without Medicare.

It is understood the recent major hacks of both Medibank and Optus have clarified federal thinking around the need for better privacy and authentication mechanisms, such as those released yesterday in the myGov app.

This article was first published by The Mandarin.