To what policy problem is this the solution?

On my drive in to work yesterday, RNZ's Corin Dann challenged the Prime Minister about one part of his meeting with Australian PM Albanese. They had apparently promised to work toward some kind of joint ID and driver license system. 

I have rented a car in Australia using a NZ driver's licence. That was ages ago now. But has that gotten harder somehow? 

I understand that passports are required for proof of age if you want to buy alcohol, with licensees not recognising trans-Tasman driver licences. But is that a problem to which a joint driver licensing system is a solution? Or is it simpler to tell licensees that they can rely on trans-Tasman driver licenses as proof of age, while supplying sample copies of the various Oz state driver licenses (and the one NZ one) so folks are familiar with both and better able to recognise fakes.

If a bar in one Australian state can rely on driver licenses from other Australian states and the world doesn't end, it doesn't seem that much harder to teach the guy at the door how to also recognise a NZ driver licence. 

What is going on here? 

The joint statement by the two PMs gives a couple of hints.

10. Prime Ministers also launched a new phase of work to deliver mutual recognition of accredited digital identity services, and commended the cooperation between New Zealand and Australian States and Territories to facilitate the verification of digital drivers licences across borders.

24. Prime Ministers reaffirmed their commitment to ensuring all Pacific countries have access to safe, secure and stable banking. They welcomed ANZ’s announcement of its long‑term commitment to the region, secured by an Australian Government guarantee, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia stepping in to provide banking services in Nauru. They also welcomed Australia’s announcement at the 2025 PIF Economic Ministers’ Meeting of further support for secure and inclusive digital identity systems across the Pacific. Prime Ministers noted Australia’s and New Zealand’s contributions to the Pacific Strengthening Correspondent Banking Relationships Project and recognised the importance of regional action to address the decline of correspondent banking relationships.

On a bit of checking:

• NZ and Oz agreed to develop a Digital Identity Mutual Recognition Roadmap back in 2019/20, or at least it was noted in the Australian Digital Transformation Agency Annual Report for 2019/20.
• NZ has a Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Register, but nobody has yet registered as an accredited services provider. So the mutual recognition roadmap would presumably be for trans-Tasman recognition of these things as they develop.
• NZ has NZ Verify for verifying mobile driver licences. So far, NZ doesn't have a mobile driver's licence. But the Verify app can check the authenticity of mobile licenses from some US states and Queensland. ISO 18013-5 is currently supported, others may be in future. 
• The digital identity work for the Pacific is most likely related to everyone having figured out that KYC requirements just kill international remittances. Rather than ditch KYC, they're going to eKYC. 
• ACCC is regulator for Australia's digital ID; OAIC is privacy regulator there. The Digital ID Act 2024 came into effect 1 Dec 2024. It's a voluntary accreditation scheme for providers of digital ID services. 

There has been Twitter speculation that all of this is about age-gating social media. It looks like this push started well before anyone was talking about that. 

But Australia is running trials on ID/age verification setups for social media age gating; it looks like a report is soon due. 

There are defensible use-cases for privacy-preserving verification. Having a system where I can request that the authenticator provide confirmation of specific details about me to a third party, and that third-party being able to confirm those details with or without needing to know anything else about me, has value. 

When the government set the Covid check-in app, it baked privacy in right from the outset. Scanning in at a place would let you get a notification that someone else who had scanned in at that place around the time you were there wound up testing positive for Covid. Done poorly, it would be a privacy nightmare. But they had folks like Andrew Chen working on it. It was fine. And there was lots of open discussion about it when it was being developed, so everyone knew that people who cared about privacy were in on the ground floor in building the thing. 

When the first a lot of us would have heard about a government digital ID is in context of a trans-Tasman agreement for mutual recognition, in context of Australia wanting to age-gate social media, and nobody particularly trusting that the age-gate system isn't intended to result in the kind of censorship being seen in Australia - not so hot. 

Just a bizarre thing for the government to highlight without having put up explanations ahead of time. 

The PM's talk had this as all being about mutual recognition of driver licences. Which is obviously a weird justification. We already recognise each other's licences. And if Oz and NZ makes it tough for bars to recognise each other's licenses as ID, that's far more easily solved by just letting bars use the other country's driver's licence. The rest of it isn't needed for that problem. 

Instead - both countries are working toward digital IDs, both countries five years ago agreed that they'd recognise each other's digital IDs, and this seems just to be reaffirming that prior agreement. I'd love there to be more assurance around privacy being important in the design of any of these in NZ. Because there are very bad versions that should not be supported.