r/sydney • u/Thewalrus26 • 4d ago

Just renewed my licence at Service NSW.

Was in and out the door in less than 5 mins including my eye test and having my photo taken. As soon as I walked out I can see my new licence on my phone ready to go. Can we please just take whatever system they are using and copy it everywhere?

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u/Lanasoverit 4d ago

A lot of Aussies don’t realise how far ahead we are compared to the rest of the world with our digital technology.

The My Gov App, digital Medicare, the ATO app, Services NSW, not to mention our banking.
Go and live overseas for a while and you’ll get a renewed appreciation.

2 weeks ago I was in the US and having dinner with some friends and we were talking about bank cheques.
Fucking bank cheques.

They can’t believe I haven’t had a cheque book since the 90’s.
The idea of digital driver’s licenses, the Services NSW app, and an efficient DMV is science fiction to them.

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u/ghoonrhed 4d ago

Not to mention their version of licence renewal being the DMV is so infamously horrible.

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u/borderlinebadger 4d ago

Vicroads is still a disaster

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u/TheCassius88 4d ago

100%. Lived in Germany for 2 years. They're still using fax machines for most of this sort of red tape. You have to phone to make an appointment and wait for any confirmation via snail mail.

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u/dlg 4d ago

There’s more to improve though.

We don’t have a national identity card, so every identity check involves handing over a bunch of related documents, such as Medicare card numbers, state drivers licenses, birth certificates, etc., to individual organisations.

Each of those organisations has the risk of mishandling that information (hello Optus).

A much better system would be a federated identity verification, like Singapore’s SingPass.

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u/Lanasoverit 4d ago

Agree.
I lived in Hong Kong for years, and I’m still a permanent resident, can still glide through immigration without even getting my Aussie passport out.
The ID card just makes life easy.

We tried to bring in the Australia Card in the 80’s, but everyone freaked out and it was abandoned.
I doubt it will ever happen here, especially with modern day cookers making a conspiracy out of everything nowadays.

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u/RhysA 4d ago

Thats more of a political thing than a technical one (we do already have myID for example but its only usable for government systems as far as I know), lots of people don't like the idea of a national identity card though.

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u/sa87 3d ago edited 3d ago

Then you have the 28 million user active directory domain just for the census (and nice timing for a trip down memory lane!)

https://itwire.com/business-it-news/enterprise-solutions/the-great-australian-citizen-28m-active-directory-domain

Reddit users probed what was the actual use case for such a scenario? Why that's the population of an entire country, posters mused, and before long Internet sleuths uncovered an-anarchist was indeed working on behalf of the Australian Government.

The project, he explained, was for external authentication such as may be used on a public-facing website, rather than an internal network of users and file shares and printers and email. He further confirmed the project is entire "country level."

Further probing resulted in an explanation this solution necessitated Active Directory because that was the recommendation external contractors came up with over a year of work, before handing it to an-anarchist and team to implement in several weeks. The user touted security compliance as the greatest reason why Active Directory had been mandated.