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     Australia

This page considers the evolution of Australian passports and traveller surveillance regimes.

It covers -

• introduction - evolution of the Australian regime
• legal frameworks - migration, passports, privacy and security legislation
• passports and identity
• comings and goings - tracking arrivals and departures
• refusals - taking away your passport
• Australian MRTDs
• recent developments - biometric and RFID passports, the APP, MAL and SmartGate initiatives

It supplements discussion of the Australia Card, privacy and other matters elsewhere on this site.

     introduction

Australian identification of travellers has followed the same trajectory as the UK and Canada

     legal frameworks

The Australian travel document (passport and visas) and traveller surveillance regimes involve the interaction of a range of federal legislation -

• the Passports Act
• the Migration Act
• the Privacy Act
• transport legislation
• national security legislation

The Australian Passports Act 2005 (Cth) - which replaced the Passports Act 1938 - covers issue and use of Australian passports. It is discussed in more detail below.

International carriers entering Australia from overseas must comply with obligations under the Migration Act 1958 (MA) and Migration Regulations 1994 (MR) in relation to their aircraft/vessel and all persons on board.

The legislation provides that all persons arriving in Australia must be immigration cleared. Vessels arriving in Australia must enter at a 'proclaimed port', with immigration clearance being undertaken irrespective of whether a person disembarks or remains on board. All passengers and crew must have the appropriate travel documentation for entry to Australia, with the operator of the aircraft or master of the vessel expected to ensure that "all persons on board have correct travel documentation, are the rightful holders of that documentation and that the documentation is valid". All passengers are required to complete an incoming passenger card.

The federal Privacy Act 1988 (PA) - overviewed in the Privacy Guide and discussed in more detail in a complementary profile - articulates national information privacy principles and deals with the handling by public and private sector entities of personal information. It includes provision of information to law enforcement agencies.

Those agencies have argued that to be truly effective passenger profiling would need access to information held by governments both in Australia and overseas. Critics have responded that although

information held by governments in Australia is subject to veracity checking under privacy legislation, this may not be the case for information held by governments of other countries.

Transport legislation includes the Aviation Transport Security Act 2004 (ATSA), Air Navigation Act 1920 (ANA), Air Navigation Regulations 1947 (ANR), Maritime Transport Security Act 2003 (MTSA) and Regulations. That legislation encompasses screening of passengers, identification of crew and restrictions on access to facilities in accord with international standards.

     passports and identity

In Australia under the Australian Passports Act 2005 (APA) all citizens are entitled to an Australian passport to facilitate travel overseas (except in prescribed circumstances, highlighted below, such as courts requiring surrender of passports by defendants in some cases).

As official identification documents - perceived as having a higher integrity than drivers' licences, the de facto identifier for most adults - passports have a secondary use in providing personal identification for individuals accessing a range of government and non-government benefits.

The New Zealand equivalent is the Passports Act 1992.

Around one million passports and associated travel documents are issued each year by the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade (DFAT), with passport services costing around $96 million in 2002-03 and passport fees generating $137 million.

Passport legislation and practice evolved with changes to the underlying nationality regime and new technology, with for example the words 'Australian Passport' replacing 'British Passport' on the cover of an Australian passport in 1949, a married woman's passport application no longer having to be authorised by her husband from 1983 onwards, and machine readable features being introduced in 1984.

Early demand for passports was low, with only 30,000 Australian passports being issued in 1950. That rose to around 1.45 million in 2000. In the following year there were 586 identified cases of passport fraud and some 15,594 passports were lost/stolen.

A Document Alert List (DAL) database within the national Movement Alert List (MAL) system holds information on over 1.6 million problematical travel documents such as lost, stolen or fraudulently altered passports.

Australian passports provide some recognition of the gender identity of transsexuals, with a person who has undergone gender reassignment surgery being able to obtain a new passport in their reassigned sex. A person intending to travel overseas for reassignment surgery may obtain a temporary passport in the new sex; once the surgery has been completed the individual will be eligible to apply for a full ten year passport in their new sex. However, transgender people who have not undergone reassignment surgery are unable to have the identified gender recorded on the passport. A new passport does not mean that the Federal Government recognises transsexual gender identity in another capacity; it can thus not be used as proof of gender identity for purposes such as marriage. 

     comings and goings

Australian governments have sought to identify people entering and leaving their jurisdiction since first colonisation. The federal government assumed responsibility for passenger arrivals and departures in 1923.

Until recently that identification centred on manually compiled passenger lists and some name indexes. The master of each passenger vessel and aircraft arriving in, or departing from, Australian ports was required to provide authorities with a list of passengers disembarking and embarking from that port. Those lists were not maintained centrally or systematically indexed, although they were generally archived.

The absence of comprehensive name indexes for passenger records meant that tracking a traveller involved identification of the date (typically year and month), location of embarkation/disembarkation (typically retrieved by port or state) and vessel/flight number.

Adoption of electronic technologies from the 1970s onwards enabled capture of information for a national database.

     Refusals

Consistent with international law, the national government can restrict use of a passport, with the Passports Act authorising orders to surrender a passport for a range of purposes that include enforcement of legislation regarding national security, corporate fraud and family law.

That legislation includes the -

• Crimes Act 1914 (Cth)
• Child Support (Registration & Collection) Act 1988 (Cth)
• Taxation Administration Act 1953 (Cth)
• Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 (Cth).

State/Territory legislation such as the Bail Amendment (Confiscation of Passports) Act 2005 (NSW) and Penalties & Sentences Act 1992 (Qld) also restricts use of passports. The Sentencing Act 1995 (WA) for example allows a court to order that an offender -

a) must remain in Australia;
b) must refrain from applying for, or obtaining, an Australian  passport;
c) must surrender possession of any Australian  passport  held by him or her to an officer of the court.

     Australian MRTDs

All Australian international travel documents issued in Australia since 1984 are machine-readable, consistent with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards on Machine-Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs) discussed in a preceding page of this note.

Australian machine-readable passports currently feature a two-line machine readable zone (MRZ) at the bottom of the biographical data page. The MRZ is designed for capture of information using optical character recognition (OCR) technology and includes most of the data which appears on that page.

As of 2000 it was estimated that up to 15,000 valid Australian passports that are not machine-readable might still be in circulation, although that number is declining sharply as old passports reach their use-by date.

     recent developments

DFAT is moving towards a new generation of passport, including potential incorporation of RFID tags and microchips that feature facial biometrics. Movement is being driven by domestic needs and international expectations, in particular US entry requirements, with an expectation that information will be provided to overseas governments and accessed by Australian federal/state agencies through the Electronic Travel Authority (ETA) communication network. By October 1998 around 22,500 travel agents, airlines and computer reservation system subscribers world-wide were participating in the ETA System and some four million ETAs had been issued by January 1999.

Within Australia those developments are being complemented by -

• the Advance Passenger Processing system, introduced in January 2003 and subsequently adopted by New Zealand
• SmartGate initiative

The Advance Passenger Processing (APP) system aims to allow airlines to verify an international passenger's travel authority at check-in and send advance passenger information to Australian border agencies using the ETA network, with carriers having the ability to fully automate capture of passenger and flight information (which can be printed on the front of a passenger card, with simultaneous coding of an identifier on the magnetic swipe section of the card to retrieve passenger movement details in Australia).

The 2004 Parliamentary Joint Committee of Public Accounts & Audit report on aviation security notes that the APP allows the Department of Immigration & Multicultural & Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) to issue a directive to carriers to prevent boarding by particular passengers who do not have permission to travel to Australia. It also enables authorities to become aware of the impending arrival of specific passengers.

A complementary Person Alert List (PAL) database within the MAL system holds information about some 235,000 "people of immigration concern", including individuals with serious criminal records, barred by migration legislation from entering Australia or whose "presence in Australia might constitute a risk to the Australian community" or "were of concern to law enforcement and security agencies". Information is drawn from the International Criminal Police Intelligence Organisation (Interpol), federal government agencies and other sources.

SmartGate is a facial recognition system, matching a passport holder's stored image against the individual presenting the documentation at the Australian border. The Australian Customs Service and DFAT claim that SmartGate performs matching and other border clearance processes in under 10 seconds, with an error rate of 1-2%. Contrary to some hyperbole by advocates and critics, it is thus primarily a filtering mechanism that aids rather than replaces manual examination of documents and their holders.

The Australian Identity Security Alliance (AISA) has proposed enhancement of US 'trusted traveller' cards, through provision of biometric data to several databases controlled by different organisations. Verification of an individual's identity would accordingly involve checking more than one database, claimed to provide "better security because an impostor would need to have altered the information in several databases to be successful". Proliferation of data in different databases might, conversely, result in problems with unauthorised access to information and even facilitate identity theft.

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