Toss out the passport! JOKES! Don’t toss out the passport, well, not yet. But some day soon (really soon) we’re all going to think back to how much paperwork we travelled with and wonder how we ever managed to keep everything organised.
Now that the Outgoing Passenger Card is well and truly a thing of the past, the Australian government is looking at other ways of unloading passengers of any excess travel documentation, including a passport.
According to Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, some $22.5 million will be spent over the next three years to roll out facial recognition technology in the form of 105 smart gates.
Smart gates are currently in operation at eight major Australian international airports (Adelaide, Brisbane, Cairns, Darwin, Gold Coast, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney) but are only available to travellers aged over 16 from 15 countries holding a passport with a biometric chip.
Dutton hopes that the extra 105 gates to be rolled out across the country before 2020 will eventually eliminate the need for printed identification all together and drastically reduce airport queues.
“The idea of this will be through new technology that is using facial recognition that in some cases if you’ve got a passport that can be read you won’t even have to present the passport.”
“It will make it much quicker going through the immigration process.”