Australians planning international travel over the summer holiday period are being advised to check the validity of their passports after around two million passports expired from March 2020 to February 2022 due to Australia’s border closures.
The Australian Passport Office (APO) is currently issuing an average of 12,000 passports a day to help meet “unprecedented demand” for the documents, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
“In the four months since June, we have issued more than 1 million passports, averaging around 12,000 passports a day – up 30 per cent on pre-pandemic normal,” a DFAT spokesperson told The Australian.
“We are now issuing around 2,000 more passports a day than in June.”
Pre-pandemic, there were about 8,000 passport applications a day.
A rise in APO staff numbers from 730 in May to nearly 2,000 has helped the office tackle the massive backlog in passport applications, with the current waiting period for the documents now at around six weeks, although DFAT says some were still taking longer to receive.
In good news for anyone concerned about the security of their passports following the recent Optus data breach, APO said in a statement that “passport numbers cannot be used to obtain a new passport”.
“Robust controls are used to protect passports from identity takeover, including sophisticated facial recognition technology,” it said.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) latest data, the number of Aussies who travelled overseas in August was 942,210, with October numbers forecast to rise above one million for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Via The Australian
