Australia To Replace Passports With Biometric Recognition Systems This Year At Airports

Australia is planning to bring some radical changes to the way you’re checked into the country upon arrival at its airports. Among other things, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DBIP) wants to eliminate passport checks at its airports and instead would replace it with biometric facial recognition and this includes the iris and/or fingerprints.

This means that in future you might arrive at an Australian international airport and not be checked in by a single immigration officer and they believe this would speed up the admission process at the airport while identifying those on watch lists quicker. According the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), the Seamless Traveller project has been in train since 2015, with almost $100 million budgeted over five years, but the DIBP has only now embarked on the most ambitious aspect of the project, which it says will “transform the border experience”.

This technology will be trialed at the Canberra airport from July before spreading to busier airports in Sydney and Melbourne. Seeing as Australia would likely be the first to implement such a technology at the airport to admit arrivals into the country, this puts the nation ahead of its developed counterparts.

So don’t be surprised when you visit Australia sometime this year and you are allowed to just walk in without anyone stopping you, it just cameras that are capable of uploading  information about you but as one report puts this, faster entry into Australia also means longer time to wait for your luggage.