NSW Driver Licence Photos to Be Incorporated into Federal Biometric Facial Database

Right now, there are laws before New South Wales parliament that facilitate the sharing of all NSW driver licence and identify card photos to a federal database containing ID photos from all Australian jurisdictions known as the National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution, or NDLFRS, that has the capability to match a single image against all other images, but it will not be used in this manner.

Tabled on 6 August 2026, the Crimes and Other Legislation Amendment (Further Organised Crimes Reforms) Bill 2026 is an omnibus piece of legislation that includes a law that amends the Road Transport Act 2013 (NSW), so that NSW ID photos will be made available in a federal database, where they will be accessed for one-on-one matching capabilities to prevent identity fraud.

The Albanese government established the NDLFRS, via the Identity Verification Services Bill 2023, which facilitates identity verification services, including a document verification service (DVS) and a facial verification service (FVS). And this will allow government and authorised private agencies to verify the identity of individuals, and for FVS, the use of biometric facial data will be employed.

This process has echoes of the National Facial Biometric Matching Capability that then home affairs minister Peter Dutton attempted to establish circa 2018. “The Capability” was to allow the matching of CCTV stills with facial images in real time, via a centralised hub, permitting access to all Australian ID photos, but civil society pushback and the dissolution of parliament thwarted this process.

Yet, federal Labor has built a system similar to the Capability that allows for one-on-one matching of ID photos but is also capable of matching one photo against the entire database. On introducing the NDLFRS laws in 2023, however, then attorney general Mark Dreyfus promised the initiative would not be used to mass surveil the public, which, as developments in NSW reveal, can be reversed later on.

Limiting the capability

Introduced by NSW police minister Yasmin Catley last Thursday, the Further Organised Crimes Reforms Bill revokes current section 271A of the Road Transport Act, which was inserted into the legislation in 2018 to facilitate the sharing of all NSW ID photos to the central hub to serve as part of the Capability, Dutton’s failed proposal, and it replaces it with laws relating to sharing to the NDLFRS.

The 2018 law allowing for NSW driver licence photos to be shared to the Capability had included a provision that ensured the privacy protections in sections 9 and 10 of the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (NSW) (PPIP Act) did not apply in relation to this agreement. Yet, the law before parliament now states that the entire PPIP Act does not apply to the NDLFRS.

New section 271A stipulated that NSW driver licence photos will be available to those participating in the “national agreement”, or the 5 October 2017 Intergovernmental Agreement on Identity Matching Services, which involved the federal, state and territory governments entering into an arrangement to share identity information, which built upon earlier determinations in 2007 and 2012.

The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) agreed to enter into this agreement in 2017, “to promote the sharing and matching of identity information to prevent identity crime, support law enforcement, uphold national security, promote road safety, enhance community safety and improve service delivery, while maintaining robust privacy and security safeguards”.

In introducing the federal NDLFRS bill, Dreyfus insisted that it will only be used in cases where an authorised entity has a photo of a “Mr X” and this will be verified solely via the biometric data stored under the name of “Mr X” to receive a Yes/No answer. The then chief lawmaker added that matching one photo against many would be limited to certain purposes and would mainly be prohibited.

All-pervasive surveillance

As the agreement sets out, the sharing of all citizen and resident biometric data for the purposes of crime prevention and in the investigation of criminal offences has been an Australian government desire since 2007. The Capability is the brainchild of former attorney general George Brandis, who’d already established a slow-moving manual version of it solely using federal passport photos by 2016.

The proposal to build the automated Capability was shifted to the Home Affairs Department circa 2018, as were a number of attorney general matters at that time. Then home affairs minister Dutton introduced the Identity-matching Services Bill 2018, which was to establish the interoperability hub, where photos would be accessed, along with the NDLFRS database for state and territory licences.

Dutton’s legislation lapsed with the dissolution of federal parliament in April 2019, as an election was about to take place. And after the Coalition was restored to office, it then introduced the Identity-matching Services Bill 2019 and the Australian Passports Amendment (Identity-matching Services) Bill 2019 to facilitate the Capability, but it was unable to pass these laws.

By 2019, the Capability had received so much bad press it had been rejected as a mass surveillance system and could no longer be progressed. However, the Albanese government was able to establish the scaled-back version of the NDLFRS, via the Identity Verification Services Bill and the Identity Verification Services (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2023, and the promise not to mass surveil.

The NDLRS went live in October last year. It now falls under the attorney general’s portfolio once more. The NSW Berejiklian government was the first state government to pass laws that permitted the sharing of NSW constituent ID photos to the proposed database in 2018. But this time round, NSW is the third jurisdiction to join, as Western Australia and South Australia have already done so.

Information should be used

The Albanese government appears to have built a version of Dutton’s Capability, with the potential to be used in a manner that would permit a law enforcement body to provide it with a photo and ask for a search to be conducted to match and identify the individual against the entire database, but, as former AG Dreyfus assured, it will not be used for these purposes.

So, the NSW Minns government has a piece of legislation before parliament to provide all NSW driver licence and ID photos to the federal database, without any consultation of the NSW public having taken place. And as Catley has assured, these images will only be used to check if an individual is the person they claim to be and held against one single image to receive a Yes/No answer.

However, another sets of laws that are contained in the police minister’s Further Organised Crimes Reforms Bill reveal that former federal attorney general Mark Dreyfus’ promise that the NDLFRS bill will not be used to mass surveil the public in real time is not worth the electricity it costs to generate those words on the screen of a computer.

Right now, that same piece of legislation containing the laws that allow for the sharing of NSW licence photos to the NDLFRS, contains other laws that seek to allow for the photos that are captured by toll cameras in NSW to take stills that not only capture the licence plates of vehicles but also those images of drivers and passengers, which are currently and have always been redacted.

The Roads Amendment (Tolls) Bill 1999 established toll camera use in NSW. Toll cameras have always redacted the images of the people inside a vehicle for privacy reasons. Yet the new legislation inserts new sections into the Roads Act 1993 (NSW) to permit the capturing of images of drivers and passengers, which could then be used to investigate serious indictable offences and missing persons.

Indeed, NSW premier Chris Minns was heard to say in respect of the toll camera photo issue, that it is “insane that a picture could be taken, that could help NSW police in a criminal case but not be able to use the information that is collected”.

And one can imagine a federal politician, a few years down the track, waving away the same privacy concerns about using the NDLFRS to match images of individuals via a search of the entire driver licence database, as well as a search of the Australian passport database, which is also permitted, in real time to solve crimes, because it would be insane not to use the collected information.