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 When it comes to ICT, national competition does not even stop at the company level. In many cases state-based parochialism hinders Australia's national interests. The cases in point are numerous from train guages to the Murray Darling river system, and more recenlty the squabbling over which piece of the NBN will go to which state jurisdiction.
Let's consider this in the context of national licencing. Queensland will be the first state to implement a smartcard-based driver's licence. Yet as certain as the other states are to follow, it is highly unlikely that other states will implement the same solution. They will be subtley different but fundamentally the same. Therefore, a national licencing bureau would seem like an intelligent national ICT undertaking. But rather than implement a single version, each state will be allowed to pursue thier own solution so long as they remain "interoperable". It is the modern version of the rail guage problem that took over a century to rectify. The arguments for producing national licences in one place, like passports and consistent rail gauges, is that it derives millions of dollars in savings. This is something that cannot be ignored in the current economic climate. At a federal level, the states already convene through Austroads who have successfully defined the necessary interoperability standards as evidenced by establishment of the Smartcard Licence Interoperability Protocal (SLIP) workgroup. The trigger required to move beyond interoperability for national licencing can be largely attributed to the technical requirements for identity based smartcards being internationally standardised (i.e. ISO). And as it happens this has also been achieved through the work here in Queensland. Why then do we continue to allow states to "go it alone", tossing aside the economic benefits afforded all states and territories to leverage existing platforms and bureaus for lower cost entry into the more robust national solution? Many countries, such as Malaysia, have also leveraged the benefits of smartcard technology to derive faster national integration of public services (and many with private sector service integration). A national licencing standard would go a long way to driving faster national acceptance of identity-based smartcard technologies. Yet therein lies the dichotomy for new technology. The common perception in the popular press is that Australian's perceive national identity cards to be problematic. Even though the state-based systems to manage the identity data would be separate it would be one step too close for many. The other enduring problem is the "we're different" argument. Philosophoically, government and their agencies, like companies, will always find ways to be different. Yet standards-based approaches and our own research into constituent uses of identity products suggest that this argument does not apply to every situation. Nation building has often occured in times when leaders have asked the nation to pull together on key projects. President Kennedy's Cold War "Space Race" plee to the nation, and other war efforts, all come to mind. The final challenge for a central licencing bureau is the first investment recovery problem. Without a national (federal) investment to seed a central bureau it would be logical for the initiating state to seek some minimal payback on the initial investment. Unfortunately such a position is often all that is required for someone to take the position that if they have to "buy in" anyway then they may as well just do it themselves. The bottom line is that while interoperability is the current default working position between states and jurisdictions, it is not always in the national interest. A policy that identified when interoperability was appropriate in relation to a cyber-ammendment to the constitution would be a major boost to Australia's future.
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