New South Wales begins digital birth certificate program as part of digital ID push

As part of the big global push to digital ID systems, the Australian state of New South Wales’ government has contracted Thoughtworks, a Canadian tech company, to develop a digital birth certificate system. The plans started last year, when the NSW government announced it was consulting about Digital Birth Certificates as part of its “Government Made Easy” plan.

The NSW government claims the digital birth certificates will solve some of the problems of physical documents and hopes it will be widely adopted. But digital certificates will not replace the traditional physical documents, they will complement them.

NSW’s assistant registrar of births, deaths and marriages, Amit Padhiar, said the state will be the first in the globe to develop a digital birth certificate system that will provide a safe and secure process for identification, verification, and authentication.