Kiwis will be subjected to face scans when entering Australia

Australian Customs project leader Gillian Savage told the annual Biometrics Institute Australia conference that New Zealanders entering Australia will be subject to facial-recognition scanning “as soon as possible.” He said that a public trial in Brisbane would be followed by the launch of the technology at Sydney and Melbourne airports in August. Savage said that “Initially, the SmartGates will only be able to process Australian e-passport holders. However, we will open the service up to New Zealand e-passport holders as soon as possible. Other e-passport holders beyond that will require foreign-language support, but the SmartGate programme will, ultimately, be open to all eligible e-passports from around the world,” she says.

The Australian trials are six months behind schedule because of several technical issues. “We’ve had the booths and gates in place since the end of February, but through the testing we discovered a whole range of issues around hardware and software,” Savage says. The Australians use software from German company Cognitec Systems. Australian vendor Biometrix was paid more than $A600,000 to develop middleware to interface to other elements of the SmartGate system.