Australian passport
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Australian passports are passports issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, both in Australia and overseas. Australian passports are issued only to Australian citizens.
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[edit] History of the Australian passport
- The 'X' series passport issued in 1917 is one of the earliest passports. It was during World War I that monitoring and identifying those crossing international borders became critical to the security of Australia and its allies;
- The War Precautions Act 1914–15 required that all persons over 16 years of age, on leaving the Commonwealth, possess a passport;
- In 1949 two types of passport were issued:
- B Series passports were issued (within Australia only) to British subjects who were not Australian citizens.
- C Series passports were issued only to Australian citizens.
- The words Australian Passport replaced British Passport on the cover of the Australian passport in 1949.
- Before 1983, a married woman's passport application had to be authorised by her husband;
- In 1984, Australian passports included machine readable lines and were the first to have a laminate built into the document;
- In 1986, the introduction of Single Identity passports meant children could no longer be included on their parent's passport;
- Until 1988, a woman could apply for and receive a passport in her married name, before she was actually married.
- The 'M' series passport was issued from 27 November 2003, which included enhanced security features.
[edit] The Australian Biometric Passport (ePassport)
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade introduced the next generation of Australian passport: the biometric 'ePassport' on 24 October 2005.
The ePassport is very similar to the previous 'M' series Australian passport, differing only in having an embedded RFID microchip in the centre page and a gold international ePassport symbol on the front cover.
The chip embedded in the centre pages stores the holder's digitised photograph, name, gender, date of birth, nationality, passport number, and the passport expiry date. This is the same information that appears on the printed information page of every passport.
Facial recognition technology is being introduced to coincide with the release of the ePassport. This technology will be used to improve identity verification and reduce identity-related fraud.
The ePassport offers several important advantages over the previous Australian passport :
- The Australian government claims that ePassports provide greater protection against fraudulent misuse and tampering
- The Australian government's claim that the ePassport reduces the risk of identity fraud is, perhaps, open to debate. Already it has been shown in the USA that a home made scanner can read these chips from a distance of 3-4 feet, roughly 10 times the designed scanning distance.[citation needed]
- The Australian government claims that ePassports enhance the protection of Australia's border through speedy and secure verification of incoming Australian passport holders.
- Recent headlines highlight the fact that ePassport data is NOT secure.[citation needed] Whilst cloning of ePassports wouldn't benefit the thieves in the form of providing a working cloned passport (the physical passport needs to be cloned as well), the data stored in ePassports is very useful for identity theft and also for illicit tracking purposes, such as monitoring the movements of individuals and identifying the nationality of passport carriers within crowds.
[edit] Languages
The data page/information page are printed in English and French.
[edit] Passport note
Most passports contain a note from the issuing state that is addressed to the authorities of all other states, identifying the bearer as a citizen of that state and requesting that he or she be allowed to pass and be treated according to international norms. The note inside Australian passports states:
- The Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, being the representative in Australia of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, request all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer, an Australian Citizen, to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him or her every assistance and protection of which he or she may stand in need.
[edit] Note
The Pictures are uploaded from Press resources of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Australia) web site http://www.dfat.gov.au/dept/passports/press/index.html
