The OpenID Foundation's Australian Digital Trust Community Group made three separate submissions into Australian identity policy this month, covering the Digital ID Act review, verifiable credentials, and identity verification for electronic property transactions.
The through-line is usability. The Foundation's central recommendation is that Australia focus on interoperability and start issuing trusted, reusable digital credentials, licences, qualifications and permits that work across different services, rather than credentials that exist only inside the government schemes that issued them.
The most forward-looking part of the submissions raises the use of these credentials by AI systems and automated tools acting on a person's behalf. That question, how an agent proves it is authorised to act for you, is the same one dominating the enterprise side of this publication, from the IETF authorization draft to this issue's community survey. It is now arriving in national identity policy too.
Why identity teams should care
For Australian readers this is worth following closely, because reusable government-issued credentials would change employee onboarding, customer verification and the identity-proofing step in account recovery, exactly the process this issue's lead story shows attackers targeting. A verifiable credential that a service desk can check beats a caller who knows an employee ID.
And for everyone: national digital ID schemes are quietly becoming identity infrastructure your organisation will one day consume. The time to understand the trust framework is before your legal team asks whether you can rely on it.
Source
OIDF's key recommendations to Australia's Digital ID Act review, OpenID Foundation