Digital driver licence here by year’s end - and much more to come

Sunday, 21 September 2025

ANALYSIS: The Government will likely introduce digital drivers’ licences by the end of the year, according to Digital Services Minister Judith Collins

Collins has been driving to get an all-of-Government app up and running, and she has a simple aspiration: for the new app to be as simple to use as an online banking app.

Collins, who sat down with the Sunday Star Times in her Beehive office on Thursday, was clearly very excited about the prospect of the digital drivers’ licence being introduced by the end of the year.

“The main thing is not to stuff it up,” Collins says, stressing that while the Government is determined to get the new tech, which is currently in beta testing phase, over the line, it will not be rushed out the door if not ready to go

“It's not a big bang theory. It's a small bang theory. And we add as we go, a bit like Lego, we're adding on.”

And licences are just the beginning. It will be the first of a long list of Government services that will be involved in a one-stop-shop of the app.

Over time the goal is to add a whole suite of government services - from car registrations, tolls, Inland Revenue and taxes, government payment such as superannuation and benefits and payments from the Ministry of Social Development. Births deaths and marriages documents. Even parking fines. In the next few years, the lot.

Collins is very keen to emphasis the choice element here, both that people don’t have to use the app if they don’t wish to, but also that the the New Zealand Government should be treating residents as people with choices.

“We have to treat them as though they have an opportunity to go elsewhere, even when they don't,” she says.

Collins’ approach looks very similar to that taken by the former Liberal NSW Government, most latterly under a minister called Victor Dominello.

In NSW, all government services such car regos, parking fines, land transfers, births death and marriages and the like were all folded in to an organisation called Service NSW, which sits inside a department called the Department for Public Service.

A decade after Service NSW was launched in 2013 the changes were quite incredible. Some 8000 phone numbers were simplified into one phone line and 800 Government websites were folded into one. Then in 2015 the app was launched and by 2019 a digital drivers’ licence was rolled out within it.

Today, over 80% of NSW drivers use the drivers’ licence in the app. As a result, a resident of NSW can do basically any state government interaction through their phone and on the rare occasion it is more complicated or a person prefers to talk to someone or go to a service centre they can. (As a former resident of the state I can confirm both Service NSW and the app really did transform dealings with the state)

This is where Collins wants New Zealand to end up.

“We're working on the basis that we get the thing going and we start putting some things on,” Collins says said.

It comes four months after NZ Verify - an app that verifies various foreign forms of identification was launched. For instance, Australians with various state drivers’ licences can verify and issue their digital licence in New Zealand - making it much faster and easier for renting cars for instance.

And the new Government app also had a digital ID that proves they are over 18 years old.

Collins is also keen to point out that, in her view, digital derives are in fact safer than those that are paper based.

“We have a lot more safety in place in many ways, because if someone steals your … digital credentials somehow - they have to be really extremely capable to do that. But then there's a footprint. There's always a footprint left.”

This she says, contrasts with the current situation.

“Instead, if people go and rent a house, or they rent a flat, or they do something like that, now they have to give all their hard copy of what they've got for someone else to photocopy: passports, drivers’ licences, you know, all sorts of utility bills to someone to photocopy and put in a physical filing cabinet that anyone in that place can access.

“So they're big fat honey pots sitting there waiting for someone to steal them, while digital actually brings enormously more security.”

Overall, Collins says it is about convenience.

“So it's like thinking about how to make life easier for people if they want it to be, because there are people who think, oh, this could be some government plot. And there are also people who live in parts of the country where connectivity is very low, and I understand that.”

And there is likely to be a political dividend if the Government gets this right. The former NSW Liberal Party thought that the Serve NSW model and very easy-to-use app was one of the reasons its Government got re-elected for a third term after eight years in office in 2019. And the reason is simple: providing good, professional and friendly Government services and making formerly tedious or nerve-racking administrative tasks easy go directly to Government competence.

And getting it right affects just about the whole voting population positively. Something clearly not lost on Collins.

This marks the latest chapter in the now storied career of the former party leader. She holds the portfolios of Defence, space and the spooks, as well as being Minister for Digitising Government and Public Service Minister as well as being Attorney-General.

Collins is well-regarded across the defence firmament, and has made it her business to get on with digitising as much within Government as possible - which her dual digital and public service hats should allow. She told The Post in March that she was getting AI to write some of her speeches. Her politics may be an acquired taste for many, but her ministerial competence is often remarked upon around the traps.

After the previous Government passed the Digital Identity Services Trust Framework Act 2023 which created the rules around digital identity, Collins and her officials have driven the development.

“The vast majority of people don't even want to be on a laptop now. They just do it all on their phones. I do everything I can on my phone, banking - anything I can do

“And if you think about iti again, I come back to banking, if the banks can do it, then why the hell can't we do it?”