The OpenID Foundation's Australian Digital Trust Community Group (ADT CG) has submitted formal recommendations to Australia's statutory review of the Digital ID Act 2024. The submission outlines how Australia's digital trust infrastructure can be designed so that it emphasises interoperability, ecosystem wide participation, and practical adoption at scale.

The ADT CG's feedback centres on three interconnected themes.

1. Design for economy wide outcomes

The current Digital ID Act framework has provided an important foundation. However, future policy should move beyond prescriptive architectural models towards principles based design that enables multiple sectors and trust frameworks to participate. This requires rethinking success metrics. Success should be measured by real public value and how many people actually use the system, not just transaction counts or how many organisations get accredited.

The underlying insight is practical. Adoption barriers are increasingly economic and organisational, not technical. This is detailed in the ADT CG's 2026 research, The Impact of Digital ID Ecosystem Design on Welfare, which explores how ecosystem design affects real-world outcomes. Successful digital trust systems depend on network effects, aligned incentives, and coordination across government, industry, and community partners.

2. Prioritise a roadmap for trusted credential issuance

Digital identity credentials are a foundation. But the real drivers of ecosystem productivity are credentials proving qualifications, licences, permits, delegated authority, and other verifiable information. Government can accelerate adoption by prioritising the supply side, making trusted credentials readily available for reuse across sectors.

This also opens new possibilities. As systems mature, this could enable AI systems and automated tools to act on behalf of individuals, creating new ways to interact with government and business.

3. Reduce barriers to acceptance and use

Widespread adoption depends on making it easier for organisations to accept and integrate digital credentials. The ADT CG recommends focusing government effort on high volume, high value use cases that deliver benefits to the broadest participant base. Practical measures that simplify acceptance and reduce implementation friction will have greater impact on adoption than managing low frequency, high security edge cases.

A four pillar framework

The submission proposes that Australia's digital trust infrastructure should be supported by four interconnected pillars:

• commonwealth government
• state and territory governments
• private sector
• international interoperability. 

Long-term success depends not on the effectiveness of any single pillar, but on how well they operate together. Government sets policy and issues credentials. The private sector builds the services that use them. International standards keep Australian systems connected to the rest of the world.

Interoperability through OpenID standards

The ADT CG identified OpenID Foundation standards as likely to underpin or support the Australian Government Digital ID System. These include OpenID for Verifiable Presentation, OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance, OpenID Connect, FAPI 2.0, OpenID Federation, and Shared Signals. 

The group also encouraged the government to leverage existing OpenID Foundation conformance and certification services, which are designed to help ecosystem partners prove their deployments meet security, privacy, interoperability, and scale requirements at low cost.

John Scullen, Head of Trust & Identity Strategy and Futures at the Australian Access Federation Ltd, and co-chair of the ADT CG "This submission reflects input from across government, industry, technology, higher education, research, and standards communities. It shows that Australia's digital trust infrastructure is maturing, and that the next phase needs to prioritise economy-wide participation, practical adoption, and genuine public value."

The full submission is available here.

About the OpenID Foundation

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a global open standards body committed to building trusted identity ecosystems. Our mission is to lead the global community in identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy respecting. Founded in 2007, we are a community of technical experts. The Foundation's OpenID Connect standard is now used by billions of people across millions of applications. More recently, the FAPI security profile - built on OAuth 2.0 - has become the standard of choice for interoperable Open Banking and Open Data implementations, while OpenID for Verifiable Credentials specifications are underpinning a new generation of digital wallets. Today, the OpenID Foundation's standards are the connective tissue that enable people to assert their identity and access their data at scale, the scale of the internet, enabling "networks of networks" to interoperate globally. Individuals, companies, governments and non-profits are encouraged to join or participate. Find out more at openid.net.