This development was followed by the introduction of automatic toll collection by road authorities, first on the Melbourne City Link from late 2000, also using RFID technology, followed in NSW on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Tunnel in 2001.

In electronic toll collection, the E-Toll tag is an active RFID tag that is instantaneously linked to specific information provided by the car's owner and the toll is charged from a prepaid deposit. Prepayments are automatically charged to the car owner's bank account or credit card, in the case of E-Toll in NSW, at increments of $100.

Melbourne City Link was one of the world's first automated, fully electronic toll roads. Since opening in late 2000, the number of motorists using the City Link toll road has increased at a rapid rate. By June 2003, City Link had more than 650,000 customer accounts, plus a million infrequent users without accounts. In total, motorists were using the toll road for more than 700,000 transactions a day. These figures are expected to increase further in the future.

In NSW, half a million E-Toll tags had been issued by June 30, 2004, and use of E-Toll has increased to two in every three tolls paid on the bridge, tunnel and linked Cahill Expressway in the morning peak hour, according to the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) 2004 Annual Report.

For users, the E-Toll is a convenient way of paying a toll, particularly for NSW users after it became compatible with other motorways M2, M4, M5 and the Eastern Distributor, as well as Queensland Motorways and Melbourne City Link uses. Business users in particular benefit from the ability of keeping track of the expense for GST calculations.

At the government level, the take-up of E-Toll has enabled the RTA to significantly improve traffic flow through the toll plazas.

In the case of the e-passport, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) hopes the use of facial recognition technology will significantly reduce identity fraud and overcome the growing problem of impostors using legitimate passports.

Bob Nash, DFAT assistant secretary, passports branch, says identity fraud could be perpetrated when somebody who illegally or otherwise obtained a passport and who looked similar to the bearer of that passport simply assumed that person's identity. "They don't do anything to the [passport] and this is happening in increasing numbers," he said.

In 2003, DFAT issued almost one million passports. Of those, 4000 contained mistakes and 30,000 were lost.

Now IT risk-management company Cybertrust has won the federal government contract to supply the biometric technology, which incorporates RFID tags with unique and secure electronic identities or credentials, in a 10-month pilot test involving 6000 e-passports for DFAT. The pilot received $2.2 million funding in the federal 2004-05 budget.