Statement on changes to Queensland licences

Published Friday, 12 January, 2018 at 10:16 AM

Minister for Transport and Main Roads
The Honourable Mark Bailey

Please attribute to a spokesperson for the Minister for Transport and Main Roads:

TMR continues to collect and record information on gender when a person applies for a licence.

This information continues to be available to police through technological advances.

For example, police have 24-7 access to this information, including the digital photograph as it appears on the licence, through QLite tablet devices.

TMR has advised that other jurisdictions are making similar changes, which first came into effect in Queensland in October 2016.

There was no cost to taxpayers.

The primary drivers for the changes were:

1)      amendments to theCommonwealth Sex Discrimination Act in 2013; and

2)      improvement to biometric imaging and facial recognition technologies that made much of the information previously collected redundant for identification purposes.