"There has been Twitter speculation that all of this is about age-gating social media."

"On my drive in to work [earlier this week], RNZ's Corin Dann challenged the Prime Minister about one part of his meeting with Australian PM Albanese. They had apparently promised to work toward some kind of joint ID and driver license system. [AUDIO, 04:15]...

"The PM's talk had this as all being about mutual recognition of driver licences. Which is obviously a weird justification. We already recognise each other's licences. And if Oz and NZ makes it tough for bars to recognise each other's licenses as ID, that's far more easily solved by just letting bars use the other country's driver's licence. The rest of it isn't needed for that problem. ...

"There has been Twitter speculation that all of this is about age-gating social media. It looks like this push started well before anyone was talking about that. ... Australia is running trials on ID/age verification setups for social media age gating; it looks like a report is soon due. ...

"[So] - both countries are working toward digital IDs, both countries five years ago agreed that they'd recognise each other's digital IDs, and this seems just to be reaffirming that prior agreement. I'd love there to be more assurance around privacy being important in the design of any of these in NZ. Because there are very bad versions that should not be supported. ...

"When the first a lot of us would have heard about a government digital ID is in context of a trans-Tasman agreement for mutual recognition, in context of Australia wanting to age-gate social media, and nobody particularly trusting that the age-gate system isn't intended to result in the kind of censorship being seen in Australia - not so hot."

~ Eric Crampton from his post 'To what policy problem is this the solution?'