The days of signing on the dotted line may be numbered.
The federal government has announced it is taking statutory declarations into the digital age, saying it will accept electronic signatures and video link witnessing from next year.
It makes permanent a change introduced during the pandemic, when attending a justice of the peace (JP) for a statutory declaration – a practice that goes back to the 19th century – was forbidden under lockdown restrictions.
Legislation introduced this week by the federal attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, will also allow people to digitally execute a statutory declaration using the online platform myGov and the myGovID Digital ID.
Dreyfus says the bill is intended to keep with the changing ways of Australians.
“This bill will respond to how Australians want and expect to engage and communicate digitally with government by providing options to make commonwealth statutory declarations facilitated by technology,” he says. “This bill is an important milestone in driving the digitisation of government services.”
While a signature in ink has been used for hundreds of years to record someone’s agreement, consent or to verify their identity, its digitisation would leave it as a relic of the past.
Meryl Kane is a JP at Chatswood Library, in Sydney’s lower north shore, and she believes that with digitisation, something fundamental and tangible could be lost in the process.
“I think a signature will always hold a bit of power, but we are possibly losing something here,” she says.
“There’s always a visceral aspect associated with signing on a dotted line, that just doesn’t come with pressing a button.”
Kane doubts the move to digitise the signature would spell the end of a traditionally written one, especially considering how arduous organising a digital identity could be.
“Particularly for the older generations, or for people where English isn’t their first language, the process of getting your digital identification is actually quite a long one and I doubt many people will do it until they actually find they need to.”
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In its announcement, the government says the move could save over $156m each year, hundreds of thousands of hours and be a productivity winner for the private sector.
With Australians spending an estimated 9m hours each year executing and processing more than 3.8m statutory declarations, the hope is the measures will smooth out the process.
But the state president of the New South Wales Justices Association, John Brodie, is also not as convinced, saying there are security concerns the move does not address.
Brodie says digitisation could “debase” the authenticity and importance of documents such as statutory declarations and affidavits by opening the door to hackers and scammers. He also questions the government’s promise to implement its fraud and security arrangements.
“Progress is great, but we all know that anything electronic is suspect to scamming, and that it can be accessed by those who want it,” Brodie says. “The acceptance of a stat dec as a proper legal document is not something we want to change. And anything modern or super modern that might undermine the integrity of that document shouldn’t even be considered.”
Brodie says video link witnessing does not provide enough security to ensure someone is not being coerced into signing anything.
“This provides ways to undermine the statutory declaration, and opens up ways for someone to be coerced; there just isn’t enough safety around these measures, particularly for the vulnerable.”