On 23 August 2025, the New Zealand Government announced
that it would legislate to allow driver’s licences,
Warrants of Fitness (WoFs), and certificates of fitness to
be carried digitally on smartphones. For the first time,
drivers will no longer be legally bound to keep a physical
licence on them when driving. Prime Minister Christopher
Luxon lauded the change as “a common sense thing,” while
Transport Minister Chris Bishop celebrated New Zealand’s
status as a global pioneer, boasting that this country would
be among the first in the world to embrace fully digital
licensing.
At face value, this appears to be a
harmless modernisation – a reform designed to make
people’s lives easier by reducing dependence on plastic
cards and paper certificates. It is framed as an update that
reflects the ubiquity of smartphones, the rise of digital
wallets, and the growing impatience of a society accustomed
to instant services. Yet as with many reforms dressed up in
the language of efficiency and convenience, there is far
more at stake. The digitisation of licences and WoFs is not
a neutral step forward but a calculated extension of
surveillance, exclusion, and state control under the guise
of modernisation.
Digital licences are part of a
broader project of normalising surveillance, deepening
inequality, and further embedding capitalist and statist
domination in everyday life. Apparent “progress” in the
realm of digital governance must be treated with
suspicion.
The Convenience Rhetoric – Efficiency
Masking Control
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The state’s central justification
for introducing digital licences rests on convenience.
Ministers speak of making life “easier,” aligning New
Zealand with other technologically advanced countries, and
saving citizens from the supposed hassle of carrying
physical cards. Yet convenience has long been a rhetorical
cloak for policies that in fact increase state
oversight.
Carrying a plastic card may be
mildly inconvenient, but it grants a measure of
independence. A physical licence exists in your wallet,
outside the control of any network, app, or database. It is
vulnerable to being lost or stolen, but it is also tangible
and self-contained. A digital licence, however, is never
entirely yours. It resides in an app designed by the state
in collaboration with private contractors, linked to
databases beyond your control. Every time it is accessed or
presented, a record can be generated, stored, and
potentially cross-referenced with other information about
you.
We need to be suspicious of reforms
that increase the visibility of individuals to the state. As
Michel Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon reminds us,
surveillance does not need to be continuous to be effective.
The knowledge that one could be watched at any time is
enough to regulate behaviour. By moving licences and WoFs
into digital systems, the state extends its capacity to
watch, to record, and ultimately to
discipline.
Surveillance in the Digital Age
The
dangers of digital identity systems are not speculative.
Across the world, we see how centralised databases and
digital credentials become tools of authoritarianism. In
India, the Aadhaar biometric ID system has been used to deny
welfare to those who fail fingerprint scans, while in China,
digital IDs integrate seamlessly into the wider “social
credit” apparatus that punishes dissent and rewards
conformity.
New Zealand is not immune from these
dynamics. Once the infrastructure for digital licences is
built, it becomes relatively simple to integrate it with
other state systems – benefit records, voting enrolments,
even health data. What begins as a “driver’s licence on
your phone” can evolve into a full-spectrum digital ID.
This is the logic of scope creep, in which technologies
introduced for limited purposes expand into wider domains of
control.
Supporters argue that digital systems
increase security, but security for whom? For the state,
digital records create more reliable trails of evidence,
more opportunities to cross-check compliance, and more ways
to punish non-conformity. For citizens, however, they mean
less privacy, less autonomy, and a deepening sense that
one’s movements and activities are permanently
recorded.
The Digital Divide and Structural
Exclusion
Another aspect neglected in the
Government’s triumphant rhetoric is the question of
access. Digital licences presume that every citizen owns and
can operate a smartphone capable of running government apps.
Yet this is far from true.
Low-income families,
elderly people, rural Māori and Pasifika communities, and
those who simply cannot afford constant device upgrades risk
being excluded. While the Government insists that digital
licences will be an option, the reality of social
expectation and bureaucratic inertia is that physical
licences will soon be sidelined. Once police officers,
rental agencies, or even nightclubs grow used to checking
digital credentials, those without them will find themselves
marginalised, regarded as backward, or even treated as
suspicious.
From an anarcho-communist perspective,
this reveals the class nature of digital reforms.
Technologies presented as universally beneficial often
reinforce existing inequalities. The wealthy, connected, and
tech-savvy gain additional convenience, while the
marginalised are forced into new layers of exclusion. This
reflects the logic of capitalism itself – reforms that
appear progressive on the surface conceal their real
function of stratifying society and entrenching
hierarchies.
Corporate Capture and the Commodification
of Identity
No digital system operates in isolation
from capitalism. Developing and maintaining the
infrastructure for smartphone licences will inevitably
involve private contractors, cloud providers, and app
designers. The state presents the rollout as a neutral act
of governance, but in reality it is another transfer of
public dependence to private capital.
Corporations
benefit in two ways. First, through direct contracts to
design and maintain the systems. Second, and more
insidiously, through the monetisation of data. Once
people’s identities are digitised, the temptation to link
them with consumer behaviour, financial transactions, and
social media activity becomes immense. Even if New
Zealand’s government swears to protect data, we know from
countless international examples that privatisation by
stealth soon follows.
The commodification of identity,
where our very capacity to move, drive, or prove who we are
becomes a profit centre, is utterly at odds with
anarcho-communist principles. Identity should be a common
resource, held in trust by communities, not a product
managed by states and exploited by
corporations.
Fragility and
Dependence
Proponents of digital licences often argue
that they are “more secure” than physical cards. Yet
this overlooks the fragility of digital systems. Smartphones
run out of battery, apps crash, servers go offline, and
systems can be hacked. A plastic card does not depend on
Wi-Fi, 4G coverage, or the latest OS update.
Digital
dependence is not resilience, it is vulnerability. By tying
essential credentials to devices and networks, the state
makes citizens more dependent on fragile infrastructures
that can and do fail. This fragility is often downplayed in
the rush to appear modern, yet it will be the public who
bear the cost when outages or cyber-attacks
occur.
Resilience lies in decentralisation, not in
brittle centralised systems. A physical licence, however
imperfect, embodies a kind of autonomy that digital systems
cannot replicate.
The Myth of Technological
Leadership
Minister Bishop boasted that New Zealand
would be among the first in the world to implement such a
system. This pride in being an early adopter is revealing.
The state frames technological acceleration as inherently
virtuous, as though being first confers moral superiority.
Yet being first to adopt a flawed or authoritarian
technology is not a triumph but a
danger.
Technological hubris leads governments to
adopt systems before their risks are fully understood. By
the time negative consequences emerge, the system is already
embedded, and reversal becomes politically and technically
difficult. This is the path dependency of digital
governance, once society is locked into an infrastructure,
it becomes almost impossible to opt out.
Rather than
rushing to be first, a genuinely emancipatory politics would
ask whether such systems are needed at all, and whether they
truly enhance human freedom.
Towards Alternatives:
Community-Centred Identity
If society requires systems
of identity and accountability, they must be built from the
ground up in ways that protect autonomy rather than erode
it. Community-issued credentials, overseen by local
collectives rather than centralised states, offer one
possibility. Such systems could be physical or digital but
must remain open-source, transparent, and non-commodified.
Instead of being managed by corporations, identity could be
treated as a commons, owned and governed
collectively.
Equally, communities could experiment
with non-identitarian methods of accountability. Rather than
proving identity through documents, individuals could be
recognised through relationships of trust, mutual
responsibility, and local accountability. These may appear
impractical in the context of modern nation-states, but they
remind us that bureaucratic identity systems are not natural
or eternal. They are historical constructs that can be
resisted, dismantled, or replaced.
Resistance and
Praxis
How, then, should anarcho-communists respond to
the rollout of digital licences? Resistance must operate on
multiple levels.
First, there is the work of education
and agitation by exposing the real dangers of digital IDs
and challenging the narrative of convenience. This means
writing, speaking, and organising within communities to
ensure people see beyond the government’s glossy
rhetoric.
Second, there is the demand for genuine
choice – that physical licences remain permanently
available, with no penalty or stigma for using them. Any
attempt to phase out physical options must be resisted as
coercion.
Finally, we must connect this issue to the
wider struggle against surveillance capitalism and state
power. Digital licences are not an isolated reform but part
of a continuum of control that includes facial recognition,
biometric passports, and algorithmic policing. Only by
linking these struggles together can we mount an effective
resistance.
The Government’s proposal to allow
driver’s licences and WoFs to be stored on smartphones has
been heralded as a pragmatic modernisation, a step toward
convenience in a digital world. Yet beneath this rhetoric
lies a far more troubling reality. Digital licences deepen
surveillance, reinforce inequality, transfer public
functions to private capital, and render citizens dependent
on fragile technologies.
These developments are not
neutral. They are extensions of a broader system in which
the state and capital collaborate to regulate and commodify
everyday life. The convenience narrative obscures the
erosion of autonomy, the deepening of exclusion, and the
entrenchment of hierarchical power.
We must therefore
reject the framing of digital licences as a “common
sense” reform. Instead, we should see them as another
frontier in the struggle between liberation and control. Our
task is not merely to criticise but to resist, to imagine
alternatives, and to build systems rooted in community,
autonomy, and mutual aid.
The state wants us to
believe that progress lies in carrying our identities in our
pockets, ready to be displayed at the tap of a screen. We
must insist that true progress lies elsewhere – in
dismantling the apparatus of surveillance and building a
society in which identity is not a weapon of control but a
shared resource of freedom.
AOTEAROA
WORKERS SOLIDARITY
MOVEMENT
aotearoa_anarchism@riseup.net
