Services Australia's COVID vaccine certificate 'not changing' despite forgery concerns

Services Australia told a Senate committee it had no plans to make adjustments after senators and tech experts raised concerns over false vaccine certificates on Thursday morning.

Independent senator Rex Patrick demonstrated in early August it had taken around 10 minutes to forge a COVID-19 vaccination certificate for testing purposes, which could grant a person extra freedoms as pandemic restrictions ease around the country.

He asked Ms Skinner what the government was doing to address the security concerns relating to certificate forgeries.

Agency chief executive Rebecca Skinner said there were no plans, adding paper certificates had been a part of the fabric of government service delivery for "many, many years".

If someone had suspicions about false certificates, they should call Services Australia to confirm its veracity, she said.

"We are not changing our approach to providing the paper-based service that we have provided for a number of years," Ms Skinner said.

"Any facility that needed high assurance that someone was vaccinated, or had any reason to be concerned about that, we would suggest that they call us and we can support them to attest to someone's vaccination status with that person's consent."

Ms Skinner said there was no business case for forgeries as vaccinations, and the certificates proving them, were free.

"I have no systemic evidence of there being rackets of people selling or producing Australian documentation," she said.

"We've taken the process of making this simple and helpful to citizens, as opposed to complex, and to [having] any need to roll out any further infrastructure around, I think, what you're proposing would be things like QR codes on a piece of paper."

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But Senator Patrick said the point was that there were still Australians hesitant to get the jab and a flawed system could enable them to avoid needing them altogether.

"I'm proposing integrity for the system," he said.

"The problem is not the people who get vaccinated and genuinely get a certificate, the problem is for those people - and there are many of them, many of them that are quite prepared to break rules [and] we've seen that in Melbourne and Sydney - that [they] can simply get a certificate and forge it.

"You've got to have confidence in [the system]. Surely you appreciate the problem."

Last month, Senator Patrick warned many of the government's promises were underpinned by a certificate system with obvious faults.

"It basically undermines the health response," he told The Canberra Times.

"Whichever of the measures people decide to tie to this, if you have a forged certificate, you undermine the measure.

"It becomes valuable after I start saying to you, 'You can't travel to South Australia unless you've got one of these'."

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