Australia is looking at trialling passport-less travel in a move Foreign Minister Julie Bishop predicts will go global. 
The idea of cloud passports is the result of a hipster-style hackathon held at the Department of Foreign Affairs, which led to an X-Factor style audition before the secretary Peter Varghese, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Assistant Minister Steve Ciobo and Chris Vein from the World Bank.
The call was put out to the diplomatic corps in Canberra and the 110 missions around the world for any idea that would be a radical rethink of "business as usual".
More than half the staff submitted, or voted or commented on, one of the 392 pitches to the "DFAT Ideas challenge".
The top 10 were presented to the quartet of judges who favoured the idea of passport-less travel. Under a cloud passport, a traveller's identity and biometrics data would be stored in a cloud, so passengers would no longer need to carry passports and risk having them lost or stolen. DFAT says 38,718 passports were registered as lost or stolen in 2014-15, consistent with the 38,689 the previous year.
Australia and New Zealand are now in discussions about trialling cloud passports. Ms Bishop acknowledged there were security requirements which would have to be met in order to store biometrics in the cloud, but told Fairfax Media: "We think it will go global."
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