Panicking about your passport could soon be a thing of the past.

People travelling in and out of Australia could do so without having to present their passports in the near future, with airport security set to undergo a radical overhaul in the country between now and 2020. According to ABC News, the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Control is seeking tenders for a new self-processing system at airports by the end of this year. Under the new system, airline passengers will be identified by fingerprint, iris or facial recognition structure rather than having to present their passports at major air and sea ports in an upgrade that will cost an estimated AUS$78 million (approximately €49.4 million). The overhaul of the existing system is designed to eliminate the need for paperwork or manual processing for 90 per cent of airline passengers by the year 2020. Commenting on the plans to overhaul the current system, Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said:

"In many cases that will mean people, whilst they'll still have to carry their passport, may not have to present their passport at all in the long term. "But in the immediate term, this will make it easier, it will make it quicker, for people going in and out of our airports."

Dutton said that the use of more sophisticated identification technology will be more reliable and will also boost tourism in the country.

"Already we know from the money we've invested into biometrics collections that that is a much more reliable collection than we have with people just scanning manually passports. "So there is the ability through this technology to improve detections of people that might be coming into our country to do the wrong thing."

It certainly sounds interesting to us; anything that can help prevent scenes like this in airport terminals is a Godsend…