For some of our longer serving staff it was hard to believe, but 27 November 2023 was the 20th Anniversary of NPA manufacturing the Australian passport book for DFAT and the Australian Passport Office. This significant milestone incorporates five different passport books across four passport series with many notable achievements along the way.
“This is a major achievement by all at NPA” says our CEO Malcolm McDowell. “To be responsible for the manufacture of the Australian passport booklet, in partnership with DFAT for the past 20 years is something of which we can all be very proud.”
To mark this 20-year milestone, a number of staff engagement events were held in November. As a lead-in to this milestone, NPA was proud to launch its latest video which tells the innovation and collaboration story required to deliver the R series passport.
The video was launched to the international security and ID documents community when NPA’s Principal Technical Officer, Michael Griggs presented the R series development story at Intergraf Currency + Identity in Bilbao, Spain. Michael also presented at Identity Week Singapore in November.
On Tuesday 14 and Thursday 16 November, the Passports Department hosted two Open Mornings in which groups of staff from outside the Passports department took a tour through the Passports Printing Room and the Passports Book Binding Hall to understand how the book is printed, prepared and assembled.
NPA also organised for DFAT’s R Series Passport Design Wall to be transported to Craigieburn for display in the lobby of the Staff Cafeteria starting Tuesday 21 November. This display comprises 13 panels that measure 2 m high by 1 m wide that document the indigenous designs that have been integrated through Australia's impressive new passport.
Finally on Tuesday 28 November, DFAT and the Australian Passport Office were NPA’s guest at a 20 Year Anniversary event as a show of appreciation for the successful cooperation and collaboration between our organisations across the last two decades that has delivered one of the world’s most recognised and accepted passports.
“The early years were spent building our reputation with DFAT of being a dependable supplier that could deliver a high-quality product on-time and in-full. Over time, we’ve really seen our relationship with DFAT become very close, to the point where NPA is collaborating with the DFAT and APO teams to push the design and technical boundaries of the Australian passport,” says Andrew Atwell, our Passports Operations Manager who was an original member of the team that installed and commissioned NPA’s passport production capability in 2003.
In 2015, the APO provided NPA with a very open brief for the R series passport, which gave the Technical Services and Design teams the opportunity to really push some challenging and innovative ideas. That brief was a function of the trust and confidence that had developed between the APO and NPA across the previous 13 years.
In speaking at the event, Malcolm acknowledged that allowing NPA to spend time working through a highly creative period of ideation followed by an equally challenging period of rationalising those ideas to just a few, required the APO team to sit with a degree of uncertainty for several years.
“Ironically, the trust that the APO has bestowed on NPA didn’t make the challenges any less daunting or the stress of finding an answer to a problem any less intense, but it did make the achievement more rewarding because that trust allowed NPA to think outside the square and explore new boundaries in passport security – and for that we very grateful to the APO,” said Malcolm.
