There's no national ID card in Australia, and the law specifically (because there was a large outcry against it) disallows providers from only allowing the use of official ID to verify age.
Because the reality of course is, if you absolutely had to determine how old someone is...you'd ask for their ID. That's how pubs do it, and someone somewhere has had the galaxy-brain idea of going "well, sometimes bouncers just know so like, can't a computer do that?" without really thinking through the constraints of the problem (or that an absolute ton of underage people still get through).
EDIT: It's worth adding - ID cards don't work for this either. The most obvious thing to do is just photoshop the ID you send whoever. But that of course creates a real problem for the "protecting the kids" people. Modern AI would let you run a client-side web-app which would fake an ID for you, but legally the issue with fake ID is that it's considered "forging official documents" which is a crime on the part of the person doing it not the person being fooled by it.
Which in turn means that your "protect the kids" policy is actually a "prosecute the kids policy" if you setup a situation where a bunch of people are pretty likely to think (without knowing the ramifications) that they should just send a fake ID image.
Because the reality of course is, if you absolutely had to determine how old someone is...you'd ask for their ID. That's how pubs do it, and someone somewhere has had the galaxy-brain idea of going "well, sometimes bouncers just know so like, can't a computer do that?" without really thinking through the constraints of the problem (or that an absolute ton of underage people still get through).
EDIT: It's worth adding - ID cards don't work for this either. The most obvious thing to do is just photoshop the ID you send whoever. But that of course creates a real problem for the "protecting the kids" people. Modern AI would let you run a client-side web-app which would fake an ID for you, but legally the issue with fake ID is that it's considered "forging official documents" which is a crime on the part of the person doing it not the person being fooled by it.
Which in turn means that your "protect the kids" policy is actually a "prosecute the kids policy" if you setup a situation where a bunch of people are pretty likely to think (without knowing the ramifications) that they should just send a fake ID image.