This is the only genuinely addressable delay in driver licensing, and the database is unusually clear about why.

Across all eight jurisdictions, the overwhelming majority of elapsed time is statutory -- legislated minimum periods on a learner or provisional licence. In New South Wales the profile is 1,460 statutory days against 49 days of scheduling and 3 days of actual assessment. That is not red tape in any useful sense of the term. Those periods exist so that inexperienced drivers accumulate experience under restriction, and no administrative reform can compress time.

The test booking queue is different in kind. When a learner has held the licence for twelve months, logged their hours and passed the hazard perception test, they are ready. Everything that follows is waiting for an examiner appointment. In August 2025 that wait was reported at six to eight weeks in NSW against a normal expectation of about a week, driven substantially by a rule requiring overseas licence holders to be retested within three months. Service NSW recruited 20 additional testing officers in response -- which is the right instinct, and treats a structural constraint as a staffing incident.

The structural fix already exists domestically. The ACT pathway converts a single government bottleneck into a market of accredited assessors, and an applicant taking that route is not exposed to the queue at any point. South Australia offers the same alternative. Neither is an experiment: both have operated for years, and their novice driver outcomes are measurable and comparable.

Note what this proposal does not touch. It leaves every statutory period, every supervised hour and every restriction exactly where it is. It changes only who administers the competence assessment, and only for jurisdictions that have decided the assessment itself is worth doing.