Only Scott Morrison – and not an accident-prone cabinet minister or a hardline attorney-general – can convince 40 per cent of Australians to sign up to the TraceTogether app.
The Prime Minister’s own government MPs, including a former police officer no less, are worried about the erosion of privacy and freedom as it’s rolled out next week.
So it’s little wonder many Australians are concerned about giving the state more details on their everyday movements outside of their own homes.
Police in recent weeks have taken advantage of the grey areas around the rushed COVID-19 public health orders to fine people for sitting on a park bench or eating a kebab after a workout – despite exercise being allowed during the lockdowns.
Australians are now being told that if they want coronavirus restrictions eased, in as little as three weeks, they must sign up to a tracing app that uses Bluetooth technology to determine whether someone they have come in contact with has tested positive to COVID-19.
Only Scott Morrison – and not an accident-prone cabinet minister or a hardline attorney-general – can convince 40 per cent of Australians to sign up to the TraceTogether app (pictured in Singapore where only 20 per cent of residents have downloaded it)
Convincing 40 per cent of Australians to download the program is a big ask, considering just 20 per cent of people were prepared to do so in authoritarian Singapore, where the app was developed.
This is why Mr Morrison, and not his embattled Government Services Minister Stuart Robert, needs to make the case for the app.
This task can’t be left either to Attorney-General Christian Porter, whose career has included taking a hard line on law and order in Western Australia and giving police the power to access encrypted data as part of last year’s federal anti-terror laws.
Mr Morrison also needs to explicitly explain why and how police and intelligence agencies will be prohibited from ever accessing the data under any circumstances so the public has confidence their data will not be used against them.
He also needs to guarantee none of the TraceTogether data will be admissible in court – whether someone is charged with breaching a COVID-19 restriction or brought before the law for an unrelated offence.
On March 24th, the day the business shutdowns saw tens of thousands lining up outside Centrelink, Mr Robert made the extraordinary and tone-deaf remark that he didn’t realise coronavirus would cause so many job losses.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison (pictured in Canberra on April 23, 2020) needs to explicitly explain why police and intelligence agencies will be prohibited from accessing the data so the public has confidence in the legal system
Last week, he was even more unconvincing when he promised the data would be deleted after the pandemic was over.
‘At no point does the commonwealth get the data, at all and when the pandemic’s done, I delete the app and all data from my phone and then I the minister will blow away the national data store and therefore no data will be kept for individual citizens,’ he said on April 18.
Civil libertarians in Australia aren’t the only ones concerned about privacy, with former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and his Nationals colleague Llew O’Brien, himself a former Queensland police officer, declaring they would not install TraceTogether.
Mr O’Brien, the deputy speaker, said was a ‘snowflake’s chance in hell’ he would use the app.
The regional MPs have taken an even more strident position against TraceTogether than even the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, which in fact supports that app provided police are banned from accessing the data.
The Prime Minister’s own government MPs are worried about the erosion of privacy and freedom. Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce (right) and his Nationals colleague Llew O’Brien (top), himself a former Queensland police officer, declared they would not install TraceTogether
The government has heeded the concerns of leading civil libertarians like Terry O’Gorman, and flagged introducing legislation to restrict data access to healthcare professionals.
‘Law enforcement agencies will not be provided access to information collected via the app,’ Mr Porter told Daily Mail Australia.
‘Specific regulatory action will be taken to prevent such access for law enforcement agencies at both the commonwealth and state/territory level.’
Like the legal profession, opinion polls show Australians accept manual contact tracing is slow and cumbersome and want technology deployed to tackle the worst global pandemic since the Spanish flu killed 50million people worldwide between 1918 and 1920.
Since late last year, COVID-19 has infected more than 2.6million people globally, killing 183,424 including 74 in Australia.
‘There is a major plus in taking it up – it is a once-in-a-one-hundred year pandemic and the civil liberties council supported moves we otherwise would not have supported because of the extreme health dangers caused by it,’ Mr O’Gorman said.
This requires trust, consent and goodwill – which should not be abused.
So it’s little wonder many Australians are concerned about giving the state more details about their everyday movements outside of their own homes. Pictured are shoppers in Australia
The Prime Minister and not embattled Government Services Minister Stuart Robert (pictured) needs to make the case for installing TraceTogether to combat COVID-19