E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
FIVEAA RADIO
WEDNESDAY, 15 JULY 2020

SUBJECTS: COVIDSafe tracing app’s failure to trace; Melbourne lockdown; Personal protective measures.

LEON BYNER, HOST: You may remember not long ago the Prime Minister held a national press conference and he looked down the barrel of the TV cameras at you and me and said, “listen, you want to have a drink with your friends at the pub on a Friday night download the COVID-19 app”, and there was a big push and I must say myself and just about everybody that I work with here did it almost immediately and we discovered that it sucks the hell out of the battery. But that's just one of those things, anyway, we kept it going and we thought this is going to be good because we'll be able to trace all these people who have inadvertently or unknowingly been infected by COVID-19. Wrong, six point six million people have downloaded this app and I asked you the question earlier today in, let's say, Victoria and New South Wales, how many cases were apprehended of COVID-19 using this app? The answer is none. How so? Shadow Minister for Government Services Bill Shorten,Bill, good morning, can you add more meat to the bone on this? Because there was a Senate Inquiry about this, and it appears that only one in four of some devices do the job that it was supposed to do.

BILL SHORTEN, MEMBER FOR MARIBYRNONG: Good morning, Leon. Yeah, listen, I should say at the outset, Labor is supportive of tracing apps which can help us see where the infections come from and moved along, so we wanted it to work. I have to say, though that I've been surprised in recent days that the reports that for the outbreak in Victoria, it just hasn't been anywhere near what we thought it would be. So, there was a Senate enquiry it said that there were technical problems to be fair to the app, I think they've tried to improve when technical glitches are identified. But the reality is, I can't speak for Adelaide because I haven't been there since the lockdowns and the shutdowns, but in Melbourne and in Canberra, whenever you go to a restaurant or a coffee shop, you have to record your name in old-fashioned pen, on old-fashioned paper and your mobile and that's been getting me thinking in the last few weeks that: How is it that in this age of the Internet and technology and with an app for everything, that somehow the pen and paper is still the most useful form of tracing? So, it's frustrating, so this is not even party politics, It's just frustrating. We were told this would be like sunscreen and you could go out in the sun. I wonder if relying on technology hasn't made us a bit complacent - that by having the app on your phone that it makes you feel like individually you can stop the virus. Logically, that's not what happens and I notice, I don't know what the debate's been like in South Australia Leon, but in Victoria now, we've been told that masks are the way to go if you can't socially distance now early on, we were told masks weren't effective. Now we're told they're effective. So, I just think people just want straight talk and in my experience, people will do what it takes provided we’re just told all of the facts.

BYNER: Stay on the line, Bill, because I will come back to you. We're talking with the director of Cyber from the University of New South Wales, Nigel Phair. Nigel, why has it come to this?

NIGEL PHAIR, UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES: Good morning Leon, well, look it’s an interesting one It's a really good point, I just think the big user acceptance testing was done in the rush to get the app out. Like you, I downloaded it and we talked about privacy before, I really believe Australians actually want this to work and that they really want to get on with their lives that they'll get around those sort of things and dare I say give up some glimmer of privacy. But the reality is the way that these devices are made, particularly iPhones, they're actually not meant to talk to each other from a Bluetooth perspective, when you've either got the phone locked or the screen not active, it’s just how they are made.

BYNER: So really, we were sold a pup in the first place that because the phones are not made to talk to each other, see, this was the assumption, wasn't it? That download this app, have your phone going, which people did, they noticed that the battery was getting weak very quickly, but it turned out that the phone wasn't talking to somebody else's phone and so health authorities hadn't been able to use it.

PHAIR: That's rights as Mr Shorten said, you know we were sold it as being like sunscreen, and that’s quite disappointing because where this really hits is the next time the government comes out with a ‘this is a great technology idea to help us in life’, people are going to look at these sort of thing and say that didn’t work, then they’re going to look at the Census and go that didn’t work, they’ll look at Robodebt and go that didn’t quite work, it really does hit to the confidence of people with a technology-enabled society, which is really what we want, we actually want this to work.

BYNER: So, what's the lesson out of this in your opinion?

PHAIR: Well, it's all about comms and being straight-up right from the outset and saying to people we are going to build an app, it may or may not work, but we’re going to give it a go, we’re going to rush it out and we’ll do some work on the side and there have been some updates, I know with mine four or five times since this has gone on, but you can’t get away from the fact that particularly iPhone to iPhone, they’re made so they don’t talk to each other, and there’s some good security and privacy reasons, you don’t want to be walking along the main street and have other devices ping you via Bluetooth, whether it’s malicious or a restaurant advertising its lunch menu.

BYNER: Thank you, so, Bill Shorten are you guys you know, you mix around your electorate, you talk to your colleagues, are you all doing the sanitizing and social distancing and masks?

SHORTEN: Oh hugely now, I mean, I'm very thankful, My wife, Chloe, she's been absolutely vigilant on this, we even took out - we're in a lucky position we could - the kids out of school a week before they shut down the school, so we've been very switched on to it. But my electorate has been hard hit, we had the Flemington towers, the high rise where people were locked up. I've got Menarock aged care facility where 16 residents in the last two days have tested positive for COVID-19 and my suburb, I guess some diehard Liberals may find this funny, we've had a lockdown a week longer than everyone else in Australia. So social distancing is switched on by the people in my electorate, a lot more masks, a lot of people still don't wear masks, I don’t know if they think it's not manly or whatever, but to me, the theory of the mask is that it stops people infecting other people. If everyone wears it, so when I wear a mask, my message to others is I'm courteous enough about your health that I wear one. I mean, not that I'm sick, but I just think, I think the mask is important. I just feel for the small businesses, though, they're the ones who are doing it really hard at the moment and the elderly and vulnerable. So I think all recipes, all solutions should be part of the armoury, but I do think when it comes to this app, you know, it just boggles the brain that I'm given a pen and a piece of paper to trace, and that's fine. I want the app to work, it just seems to me that what they need to do is communicate with experts in the industry and to have tested it before they announced it. The golden rule is under-promise and over-deliver.

BYNER: Bill, good to talk to you. That's the Shadow Government Services Minister Bill Shorten with some assistance there from Professor Nigel here. Have you kept the app on your phone, or you just leave it there? I've kept mine I didn't delete it.

ENDS