COVID19 Has Been A Real Challenge For The Functioning Of Our Commonwealth.

This appeared last week.

This saga provides some interesting insight into how technical progress can be stymied by State infighting and shifting requirements.

Vaccine passports the latest casualty of our hopeless infighting

The great irony is that we have an app that could have done the job nationally – the much-maligned COVIDSafe app.

Phillip Coorey Political editor

Sep 9, 2021 – 8.00pm

Australia must be the only country in the world able to have a blazing row in the middle of a crisis about when and where the Prime Minister can do his job.

So angry and divided has the nation become that it spent two days this week mired in furore because the Prime Minister went home to Sydney at the weekend to see his kids, just as every other federal MP from NSW who had been stuck in Canberra for weeks and months was entitled to do.

No exemption was necessary for him to go home and none was granted. No law was broken nor circumvented.

The supposed crime was that Scott Morrison jetted back to Canberra on Monday for some meetings and the women’s safety summit, and that trip did require an exemption from the ACT government. He’s heading back home to Sydney later this week.

Whether Morrison exercised poor judgment is a subjective assessment, fuelled by perception rather than fact.

Anthony Albanese, who also went home to Sydney after three months away, assured Morrison Labor would not make a big deal of his travel plans. When Labor did just that, however, Morrison phoned the Opposition Leader to ask what happened.

Albanese sort of hosed it down, telling The Australian Financial Review there was plenty to criticise Morrison for, but seeing his kids was not one of them.

As the nation fulminated over a Prime Minister having the temerity to travel to the national capital to run the country, the government indicated that the vaccine supply crisis was pretty much solved.

***** Lots omitted *****

Yet even on the way out, there is no broad agreement among all the states on the use of vaccine passports, which would speed up the exit by allowing businesses and venues to screen their customers and patrons, enabling people to get their freedom back and economies to reopen.

The states are being urged to modify their check-in apps so a person has to swipe only once to enter. The QR code would be read as usual and the person’s vaccine status would be displayed.

NSW, Victoria, SA and most likely WA are on board, while the ACT, for its own unique reasons, will not join.

Chief Minister Andrew Barr, who opposes passports on technological and philosophical grounds, said when the ACT hits the 70 per cent double-dose rate, it will have a 95 per cent first-dose rate.

Based on bookings and current rates, it will take only another two weeks for the ACT to have a double-dose rate over 90 per cent. Therefore, he’s not going to bother with vaccine passports.

Tasmania, the NT and Queensland are undecided, in part because their app is based on the ACT app and there are technological challenges in adapting it to incorporate a vaccine certificate.

The great irony in all of this is that we have an app that could have done the job nationally – the much-maligned COVIDSafe app.

There was nothing wrong with the app until it had to be reworked to accommodate all the fears about privacy and the government being able to track your movements. It was reworked to the point where it was rendered ineffective. It lost its utility.

So, we wound up with eight different apps, one for each state and territory, which allow each government to track your movements.

Just another example of the mishmash approach the federation has imposed on our COVID-19 response and now, potentially, our exit.

More here:

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/vaccine-passports-another-federation-mishmash-20210909-p58q3f

So basically we have abandoned the COVIDSafe app because it has been hobbled from working to contact trace to prevent location tracking nationally but then we had the States create 8 different apps which can track your location (using QR codes) and also display your vaccination status from the Commonwealth database.

Really you could not make this stuff up! Clearly there now needs to be strict legislation to protect the use of QR codes to preserve privacy and prevent abusive use of the data.

I guess this explains why it has been so tricky to land on a national app – albeit it really does make sense to have a single app to both check in with a QR code and display a vaccination status as a venue is entered on a national rather than a State level!

To me this reflects just how complex our efforts to cope with the pandemic and how rapidly requirements can change as the virus changes and we learn more.

Overall we have rather crab-walked to a solution which will work for most, most of the time. Not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good seems a reasonable compromise. An app with all the required functions in one spot is clearly the sensible end-point of all this!

What do you think we could do to make this all work better as we are going to need to contact trace and show vaccination status well into the future!

David.