'Australia’s ‘COVIDSafe App’: An Experiment in Surveillance, Trust and Law
(2020) University of New South Wales Law Research Series 999) by Graham Greenleaf and
Katharine Kemp
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The joint Australian governments’ coronavirus contact tracing app, marketed as ‘COVIDSafe’, was released on 26 April 2020 for public download by the federal government, together with an emergency Determination under the Biosecurity Act to govern its operation, a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) with the Health Department’s response to that PIA, and (not least) the App itself and its privacy policy.
It is a package intended to create sufficient public confidence to result in downloads of the app by a sufficient percentage of the Australian mobile-phone-owning population, for it to have a significant effect on the tracing of persons infected with the COVID19 virus. In the first few days since its launch nearly 3 million Australian’s have downloaded the app.
When Parliament resumes, probably on May 12, it is expected that the government will introduce legislation to replace the non-disallowable Determination. This article analyses the steps that Australian governments need to take if public trust is to be justified, and aims to make a constructive contribution to the development of better legislation and greater transparency.
We conclude that the conditions necessary to justify sufficient public trust in government for the Australian public to opt in voluntarily to the installation and use of the COVIDSafe app, and to not opt out, are lacking. Many of the main deficiencies we identify in this article are remediable: five deficiencies in transparency; and nine categories of improvements to the current Determination by the proposed COVIDSafe Act. However, the question of whether an individual Australian would be well advised to install and run the app remains a decision which depends on individual circumstances.
'Covid-19 and the Global Legal Disorder' by Simon Chesterman
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When the world restarts and the masks are put away, will the global legal order look the same? Should it?
A crisis is a terrible time to make predictions about the future. But it’s a great time to rethink dubious assumptions of the past, and address tensions revealed in the present. Just within the field of international law, Covid-19 has encouraged all three. Pundits predict the death of globalization — or its rebirth. Others assert that they always knew the global public health infrastructure was fundamentally flawed, or that it was the one thing saving us from apocalypse. And, of course, there are those eagerly seeking someone, somewhere, against whom they might bring a lawsuit. So it might be helpful to sort some of the wheat from the chaff and map out what we know, what we don’t know, and where we might go from here.
