Australian gov to use facial recognition and GPS tracking to enforce quarantine
geospatialworld.net
geospatialworld.net
"In an official statement, the State Government announced a contract to a Western Australian (WA) company for $1.1 million to develop a new smartphone app that uses facial recognition and GPS tracking technology to monitor people who are ordered to self-quarantine at home, reported InDaily."
So this isn't an app meant to enforce state-wide quarantines or to enforce any additional restrictions or controls on the general public. This app is to enable those who are specifically ordered to self-quarantine (e.g. arriving from a Covid-hotspot, or close contacts of Covid-positive cases) to be able to check-in so that they can self-quarantine at home instead of at a managed isolation facility.
Keep in mind that when quarantined this way, if you fail to respond to their random, RANDOM, pings...they will send police officers to your house to do an in-person quarantine check. And not only that, but these so-called leaders of Australia are celebrating it and rubbing it in Australian faces. Source:
Returning travelers quarantining at home will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
You see that? South Australians should feel pretty proud that they're the national pilot for this. What an honor.
A slightly different reading of what they're saying is:
"The government ifs offering to allow you to quarantine in your home instead of the otherwise mandatory 2 week stay in a sealed room in quarantine hotel, if you agree to download and use this app."
And given that, rightly or wrongly, many Australian states are charging several thousand dollars for hotel quarantine, it's clearly a choice many people might choose to make.
On what planet do we live, where all of a sudden that statement even in your version of the reading is in ANY way more palatable or reassuring? The government is offering you these choices:
1) Quarantine in a guarded quarantine hotel for two weeks in a sealed room
or
2) Quarantine in your home with facial recognition and GPS tracking and random pings that send the police to your home if you do not respond within 15 minutes
This is not a choice. This is the government giving you a false dilemma because it's tricking people into tolerating its massively expanded surveillance systems that it wants to build, and the normalization thereof. These things will not go away, just like the narrative until now has constantly shifted to keep the situation ongoing while power continues to consolidate.
These systems will be used for worse once they exist.
> 1) Quarantine in a guarded quarantine hotel for two weeks in a sealed room
Where I am (Australia, the place where this is happening), right now that is current reality on the planet we live on, and is the _only_ choice offered. I cannot leave Sydney for any reason, without being required to spend two weeks in a sealed room at my own expense. It's not just state or federal borders, it's travel within the state of NSW - I cannot go further than maybe 30-40km in any direction from my house without a "permissible reason" which pretty much means "essential work". Bereavement, family visits, or wanting to stab all my household and neighbours in the face do not count as "permissible reasons". That is, as you rightly allude to, in now way palatable or reassuring. But is is in fact the ground truth where I live.
As much as I despise option #2, I would seriously consider making that choice for myself - in spite of the acknowledged normalisation of massive surveillance overreach it would represent.
What's your alternative? Just let sick people loose into the country, exponentially infecting everyone? I'm in the US, and that strategy did not work out very well. 660K deaths and counting. Quarantine has historically been a sensible, effective way to deal with deadly communicable diseases. I wish the US took it as seriously as Australia and NZ did.
EDIT: Crap, I just realized I responded to the article's submitter, someone who's already posted the same ax-grind 30 times to the article's threads. Guess I've been had.
In fact, there are few return slots available and many people can't get a flight back to Australia from places like the UK or the US. And yet they still try, because comparatively our life out here in the state of Western Australia (bigger than Texas mind you) is FULL OF FREEDOMS BECAUSE WE'RE COMPLETELY OPEN AND FREE OF COMMUNITY SPREAD.
when you disagree with somebody, please make an attempt to believe that the person you disagree with has actually thought about what they said. assuming that the only reason somebody might disagree with you is becauase they don't understand an issue as well as you do is a really insulting way to attempt to join a conversation.
Ah yes these are totally normal things for a democratic country to do
The quaranting itself is not the enslavement. It's how they are going about it and what kinds of systems they want to build.
You don’t seem to be well informed on how they’re going about it and what kind of systems “they” want to build. Who are “they”? Which of the multiple levels of government, several states and territories and multiple political parties who all have different policies and priorities do you mean? What do you mean by “enslavement”? None of it makes sense, and you’re making giant extrapolations from exaggerated and inaccurate headlines and reports in a media that you probably wouldn’t trust or believe on most other topics.
Imagine being told in 2018 this would happen a short time later - the government there arresting or locking people in that way. Would you have believed it could happen?
Could you see it becoming worse, particularly if the media narrative about us-them continues until one side gets dehumanized?
Why rest in this blind faith about how much they can sustain? When they have already been sustaining this stuff for going on two years with no signs of letting up. If anything it seems to be getting worse per the OP, with even more idiotic systems being built “because of the antivaxers” or whatever convenient justification is peddled by media to divide the people and consolidate power towards the top of the top.
sigh
I don’t want to be right. I want to be WRONG.
Every possible scenario would have been alarming. 50000 deaths and a collapsing hospital system would have been unthinkable too. Australia has chosen to avoid that nightmare, and has chosen a different, also highly undesirable but marginally preferable path.
People are getting whipped up into a frenzy about all this, based on mental models of government and population relations that may apply elsewhere but don’t apply in Australia.
In truth:
- there is heavy pushback on government by the media and population, acceptance of lockdowns is in rapid decline, and governments are being forced to change their polices week by week.
- We don’t have a heavily militarized and hostile relationship between police, military and the population, it has always been egalitarian and cohesive, like pretty much everything else in the country.
- Australia has been ranked in/near the top 10 freest countries in the world for a long time, and little of what has happened during the pandemic would warrant that changing.
For what it's worth (you've revealed in another comment that you're not Australian, so you might not be aware,) in the period between the 2020 lockdown and the delta outbreak this year (approx. October 2020 to June 2021) things had almost returned to normal. I was back at work and at sport. Beaches and shopping centres were packed. State borders were open (a friend went on a camping trip to Queensland.) It was remarkable how quickly things returned to normal once the number of new cases dropped to zero, and it was surreal to watch international news and see that not everyone was able to live like us. This outbreak is more severe, but I have no reason to believe things won't be like that again once case numbers drop.
This IS the correct procedure during a disease pandemic. To halt the process of a disease it's been a common and effective practice throughout the centuries and across many countries to isolate those infected along with their close contacts for a period of time until the disease is over/can no longer propagate.
What do you specially find wrong with it and why? Sure it's inconvenient for those involved but it's the least harmful action for everyone - all of society benefits this way.
Clearly you don't know your history or you'd realize it was common practice. For example, until quite recently Sydney had a quarantine station at North Head for well over a century until the Government stupidly shut it down and turned it into a hotel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Head_Quarantine_Statio...
Clearly, isolating people like this is new to you. Get used to the fact that it's not a new practice and the fact that you'll likely see it again in the future.
The same goes for the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated. Unvaccinated people are threat to the life and health of others so society has the right to isolate them for its own safety. This practice is not new either, it's been practiced ever since vaccination became common practice.
The them and us problem is simply solved by 'them' not being so damned selfish and getting vaccinated like the rest of society.
Please note: the matter of coercion with respect to public health matters is NOT like other forms of government coercion or government surveillance for political reasons. They are two completely separate matters - or they ought to be. If any of these COVID measures are later abused by Government then the citizenry has full rights to object in every way possible. Government has absolutely no right to take advantage of this tragic heath problem and it is incumbent on citizens to ensure that it does not.
It is naive to think this way. By then it will be too late. They are building tyrannical systems of enslavement in the name of public health because obviously they wouldn’t openly say they want to enslave you.
Waiting for them to build the systems before you evaluate if they’re abusing their power must be some kind of preemptive Stockholm Syndrome from a citizenry that deep down can sense what is happening but finds itself powerless or too afraid to speak up. And so they just eat their own by failing to be critical and cautiously paranoid at the right time.
Wake up.
People don't understand how isolated some states of Australia are, even from the other states. Some parts of this country were barely touched by covid. It was just about the least dystopian life you could imagine apart from driving through the Mad Max landscape.
I think if you asked the majority of Australians they would say that they are happy people have to quarantine at the hotels and that they be guarded, since most of our outbreaks have been from quarantine breaches. So as far as a democracy goes that's right on track. Democratic doesn't mean individuals can do what they want, it means the whole community is involved in setting the rules for the community.
They weren't guarded by police at the start, but non-compliance and malpractice from the regular security guards had the community complaining about having such lax security.
What would have been the case if you asked the majority of Germans what they thought about certain restrictions in the 1930s?
Democracy is more than the "whole community setting the rules for the community." It is the rule of law in preserving the rights to life, liberty, and justice for all people. In the form of negative rights and the freedom to live as an individual unfettered by a mob of the majority. What you are describing and proposing is mob rule that subjects the 49% or fewer to tyranny.
And actually, what you're describing will subject 99.99% to tyranny because you are building a system of enslavement that will serve just the cream of the crop and crush everyone else.
Say it out loud. "They should have listened and the regular security guards should have been complaint! Now we need to use military officers to patrol and enforce." Say it out loud so you can hear what you're actually saying.
It seems to me that much of human misery down through the ages can be put down to a small percentage of humanity who thinks this way and we'd all be better off if they had bigger more highly tuned amygdalas to boost their empathy for other human beings.
(This question has always intrigued me, it would be very informative to see sets of normal distributions for given dollar amounts for the population.
Also, given that we're living in COVID times, distribution figures for a virus's infection/replication rate vs death rate per capita, etc. would be informative. Knowing when fear gripped everyone to such an extent that say 95+% of the population would be clambering for vaccinations would be useful if for no other reason than to put vaccination resources to best use. For example, if the death rate for COVID or any virus were one in three as it was for the Plague/Black Death in the Middle Ages, would we then reach a figure of 95+% vaccination rate? Surely such figures would be of great interest to medical professionals and behavioral psychologists.)
How dangerous do you think covid is? Is it just a common cold like the recipient of the highest civilian award in the US said? [1] Or just a flu like Fox News kept saying[2]?
Are these scenes in Russia[3] and India[4] made up, or are those acceptable when only a fraction of people were infected, and no lockdowns would mean a much worse situation?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/25/rush-limbaug...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o
Yes. Simple as that. Most of us are happy with the trade off of freedoms in this scenario.
Your viewpoint of what defines totalitarianism or miscarriages of liberty are fine, and you’re welcome to keep them or even share them. But you don’t get to don’t get to dictate to others why your fiercely individualistic ideals are definitively are better than the community trade offs being made.
That I understand, and the same for the quarantine rules. But things have been getting really complicated lately. As you have pointed out, these agreements aren't feeling like community decisions and technology has been making the application of law humanless and arbitrary.
If I forget to pay for a loaf of bread, walk out the store, and then go back to pay immediately, it would just be a human misunderstanding nd everyone would be happy with that outcome. Societal dues paid.
But if instead a facial recognition camera tracked me leaving and the security gate detected the item unpaid then the matter goes into an automated system and even if I realise my mistake and pay my societal dues the system doesn't care. If we aren't careful it could elevate the system above the society, and lose its original purpose of helping resolve social conflits. Instead it would just apply law without the capacity to fully appreciate it's role of societal mediation.
There are things in Australia that are already like that. Expired registration cameras for example. A police officer can suss out the situation and see if you just forgot to do it this morning, or if you are constantly driving without insurance. The camera can't figure that out, so a simple mistake can cost you.
There are ways in which I agree with you about Australia's future and reducing freedoms, especially around technology and tracking. But the pandemic is not trivial, look at countries like India and America that essentially had it run free, that is a lot of death, and it wasn't just covid patients. A health system full of covid patients can't help anyone else either.
The thing is that we have a plan and a path out of this, and it relies on controlling outbreaks until we are all vaccinated. To make that happen, people have to quarantine for 14 days. People thought their happiness was more important than the community and the community disagrees so we had to enforce it.
The community also thinks you can't let rodents live in your restaurant kitchen, and that you can't drive while drunk, etc. Laws often protect the community from the selfish and that is what happened here too. We tried to let people be adults but they left the hotel and caused untold damage to the community, so now they get babysat.
A HUGE percentage of the deaths in the US are from people institutionalized in government facilities. They had no freedom..
Another HUGE percentage of the deaths were people that were already unhealthy, and what I know about Australia you guys do not have them levels of general unhealthy people.
America also has a much high percentage of the population over 65, a group that makes up the majority of COVID Deaths
There is more to the story than simply "American did not impose enough tyranny on the citizens to combat COVID"
I don't think we gain anything by trying to qualify exactly who it killed, since over 65s are still people, as are institutionalized individuals.
FFS. So you're ok with hundreds of thousands (660,000 so far in the US) of people dying for your freedoms compared to the 9 (YEP, NINE) deaths we've had in Western Australia from Covid?
Democracy isn't some mask off individualist system where your perceived individual rights trample the rights of the wider community to stay alive, despite the deep throated bellowing coming from a media more concerned about stirring controversy to drive revenue.
You keep your freedoms. You freedoms to shoot each other rampantly with all your guns; your freedoms to have your police shoot and kill you without repercussion. Your freedoms to not get vaccinated and die from a virus that has an easily sourced vaccine readily available.
We'll take our sane approach to zero community spread of Covid and our two years of billions of budget surpluses. Who would have thought that having no community spread and a wide open economy would result in such financial windfalls? /s
All this app does is allow for people to self-quarantine without the cops being required to physically check that you're doing so. It's voluntary and allows the police to actually focus on their job instead of constantly checking on self-quarantining returned travellers. You can take you tyrannical Nazi German hot takes elsewhere, we're 100% not listening with our community free of Covid.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
Ahhhhh joy, the choice between a state-run guarded hotel room, or in-home surveillance with random pings that send the police to your house if you don't respond within 15 minutes.
What a sensible and efficient use of technology!
And what comfort? Facial recognition in your home? GPS tracking? RANDOM pings that send police officers to your house for an in-person quarantine check fi you don't respond within 15 minutes?
Stop pretending to think about what most people would choose, and wake up to the reality staring you in the face.
Having an app on your phone that lets authorities check if you're self-isolating sounds totally reasonable to me. When you've finished your two weeks isolation, you just uninstall the app and move on with your life. No big deal.
Yes, we have less individual freedoms in Australia than places like the USA. Some of them are trade offs that have been pretty widely accepted, even though they might have been unpopular at various points. Australian's generally have more trust in our institutions than other countries, and the handling of the pandemic in 2020 is a good example as to why that might be. This is an app provided by a state (not federal) gov, that is open source, and there are various other gov mechanisms to verify how the data is being used. If it ends up being poorly implemented/used/abused, very likely it will be found out and become politically unpopular to the point where it will be quickly dumped.
"Sir, if we make the general public use this, it will save 24% more lives"
Oh no saving lives! What a terrible use of tech.
Would it make you feel better if I told you that if we save their lives we can serve them more ads?
Seriously. Half a million. And for that, you won't stay inside your house for two weeks, because you're worried it's a slippery slope of some sort.
What need for me to be gullible to think "I'd rather five hundred thousand less of my countrymen had died this year", and not go out?
What need for me to be gullible to think that you should do it to? What need for me to be gullible to look at my government forcing you to do it too and saying "that's a good move"?
The quarantine system is quite literally saving lives, and the things that we can do to improve that system should be done.
This is not trusting the government, and it's not "ignoring tyranny". It's how society ought to work.
The approach you are taking can be used to justify complete control and arbitrary lockdowns whenever N cases or N deaths for any virus happen. Or for anything that can be construed as a public health crisis, including things not related to viruses. Don't you see that?
My heart breaks for any death anywhere. Including the death of a free and normal life. Suicides and depression have skyrocketed. The evidence shows this:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/ludhiana/covid-led-to-spik...
There are no easy answers, and it is not appropriate to beat someone over the head with the numbers of death in response to them calling out the systems of enslavement you are building in Australia. It's clear that your approach is not good for people's mental health, especially for young people. Presumably you still have lockdowns where you can't go more than 5km from your home? And restrictions on what you can be outside for?
Do these pandemic deaths justify the emergence of a totalitarian state? No.
Yeah, I do see that! In fact it's almost like Australia wrote an act about this stuff like 80 years ago that define the criteria and rights and responsibilities of the commonwealth during national emergencies. And it's almost like the pandemic meets those criteria and then we used the powers as written in the act.
Almost like this isn't the emergence of a totalitarian state but was the state we lived in all along, or something.
> My heart breaks for any death anywhere. Including the death of a free and normal life. Suicides and depression have skyrocketed. [... > ...] And it is not appropriate to beat someone over the head with the numbers of death in response to them calling out the systems of enslavement you are building in Australia.
Cognitive dissonance getting to you, yet?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
To prevent misunderstanding: I'm not siding against your views. I've just noticed that you've repeatedly been breaking the site guidelines lately, often egregiously - and this is not something we can allow, regardless of how right you are or feel you are - because it destroys HN for its intended purpose.
I will do my best to be more kind.
Plus it's been done already by the Western Australian state government
https://www.wa.gov.au/organisation/department-of-the-premier...
Sure - I noticed that and wasn't implying that you modified the article title. The article title is incorrect, at least in the way it reads at first glance - yes the South Australian government is "an Australian government", but it's not "The Australian Government".
> But is it actually a meaningful distinction as far as these policies being constrained permanently to just one part of Australia? Will this spread everywhere or is there a reason why this would only be constrained to a really small town no one really notices?
It's too early to tell - but it's worth noting that the main revenue generating states with the lion's share of attention in Australia are New South Wales and Victoria and so they usually set the tone of state policy countrywide. IMHO this is unlikely to spread to those states.
More importantly:
1) the article indicates that its use will be voluntary anyway;
2) Australia has a long track record of paying millions of dollars for technology like this that actually never works properly.
So as a Victorian I'm not too concerned.
This other source does not say that it is voluntary.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
Returning travelers quarantining at home will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
And are you comfortable remaining "not too concerned" as a Victorian when you admit that it's too early to tell if this idiocy will spread? Because idiocy it is, and spread it very well might. How long will you wait to call it out? Where will you draw the line in the sand? Power consolidates.
Interesting .. how exactly will they "force" people to download an app if they said person doesn't have a smart phone, or refuses to unlock it? Are they going to buy them one?
The police aren't going to see this as a useful use of their time and resources; and the public isn't going to put up with it either. There's one thing to make an announcement like this in Australia; and another thing completely to make it stick. Governments here have a habit of backing down completely when it's clear their re-election is at stake.
The proposal wouldn't fly in Victoria; but if it was attempted, I'm pretty sure it would be rolled back pretty quickly. Let's wait and see before getting too up in arms about it - the app isn't even written yet.
I posting now because of necessity. All the alarm bells are firing. Too few are paying attention to the alarms.
Australia would essentially become a failed state with your suggestion, and I don't exactly think the government is just going to let that happen.
Sometimes you have to break the rules to make long-term positive changes.
Dr. Chant said: “We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the New World Order…yes it will be pubs and clubs and other things if we have a positive case there.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/new-world-order-austra...
Let's go back a long way to 1854 during the cholera epidemic in London when Dr John Snow found that the Broad Street pump was its cause and he located it by contact tracing those who contacted cholera and worked backwards to the source. This case is famous for the very fact it shows that contact tracing and isolating saves lives (please ensure that you look at the map he used to trace the pump): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_ou...
I can attest to this, contact tracing put a quick end to the COVID outbreak near where I live and I'm very thankful for the work those tracers did under very arduous circumstances.
In principle, contact tracing during a pandemic has nothing to do with the general increase in surveillance that's gripping the planet at the moment - it is an entirely separate matter.
The fact that we have sleezebag governments prepared to subvert a decent legitimate process is - again - a separate and serious problem for democracy.
Wake up before it is too late.
https://theconversation.com/vaccine-passports-are-coming-to-...
“NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced freedoms for fully vaccinated people once 70% of the state’s eligible population are double dosed. These include being able to go to hospitality venues, hairdressers and gyms, and have five people to your home.”
They are even now trying to limit how many people you can have over in your own home. It is a failed state. Wake up before you are enslaved.
Australia is done, I'm making plans to leave.
And judging by the downvotes people think this stuff is acceptable?
A "bill of rights" is a piece of paper. A piece of paper which is ruled upon by a court that was granted its power by the very same collection of papers.
For example, the right to keep and bear arms (obviously not for hunting but for war and security) has been infringed upon many times, but constitutional courts have decided that actually despite the bill of rights, some infringement is allowed. (EDIT: And this doesn't even address the problem of governments creating unconstitutional laws or executing unconstitutional actions which de facto strip your rights for some possibly significant time until it can be overturned by a court, but without much redress or punishment or deterrent)
In the end the people are the ultimate arbiters and deciders of what rights they are willing to give up and what powers they are willing to be governed under. This plays out the same way in USA and Australia and Afghanistan and Libya.
I've never understood why America puts of with basically being a police state, with the level of police brutality and incarceration that they have.
And here in aussieland, we don't have that, but we do nothing to protect our liberties.
Unfortunately this creates a strong incentive for all governments to actually create such societies and increase division and mistrust in order to gain power.
> Unfortunately this creates a strong incentive for all governments to actually create such societies and increase division and mistrust in order to gain power.
Have you actually been to Australia before? Or Europe for that matter? Or Japan? Your claims don’t make much sense with the current examples. All we have is a developed country that heavily values the right to bear arms and has a horrible crime rate, while the other countries are the exact opposite.
I didn't say they were.
> Have you actually been to Australia before? Or Europe for that matter? Or Japan?
Yes, yes, yes. Worthless rhetorical questions.
> Your claims don’t make much sense with the current examples.
What claims?
> All we have is a developed country that heavily values the right to bear arms and has a horrible crime rate, while the other countries are the exact opposite.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but Europe is not a country. And there are more countries than your examples with differences in crime rates and gun ownership, so I suspect whatever point you are trying to prove with selective data points wouldn't actually hold up.
Patently false from all available exemples.
And nowhere did I say that that is the only reason a society would be willing to turn to the state for protection, so spare me the false counter examples dressed up breathlessly to look like some incredible gotcha.
There is always going to be capacity for doing better, society is always what we make of it, even without hard legal limits (not to suggest imposing limits of state power is bad).
Kick 'm out, elect a new batch and keep their feet to the fire.
You can instead spend 2 weeks locked up in a hotel at your expense.
That’s like saying people aren’t forced to vaccinate since you don’t “need” to work at that particular job and you don’t “need” to exercise in a gym or watch a movie in a theater.
Everything in history shows the slope is slippery. They will pass this on to everyone. It’s a blatant power grab. They want to spy on you and track you. They don’t care about your health.
And I think the outrage is useful. It will mobilize people until it boils over into action, if enough people do it when it actually counts. This is when it actually counts. Everyone has spent all their Outrage Points on useless shit some actor or celebrity said about something no one will care about on their deathbed, but so few are saying anything about this totalitarian nightmare.
But the App that is the subject of the article serves to reduce the severity of that law and thus reduces government overreach. To be upset about the App, rather than the original quarantine law, is to be focusing attention in the wrong place.
Returning travelers quarantining at home will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
It's a reduction in government overreach that you have a "choice" between one of their quarantine "hotels" or in-home surveillance? Is the part that is the lesser government overreach, the part where if you fail to address one of their random pings they'll send officers to your house to conduct an in-person check?
The app isn't the problem in itself. The problem is the enslavement. This is a system of enslavement.
Creating an alternative solution for home quarantine gives people more options.
You could argue that there was a better way to implement home quarantine. You could argue that the 2 week quarantine is goverment overreach. You could even argue that this option helps the government keep the 2 week quarantine in place longer by tempering its severity.
I don't see those sorts of rational arguments. I see a bunch of people making an irrational or uninformed argument that this extends government overreach by making the 2 week quarantine rule more severe.
It was a bit of a wake up call actually - the level of conversation was starting to feel more like reddit than what I'd always (until now i guess) expected from hacker news.
> It’s a blatant power grab. They want to spy on you and track you. They don’t care about your health.
That sounds like a conspiracy theory.
So it's hard to ask whether the people support it in such a state.
We should be very very careful relying on crisis moments to make major decisions. Which is always going to be a drawback in democracy (all systems have flaws). There will always be long term consequences as these things never have time limits. Any new capability adopted should be assumed to be permanent.
That being said, each time I read a headline like this I get slightly more concerned that if one day this trust is ever abused, it'll be all the worse because we never fought hard against these measures.
I think Americas emphasis on individual freedoms comes at the cost of some of these things, but there are other benefits of course and I do admire America's philosophy quite a lot. I don't have a crystal ball and I'm not sure what's better in the long run. As an Aussie though I'm happy with the trade-offs so far.
But unfortunately government is run by humans who are susceptible to delusions like the consolidation of power over other humans. And if it is ever run by an AI, well, that AI may decide to just destroy everyone. So while trusting a government would be great, they have not earned that and Australia's governing bodies are clearly driving off a cliff with everyone still in the car. Why trust that anymore?
They're arresting people for making Facebook posts against lockdowns. Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54007824
Australia presumes to say how many people can visit your home. Source:
https://theconversation.com/vaccine-passports-are-coming-to-...
“NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced freedoms for fully vaccinated people once 70% of the state’s eligible population are double dosed. These include being able to go to hospitality venues, hairdressers and gyms, and have five people to your home.”
They can arbitrarily lock you in your apartment building for up to weeks, no one allowed to leave. Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53316097
So what is there to trust?
Where will you draw the line? And when? When it's too late, and when you have to pretend to be "happy with the trade-offs so far" because they're monitoring your posts on HN and arresting you if you are not happy with the trade-offs so far? That's not far off from how they arrested that pregnant woman for making a Facebook post. Wake up.
And you celebrate that you can't defend yourself with firearms, but now you have police and military patrolling your streets to enforce these covid laws and check papers.
Source:
https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idP8sX
Why trust this?
The number of people in the home thing doesn't bother me, again because I'm happy to accept this as a temporary restriction that reduces deaths until our vaccination rates allow us to go back to normal life.
I understand your perspective, and these events do concern me. However I personally don't see them as an authoritarian government making efforts to reduce our freedoms, I see them as a generally well-meaning government misstepping in an unprecedented situation, and I expect those missteps to be accounted for via legal action.
The number of people in the home thing doesn't bother me, again because I'm happy to accept this as a temporary restriction that reduces deaths until our vaccination rates allow us to go back to normal life.
It's been two years. These things are clearly not intended to be temporary. They will normalize it as much as possible. The frog boiling in the pot is an apt analogy here.
I understand your perspective, and these events do concern me. However I personally don't see them as an authoritarian government making efforts to reduce our freedoms, I see them as a generally well-meaning government misstepping in an unprecedented situation, and I expect those missteps to be accounted for via legal action.
What would it take you to consider that it is turning into a totalitarian regime, and that those are not missteps, but steps that were done perhaps too soon and they should've given the frog in the pot a little more time? I mean, I'm not here to waste my weekend arguing for nothing, I'm genuinely asking - what would it take for you to see that it's a bad situation? What else could Australia do that gets you thinking "we should take a step back" and will it be too late by then?
I truly hope that it's a generally well-meaning government misstepping in an unprecedented situation. I truly do. Is that realistic given a study of history and the nature of Power?
I understand I probably seem like a naive optimist, and I self-confess that I am (although most of my Aussie friends are even less concerned than me). At least we will find out soon whether that's misplaced.
This is not happening. It's a complete beat-up and it's utterly false. The military has been engaged to provide labor, not enforcement. They have no enforcement powers. Parking inspectors have greater powers to enforce civil laws.
As for the inflammatory "checking papers" trope: many countries in all parts fo the world have had lockdowns, including in the U.S. Why single out Australia for condemnation when it is doing the same thing as so many others have done?
That aside, on the ground, there is really not much enforcement of the restrictions - less and less as each week passes and everyone accepts that the virus is here to stay.
Covid is a fact of life elsewhere but we have no cases so to sell opening up the state to more visitors the government has to show they are able to control the transition and keep our hospitals working well. We still have comparatively low vaccination rates here as we have been supply constrained so we are going to lag behind what is happening elsewhere.
In a small state like SA people care more about their own families than the rights of people to freely spread an infectious disease. A few days of enforced isolation for someone with a highly infectious disease isn't all that contentious for most people. The alternative to home detention with an app for verification would be putting them in a secure hotel which does not scale or home isolation with spot police checks which wastes a lot of resources. Things will change as we catch up on vaccination rates and see what the real health impacts are.
This is about South Australia adopting a new quarantine at home option for those who are entering the country. Allowing people to quaratine at home with an App rather than at designated quarantine hotels is a REDUCTION in government overreach.
In Western Australia where something similar is in use, this is a voluntary part of a similar program that saves officers having to make more house calls.
If you don't bother to do basic research before you get outraged, your outrage will eventually be discounted as "crying wolf" and won't be as effective the next time you need to push back against real government overreach.
Not only is this a laughable “choice”, the kind of manipulative choice you’d expect a tech manager to pretend to offer you when all his projects suck but he wants you to feel like you “picked” a project, it’s also naive to present it as a choice. You don’t wait until it’s mandatory for everyone to say something. You say it now when the machine is rearing its ugly head and you can see the writing on the wall.
Keep in mind you are writing this in defense of a gov that presumes itself to be in charge of how many people you can have over. Source:
https://theconversation.com/vaccine-passports-are-coming-to-...
“NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced freedoms for fully vaccinated people once 70% of the state’s eligible population are double dosed. These include being able to go to hospitality venues, hairdressers and gyms, and have five people to your home.”
Seems more than NECESSARY to cry wolf right now. The slope is slippery. We all know they will push these systems as far as they can if they are allowed to. Cry wolf when the wolf is coming, not when it has eaten your chickens already.
Source: https://theconversation.com/vaccine-passports-are-coming-to-...
“NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced freedoms for fully vaccinated people once 70% of the state’s eligible population are double dosed. These include being able to go to hospitality venues, hairdressers and gyms, and have five people to your home.”
That's not the same government at all. You've quoted a decision by the NSW government, and this article is about South Australia.
More importantly though, that distinction does little to make it feel more right. What controls exist to keep the idiocy contained to only one part of Australia? How do you know they won't make that the policy everywhere? Could that happen?
> How do you know they won't make that the policy everywhere? Could that happen?
This would require the state governments to collectively agree on something (unlikely) or for Scott Morrison (the Prime Minister) to get his act together and actually do something for once in his ineffectual life, so equally unlikely.
I'm not defending any government here. I am pointing out that people are getting outraged without even understanding what they are being outraged about. When you do that, you undermine your own credibility and potential impact and make it easier for people in power to brush aside your outrage when you do know what you are talking about.
If you really care about these issues it behooves you to inform yourself as well as possible and be as accurate as possible so that you don't do more harm than good for your cause.
>Downloading and using the G2G app is voluntary in WA [Western Australia], but the Government encourages people to use it
So not enforced, right...?
(EDIT: my bad, this refers to an existing app; the new app sounds like it would be a mandated download)
Remarkably slow process given that we are dealing with a pandemic.
Worth pointing out that "Australian gov to use" should read "South Australian gov to use" (South Australia being a state of Australia).
EDIT: As this thread is attracting attention from people who have views different from my own I'd just like to make it clear that I'm in favour of controlling the actions of people who choose to endanger public health and nothing I said above is meant to suggest otherwise.
#trustthescience
Which makes the media fearmongering about the “unvaxxed” even more dangerous. They never mention immunity from past infection which is now known to be superior protection.
Here’s a recent source:
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
That they insist on vaccinated vs unvaccinated in the media narrative is worrisome because it is going to lead to dehumanization and division.
As it stands, neither of those things have happened yet.
Health departments are supposed to be prepared for a pandemic, they've been happening for all of recorded history and it's in the job description to be alert and ready to manage it. Today is lockdown day 224 in Melbourne and here we are wondering how to eventually open up retail and manage international arrivals.
The title is wrong (it’s state government, not federal. You wouldn’t post “US government” when Florida enacts something).
The intent of this program is as a trial to see if this improves things or not.
I suspect a lot of the readers here are lacking any real knowledge of Australia’s treatment of COVID-19 beyond the odd random news article and are looking through their own localised lenses. Before criticising, it may be worth taking some time to research and understand.
Our death toll in total in 18 months is about the same as the current daily death toll in the US. We have achieved this via means that simply would not work in the US due to dissension between states and differing views on the practically of temporarily giving up freedoms for the greater good.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/melbourne/article-9964173/M...
Where is the overreach in a voluntary app that people are encouraged to use to save the government resources?
We had Katie Hopkins here earlier in the year bragging about how she was going to deliberately break quarantine etc etc.
If people aren’t going to follow a reasonable precaution, this far into a pandemic, then I have little sympathy when harsher measures are employed.
This pandemic is nowhere near that dangerous to justify this. Where do you draw the line? When you can’t shop in the grocery store unless you accept public health treatments without question? When they’ve dehumanized people enough that you tolerate surveilling them in those quarantine “hotels” “until they choose to comply with public health safety laws?”
The slope is slippery and you are sliding into hell. Time to stop being tribal or partisan about sticking it to the “anti vaxers” and start thinking about the system that is being built.
I am posting far outside my comfort zone because the alarm bells are ringing. Everything about this situation is getting more and more terrible the longer it is allowed to continue.
I would prefer to lurk and not talk. Like before.
Unlike the US, COVID was essentially controlled in Australia until some very specific violations of quarantine happened - and the outbreak traced to these violators. These outbreaks weren't of iffy origin, they were clearcut linked to these perpetrators.
In an era where governments everywhere are going authoritarian it only takes something like this to be used as an excuse. The trouble is there'll be little complaint from the public as everyone is aware of the causal link to the outbreaks - and the Australian public, like bloody-minded sheep, is too easily spooked when governments crack the whip.
Unfortunately, Australia is a very conservative country and the vast majority of its citizens do what they're told without question even when government makes crazy decisions, so we've a double-whammy problem/excuse when a few people go feral.
And it is a fair comparison because both were used as excuses by governments for overreach.
Clearly that's not the case with Covid!
And even if it wasn't, it would be true in the long run.
Some might do but cholera, polio and smallpox and many, many other diseases are still just as virulent as they ever were down through the ages. (I know, smallpox only exists in labs but the last known case was a lab worker who died).
That argument is essentially a non sequitur, it's attempting to justify a position that doesn't really exist - and even if it did then it'd be by the very slimest of margins (apply with very strict constraints).
Even in cases where certain viruses have mutated to weaker strains - and given the high stakes involved (gambling with human life), then you would not only have to be extremely specific but also provide soild/reputable scientific evidence to backup your assertions (i.e.: for specific viruses/strains, etc.).
Meanwhile these localised state based measures aimed at fighting this pandemic are another thing entirely. Our state governments are not part of five eyes and aren't under pressure to maintain any of these measures indefinitely. They want to keep local businesses active by avoiding lockdowns and keep their tightly budgeted public health systems working.
Our less populated states here managed to get through the pandemic basically virus free without much in the way of restrictions within their states. I don't think people understand how good we have had this.
Our vaccines supply was delayed but now that has improved all the states are opening up once vaccine targets are reached and the state want to ease into the change. We still have very low vaccination rates compared to many countries where vaccinations were expedited as the only real viable solution. To reopen state borders and allow more potentially infected people in we need to be able to quarantine infectious people without locking them up and an app is a cheap solution. Once covid is endemic and as vaccination rates climb there won't be any point to quarantining people and the app will be discarded. It isn't for surveilling the entire population but for individuals for the relatively short time they might be shedding virus.
People are right to be vigilant but you all have the wrong target here. The right target is the Australian federal government's mass surveillance laws. An app that will be used for a week or two by a sick person then discarded isn't the real problem.
On one hand you have QLD/SA/WA which are probably the places least effected in the world by COVID. QLD for example with a population of 5.2 million has had a total of 7 deaths from COVID over the entirety of the pandemic. Schools, shops and workplaces have all been pretty much running as normal the last 18 months in these states.
On the other hand you have the South East states which have large active delta outbreaks and have gone through long lockdowns, especially Victoria. These states have given up eliminating COVID and are planning on letting COVID spread as vaccination rates meet targets.
Residents from the SE states are effectively locked out from the rest of Australia. State borders are shut and have been on and off for much of the pandemic. Thus Australia is in some ways operating as two countries at this stage.
What’s more international travel to Australia is effectively shutoff. The only people allowed back are Australians and there is a wait list and you better be planning on moving back to live permanently.
Obviously no one wants to split the country in half. No one wants suspend international travel indefinitely. In particular the federal government views its reelection chances as effectively riding on getting things to a semblance of normality by Christmas.
Yet residents of places like SA and WA obviously do not want to give up their COVID free status.
Hence you see the search for solutions like this. The app does address a genuine problem. In particular, hotel quarantine was introduced in Australia after home quarantine failed due to wide spread non-compliance. Yet it is expensive , capacity is limited and hotels aren’t great quarantine facilities in the first place. Sealed windows and shared ventilation systems in particular are problematic.
Whether or not the trade off in tracking people for two weeks is worth it, I’m not sure.
I don’t think these measures will be around permanently though. The slightest suggestion of permanent measures has been slapped down hard so far.
In Australia it's under 20% of people that have gone insane. The rest have checked out and completely ignored it. It's like a long holiday where you get paid to pretend you work.
But you can't say that in polite company so you just have ~40 percent compliance with whatever insanity is going on now. Hilariously enough the compliance from police is lower than from the general population so basically we have politicians and the terminally online talking about masks, jabs and sign ins and the people who are supposed to enforce it not being bothered with it.
Standing in front of the super market something like one in three pull out their phone, unlock it, point it at the check in qr code and not log in.
I'm reminded of the latter days of the USSR where no one took anything the government said seriously and just did whatever they felt like. Which does not bode well for the current incarnation of Australia long term.
Thanks for this refreshing update!