In this week’s radio segment Hong Kong Radio 3’s Morning Brew host Phil Whelan and I take a look at the Australian introduction of a COVID tracking app, why it’s a must have if we’re going to tame this outbreak and then head of in search of the ripple effects this pandemic may have on children, family, education and our future selves.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Phil Whelan: [00:00:00] It’s quarter past 12 and off we go back to Australia about a thousand miles South as we were in Brisbane earlier on, and say hi to Morris Miselowski. Good. Hey Morris.

I’ve had some few things go on today. People talking about stuff, obviously to do with viruses and covert 19 and stuff. one of Jarrod’s stories was about the new app, and I figured perhaps technically you could fill us in a bit.

Morris Miselowski: [00:00:33] Yeah, I can. So this came into existence on Sunday. For us, the federal government’s looking for about 40% of the population, at least.

To download it and put it on to their fine. Yep. Download. Of course, it’s free. It relatively quick. Guide, downloaded. It took me literally about a minute and a half, two minutes to get the whole thing rock and rolling, and then it sits on your phone permanently until you deleted it. So what it does is it [00:01:00] turns on with your permission, it turns on your Bluetooth and puts it into permanent on status, and also gives you a liberal message on your home scrape to tell you it’s working.

Okay. That’s all that you say on your phone in the background. What it’s doing is when you, whenever you go anywhere, if you have been somewhere for longer than 15 minutes. So that’s basically the cutoff. Market’s not looking at every single person you walk by with. Basically the fine doesn’t move 15 minutes.

It’s pinging out other people that have that app, and it’s doing that through Bluetooth. It’s not sending your name, it’s not looking for their name, it’s just looking for the Bluetooth signal. And what it’s doing then is taking the Bluetooth signal, the code for that, and storing it on a database. On your phone, so it’s storing it on your phone and nowhere else at this stage.

Now the premise works like this, should you get COVID and the doctor says, yep, you’ve passed the test, unfortunately, and you [00:02:00] have it. One of the things you’ll be asked for is do you have this app? And if you say yes, you’ll then be asked to push a button on the app, which says, share this information.

It’s a big blue button at the bottom. Okay. And with your permission, once you hit that button. It sends all of those pings. In other words, all of those Bluetooth messages across to the government. This is where you have to trust and the government then contact all of the government, then contacts, all of the people that you have been there in the last year.

10 days or so that you’ve been in contact with for 15 minutes or longer, and it makes the way, not that Morris has it, so it doesn’t point you out, but it says somebody you’ve been in contact with has had covered and therefore you have to do X, Y, Z. That’s the premise of it. Okay.

Phil Whelan: [00:02:46] Now, so far so good. Morris, what do you reckon as a third party.

Morris Miselowski: [00:02:50] I reckon it’s terrific. I reckon it’s terrific because we need to do some active look. This thing is not going to be everything. It’s not going to solve our problems, but one of the [00:03:00] issues we have getting out of jail is this, that we’re told that we can’t leave because if we leave, it’s possible. Lots of people will contract covert and we will be back to square zero.

Phil Whelan: [00:03:13] Right? You know what already already know as you’ve brought up a brilliant topic. You’re just saying you got to trust, et cetera, et cetera, across the world. How much of this stuff is getting screwed because people do not trust the government.

Morris Miselowski: [00:03:27] Yeah. Look, I think lots of it, Phil. I’ve got a really basic philosophy.

I’ve advocated for everybody to download this app. I think it’s nonsense if we don’t. The reality is if you think the government needs this to trace you, then you’re living on Mars. If you think the governments are interested in what you’re doing, then you really do have to have some assistance because the government’s not really that interested in what 99.9% of us are doing.

And this app has a purpose. It also has it also, we believe, again, all belief. We believe that when this thing is said to have ended, whenever that is a month, a year, [00:04:00] sorry, I’m not a year, 18 months, that the app will disconnect itself and we will be able. Too. and we will be able to delete it. Okay. You have to trust all those things.

I don’t have an issue with the app because as we’ve talked many times about how easy it is to spy on people. The government does not need this to be able to spy on us.

Phil Whelan: [00:04:19] Very interesting reality. Check there, Morris. Let’s just go sideways for a second. What would be the least thing on my person walking around that I would need for somebody to, if they really wanted to, to check me out, a phone switched on.

Is it that simple?

Morris Miselowski: [00:04:35] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let’s forget this app. If somebody really wants to know what’s on your phone, in fact, if somebody wants to steal the contents of your phone, this will send everybody into a spin. You only need to go into the black wave, no address provided, and there’s a little device you can buy, which is very, very cheap, and you can sit there and literally sucking all the details of all the mobile phones around you.

Phil Whelan: [00:04:56] It’s done on proximity.

Morris Miselowski: [00:04:58] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. [00:05:00] Is there, there are many, many, many stories of people sitting in, in food courts sitting in the street, sitting in cars, and they’re literally just, just hoovering in all of the information around them.

Phil Whelan: [00:05:12] Hey, we’ve all used, remind me most, I don’t think you’re an Apple guy.

I, you know, an iOS guy right.

Morris Miselowski: [00:05:18] On a half. Half.

Phil Whelan: [00:05:19] Okay. So, work wise, it’s really good to use airdrop. If you work in a one machine, you want to go to another, you sit on a bus or a ferry or something and you open air drop loads of them come up and there’s that. The gate.

Morris Miselowski: [00:05:30] Could be. It could be if you allow, allowed to be.

Phil Whelan: [00:05:33] Yeah. But I mean, my phone recognizes all the people sitting around me and I’m one of the people sitting around them. and I think sort of protest movements have used this kind of thing before. They, they go fishing and they just, airdrop stuff to whoever’s around them sounds to be wide open to me.

Even though it’s useful.

Morris Miselowski: [00:05:48] It’s, it’s possible. It’s absolutely open for abuse. It’s not, it’s not always as easy as that. Often you need the permission of the other person. I certainly. On mine would would insist on big giving [00:06:00] permission for somebody to airdrop something for me. Yeah. I imagine there are people out there who just have the switch on and that’s a terrible thing in any, it

Phil Whelan: [00:06:07] doesn’t matter what BOMA state moments.

I like to work between iPad and phone and I always have to tell myself, everyone I should remember not to do that because I’m sending it to me and I forget to switch it off, I suppose. I don’t know.

Morris Miselowski: [00:06:19] Well, you need to be careful. You need to be careful is the thing. You shouldn’t do it. No. You just need to be mindful that juniors should close the door behind you when you’re finished.

Phil Whelan: [00:06:26] Yeah. So, what, what, what else on my person would give away my identity if somebody was really smart at doing that?

Morris Miselowski: [00:06:34] Your face to start with

Phil Whelan: [00:06:36] yeah.

Morris Miselowski: [00:06:37] I’m not being facetious, in the old days, that’s where it started from, and then we went to people’s letterboxes. We did all kinds of things. People have been stealing people’s identity forever and information forever as well.

That doesn’t make right. It makes it terrible. It just means we have like always new tools. It’s somewhat the make it somewhat easier to do that and you don’t have to be as close to the person physically.

Phil Whelan: [00:06:59] Yeah. [00:07:00] What strange times we live in though more is that our immediate reaction is going to be, I don’t trust this.

The boy that cried Wolf and all that stuff. I mean, back to what I asked you about, people just not trusting governments, especially in this part of the world.

Morris Miselowski: [00:07:13] I think that was true. I think that will be true. I think it’s at the moment, especially in Australia, it’s not as true as it once was. In other words, we’re looking for big brother.

We’re looking for a government or some entity to help us to get out of this problem that we’re in. We can’t do it by ourselves. We need some overarching, so in the last three months, we’ve given away rights. That really, if I said to you in February before all of this, imagine Australia doing this, we will all be sitting here laughing.

And I would have lost my license to practice.

Phil Whelan: [00:07:42] Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So what is the trust level like with your government in general? I mean, I only get the juicy stories of you guys, but just, you know, down the line, mom and pop.

Morris Miselowski: [00:07:52] Yeah. I kind of tell that we’re, that we’re at the tail end of this because we’ve moved into what I call the pre-phase for the last two, three months.

The government [00:08:00] was in some ways a day. It was some way, Holly, like a small G, God, we listened to it. We, we, every day we, we waited for the press release to be told what was going to be happening. And. Most of us kind of towed the company line, so to speak. You can see already people arrive over the last week or two.

People are beginning to rebel every time they open the beach. We tend to find that people align on it where they shouldn’t be and you have hundreds of people. When I walk around the streets, you know, for that walk that we’re allowed to do one of four things that we’re allowed to do. Walking around the streets, the streets are packed with people walking.

The parks, I think are the most, I love going to the park, but it is so full of people. It’d be about the worst place to go if you were truly hibernating and trying to keep away from

Phil Whelan: [00:08:42] people, which I would recognize. Everybody’s over it and they just.

Morris Miselowski: [00:08:46] Cause we’re all pushing back. We’ve, we’ve kind of forgotten the message of how terrible this thing can be.

Because thankfully in Australia it’s not as bad as we heard other places. And we’re really saying, well, what is all this stuff about in typical Aussie, [00:09:00] she’ll be right fashion. And we’re pushing back now.

Phil Whelan: [00:09:03] Yeah. So what’s the scene in Melbourne? Cause I said to him this morning, I mean he’s always going on about Sydney is different Perth’s different, but what’s the scene in Melbourne and how do you think it might be?

Conversely in Sydney. Behavior-wise.

Morris Miselowski: [00:09:15] Well, yeah. So, so Melbourne now, government is being described now as being particularly tough. Other States have all begun to speak about how they will release us from our hibernation, our jail, whatever you want to call it. You know, you’ll be able to go out for a little bit longer, a little bit further.

Queensland has said by Sunday you’ll be able to travel up to 50 kilometers, you’ll be able to go and buy clothing and shoes. You’ll be able to congregate in groups of up to 10 so they started to give some leeway. Some of some Western Australia also has Victoria. Our premier has said, we’re in this for another week.

10 days. Don’t even think about changing anything. We need to see how things are going to evolve. So where. Apparently, or at least it’s being [00:10:00] perceived now that we are a bit more draconian, but our premiere is a bit more hesitant to let us out into the wild yet. So there’s literally only started in the last two days at the Bates, so we’ll see how that rides itself out.

Phil Whelan: [00:10:14] I know Melbourne, supposedly, is the the biggest party town in the world, or the best gig town in the world? One of those. Anyways, so can you foresee this flood of relief and people.

Morris Miselowski: [00:10:24] Yeah. Well we’re definitely the best gig town cause we asked. We are seen for our arts and our theater. We do like going see live music bands doing all of that kinds of stuff.

Yeah, definitely a part of our, of our culture going to pubs doing that. We certainly will. They’re going to the theater, going to live bands, going to those sorts of things. I still think a months away and the way that we used to want to have them and maybe not till the end of the year, but certainly we will start getting back on the streets as soon as we can push back into restaurants and pubs.

We’ll all be done with 1.5 to meet our distances and things, but we’ll, we’ll evolve out of that too. [00:11:00] Which

Phil Whelan: [00:11:00] demographic or age group do you think has behaved, has been the most compliant over this where you are?

Morris Miselowski: [00:11:07] Definitely the, the elderly. I shouldn’t say that. I’m getting close, you know, the either seventies I’m not that close yet, but the over seventies definitely have.

They went into lockdown long before Phil. I mean, my sister and brother are both that age. They’ve been in lockdown, I think, for their entire life. It feels like .

Phil Whelan: [00:11:25] Yeah.

Morris Miselowski: [00:11:26] Yeah. So they’ve definitely, and they’ve taken it quite seriously as have many other people that I know are that age. and the rest of us, I think rest of us have been fairly good.

There are lots of anecdotes, but I, that to me, they’re the one off stories or they’re the 1% of that we’re using. There are lots of stories of younger people having parties. We had the Airbnb story last week where a group of teenagers or early twenties had hired a pad. To get starting to have drugs into and to dance.

We’ve had those stories. We’ve seen our beach stories. We had a couple of footballs [00:12:00] that have been seen to be doing the wrong thing, and as always they brought it on themselves because they posted their wonderful experts on social media,

Phil Whelan: [00:12:08] but look, a very impressionable age, not super, super young, but the age when kids kind of get stuffed.

Let’s talk about your average ten-year-old. How are they going to be as 20 and 30 year old adults as a result of this.

Morris Miselowski: [00:12:19] Yeah. There’s a lot of conversations going on around that. It has to, it has to Mark them the same way that children living through the depression or living through a wall were marked by it.

Now, when they went through it, they obviously had lived and had lived the way you had to live appropriate to the time. But what’d you find afterwards is it does leave scars of thinking of scars, of thought. If I think there’s going to be big issues around hygiene, not necessarily washing our hands, but feelings of security of the home being secure, the family being secure, and when we don’t have that anymore, I think they’ll have separation anxiety or those sorts

Phil Whelan: [00:12:54] of, what was it called?

Compulsive conditions perhaps.

Morris Miselowski: [00:12:58] Yeah, well [00:13:00] maybe, maybe not. But the notion that you are safe, you know, when you’re a 10 year old, you still want the safety of parents. And if the world is telling you the only place that’s safe is home with your mum and dad, I think it’s a really serious lesson. You can’t go to school because of it.

So I’m guessing, I’ve spoken to a number of psychologists. I had one on my show last week. Yeah, we’ve talked about that. And she was also saying that the, the medium to longterm psychological issues that come out of this will be quite stark.

Phil Whelan: [00:13:27] Let’s talk about the upside and they’re going to be better citizens.

Not going nuts, but just general behavior. Maybe busy. I’ll see if he comes back. We’ll wait for a second.

Morris Miselowski: [00:13:40] Good. Hey, welcome back.

Phil Whelan: [00:13:42] I’ve learned to be patient with this thing. Yeah. What about, what about the upside? Is there going to be sort of in a good knock-on with your average 10 year old now when he grows up, when she grows up.

Morris Miselowski: [00:13:52] Yeah. I hope so. I’m hoping we will. We’ll have adjusted the education system. I was probably a bit too late for them, but maybe for the younger siblings. So [00:14:00] education will have changed. Also the workplace, the notion that, you know, many parents have rallied, I’ve heard for 20 years against this flexible workspace, working with technology.

Too many screens. We’ve all lived through a time when those things were really helpful. I’m hoping those messages won’t be sent to our kids anymore. We’ll see. Innovation and change is a normal pop for them. The changing jobs, changing careers is ordinary. They have to be adaptable. All those messages I’m hoping we will have learned as adults, as onto our kids.

Phil Whelan: [00:14:28] Finally, are we going to see basically nicer, more friendly people down the line? More time, more humility, more understanding and empathy. No,

Morris Miselowski: [00:14:39] not really. And then the reality for me is that we do that we do now hopefully will rub off to Phil. I mean, I don’t know of anybody else, but I tend to go back to my old grumpy nature when I can.

Phil Whelan: [00:14:50] Fair enough. Moses says we’re going to leave it there. Bah humbug. Talk to you next week. Always fun there. Morris Miselowski live on the line from st 

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