Pandemic surveillance and mobilities across Sydney, New South Wales
Funding information: Funding for this research was provided by the University of Newcastle, CHSF PPP scheme 2022.
Abstract
In response to the acute public health crisis of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, governments in Australia and around the world rushed to institute technologies to track human bodies with “live” surveillance. In Australia, “lockdowns” halted human mobilities in all states for different periods, and technologies for tracking bodies and collecting data were introduced after and between physical lockdowns. In this article, we analyse both the monitoring technologies developed to contend with COVID-19 and the complex array of regulations and public health orders governing space and mobility in New South Wales and Sydney. Our focus on monitoring technologies is based on the COVIDSafe App (National) and the New South Wales COVIDSafe Check-in App. These apps enabled the surveillance of individual mobilities before their sudden demise apparently unrelated to the public health scenario at the time. We argue that these technologies are examples of sensory power which rapidly enrolled human bodies in systems of surveillance that were difficult to unravel through 2022 and beyond. Our focus on regulations and public health orders outlines the shifting legal geographies during public health crisis and the ways these were enacted as mobility restrictions, surveillance, and punishment in western Sydney. We argue that the scars of the peak pandemic will endure in particular locations and communities, signalling the persistence of sensory power beyond the life of specific COVID-19 tools.
Key Insights
We examine relationships between mobilities and surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in Sydney during 2020 and 2021 and post-lockdown in 2022. We critique the geographic unevenness in how people’s movement and activity were surveilled and enforced, and were particularly harmful for people in western Sydney. We consider the legacies of targeting and enforcing mobilities restrictions and surveillance through apps and data collection. We also consider the future of tools of sensory power since post-peak pandemic mobilities have resumed and question our relationship with surveillance in the “new normal.”
1 INTRODUCTION
The COVID-19 pandemic in the state of New South Wales, Australia, necessitated a rush to institute technologies to track human bodies using pervasive, intimate, and “live” surveillance. At the same time, physical restrictions on mobilities were also put into place. In a confusing array of laws and rules, several forms of lockdown were added—temporal (time allowed in public/enclosed space), proximate (distance from other bodies), and volumetric (number of bodies in private and public space). In retrospect, the period from 2020 to 2021 can be analysed by geographers as an unprecedented pause in mobilities and an attendant boom in enrolment of bodies, lives, and relationships in systems of sensory power—ways of governing people through sensors, surveillance, and the data they produce (Isin & Ruppert, 2020). COVID-19 enrolled many citizens into systems of sensory power for the first time, deepened the enrolment of others, and pressured citizens who refused or sought to bypass certain components by limiting their mobilities and access to public and quasi-public space (Akbari, 2021). As Lupton (2022, p. 42) points out, usual “habits of moving and emplacing our bodies in relation to others’ bodies and to things were transformed.” For a time, it seemed that the ways bodies move between and dwell in space would be changed forever.
Despite the far-reaching nature of sensory power during surges in COVID-19 cases, requisite tracking of mobilities was suddenly dismantled in late 2021, and by mid-2022, showpiece technologies such as Australia’s national COVIDSafe App were decommissioned. No single piece of technology symbolises the rise and apparent fall of sensory power in this period like the COVIDSafe App. Its decommissioning signalled that bodies could be mobile once again without disclosing their movements or time spent in a particular space.
In this article, we use the concept of sensory power (Isin & Ruppert, 2020) to explore relationships between mobilities and surveillance through the peak pandemic and into the period dubbed, somewhat innocuously, “back to normal” by the Premier of New South Wales, and we ask how these relationships play out spatially. The peak pandemic period refers to initial wave of COVID-19 from March to June 2020 and then June to December 2021, when the Delta and then Omicron variants spread in New South Wales, when lockdowns resumed, unevenly, and when enrolment in technologies to track mobilities and vaccination status was essential for everyday life. We argue that live surveillance deemed necessary during the peak pandemic period deepened the enrolment of individuals into data systems that have persisted with varying levels of visibility. This whole period is, therefore, crucial for understanding the conditions and speed through which sensory power can be implemented.
The “back to normal” period refers to the sudden turn away from restrictions on mobilities and limitations on use, time, and volume of bodies in space. Analysis of the period is tricky. While some overt measures brought into place specifically for the period of crisis have been removed, other components of sensory power still have high-volume enrolment, even if their use is not tied to public health concerns. Furthermore, the scars of lockdown and differentiated treatment of communities in different parts of Sydney remain. We argue that the legacy of uneven sensory power deepens existing inequities and divisions within and between different geopolitical contexts in Sydney. We drew on the analytic of “intermediary clusters” from the concept of sensory power to develop an understanding of the geopolitics of pandemic surveillance in Sydney through the peak pandemic, the “back to normal” period, and beyond.
In analysing these moments, we utilise a hybrid methodology borne of necessity as we began this work with limitations on our own mobilities as researchers. First, we analysed information in the public domain, especially news media and government laws and policies related to mobilities and space. The peak pandemic period saw new rules and laws rapidly introduced, some entangled in new technologies, some relying on existing technologies, and some focused on physical restrictions. We examined public information to explore “the co-constitutive relationship of people, place and law” (Bennett & Layard, 2015), the key tenet of legal geography, during an exceptional period for these relationships.
Second, we drew upon our personal experiences of sensory power during the pandemic and lockdowns and other legal restrictions. We put into practice the idea of “affective inventories,” recalling and sharing our own affective and emotional responses to the conditions we lived through, “resisting the temptation to smooth our experiences into a single voice” (McDuie-Ra et al., 2020, p. 9). Affective responses to major spatial–social ruptures can have common elements among a group of people (in this case co-authors). However, they are also experienced individually, and during research for this article, we took time to recount and share our own responses to the period in question (the second half of 2021) and the legacies that dragged on through 2022 when the article was written. We recognise too that this micro-affective pool of responses mirrors the shared, yet differentiated, affective response across cities, entire societies, and even globally during the pandemic.
To go some way toward balancing the public and the personal, we examined media produced in this period, and this is the third activity in our methodology. We spent time exploring public exhibitions about life in the pandemic, both in-person (where possible) and online during 2022. The media presented in these exhibitions counters the voluminous content produced by the government and news media, offering reflections of what changed during the pandemic, where change is experienced, and what has persisted.
The article is divided into three further sections. Section 2 analyses the relationships between mobilities and surveillance using the analytical framework of sensory power. Section 3 analyses physical restrictions on mobilities in New South Wales and Sydney during peak pandemic periods. The array of laws governing space and movement are complex and confusing, and we emphasise the geographic unevenness in targeting enforcement. Section 4 continues analysing the peak pandemic, this time focusing on the tools of sensory power deployed in apps and QR codes. We then shift to consider the legacies of targeting and enforcement, with a focus on western Sydney, to argue that the scars of the peak pandemic remain in particular geographical locations and communities.
2 MOBILITIES AND SURVEILLANCE
Mobilities research is important in geography. Mobilities refers to the study of people and other animals, objects, technologies, ideas, and viruses on the move and the spaces where they transit, where they end up, and what they shape along the way (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011). Sheller and Urry (2006) draw attention to the ways in which “multiple mobilities” gather in nodes, especially in urban space, and in this article we treat cities as spaces shaped by—and shaping—mobilities at different speeds and scales. COVID-19 ruptured mobilities within and between cities over the period from 2020 to 2022. Emptying urban landscapes, limiting human contact, directing people away from crowded areas, and slowing down or halting mobilities were crucial tactics for combatting the pandemic globally (Brail, 2021; Praharaj & Han, 2022). During that period, mobilities and proximity threatened health (and life), turning “quotidian bodily mobilities into a threatening endeavour” (Holwitt, 2021, p. 22). Lockdowns, restrictions on mobilities, and acquiescence to tracing movement were essential tools for fighting the pandemic. The regulation of mobilities usually reserved for international borders was introduced at a sub-national level, including restricted movement between states within Australia and even within states and between cities. Urban recovery buoyed by vaccinations and more manageable variants have reactivated mobilities at different speeds and volumes, yet in many locations, re-mobilisation was/is dependent on acquiescence to surveillance.
Surveillance is the “focused, systematic and routine practices and techniques of attention, for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction” that “occurs as a ‘normal’ part of everyday life in all societies” (Lyon, 2007, p. 14). COVID-19 surveillance utilised mobile phone apps and location services. As vaccinations were made available, apps were linked to vaccination data. Apps were thus a crucial element in everyday spatial practices including isolation, distancing, and capacity limits in venues, while also enabling the “live governing of the dynamic relation between bodies and populations” (Isin & Ruppert, 2020, p. 11). These tools track bodies infected with the virus, “notifying, testing and isolating (if necessary) them” and “tracing all bodies that infected bodies came into contact with, notifying, testing and isolating (if necessary) them as well” (Isin & Ruppert, 2020, p. 11—brackets in original).
The COVID-19 response builds on existing surveillance infrastructures, expanding their geographic reach, the latest episode in a long technological creep enabled by “multiple connections across myriad technologies and practices” (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000, p. 609). Surveillance has reached extraordinary levels since the 1980s through changing technologies (closed circuit television [CCTV], artificial intelligence [AI], and biometrics), integration of surveillance technology into personal electronics, and the “data revolution” that feeds and “feeds off” surveillance data (Kitchin, 2014). Surveillance of mobilities, rather than of static space, has a long history, accelerated in recent decades (Wood & Graham, 2006). It is common for individuals to consent to live surveillance, especially as a trade-off for greater mobility and convenience (Lyon, 2019). This shift towards “sensory power” foregrounds sensors as “technologies of detecting, identifying and making people sense-able through various forms of digitised data” (Isin & Ruppert, 2020, p. 2).
Articulating the concept of sensory power in the context of the pandemic’s first wave, Isin and Ruppert (2020) argue that sensory power developed from the 1980s and has accelerated during the pandemic as governments are forced to intensify ways to track, notify, and isolate individuals in real time. Sensory power exists alongside, and is entangled in, established forms of sovereign, disciplinary, and bio/regulatory power. Referring to biopower, which they label “regulatory power,” Isin and Ruppert also suggest it “calibrates the conduct of bodies [by] … persuading, guiding, nudging and cajoling bodies that their health and wealth derives from it” (p. 6). Like other scholars, their way of understanding biopower is to identify simultaneous “totalisation and individualisation [by] … regulating between bodies and populations” (p. 7; emphasis added).
Isin and Ruppert (2020) also suggest that sensory power, made visible by the pandemic, signals that there are “intermediary clusters” (p. 7) that complicate the bipolar notions of power formulated by Foucault decades ago. These intermediary clusters are “objects of government between bodies and populations that a new form of power enacts and governs through sensory assemblages” (p. 7). These assemblages include apps, devices, and platforms for live surveillance that enact clusters as a specific technology of government and they are relational, multiple, fluid, visualised, and live objects. For the purposes of this article, we add that clusters are spatial, pinned to particular geographies imagined at different scales. In New South Wales, the term “COVID cluster” was common in official communications, media, and everyday use, and the geographic specificities of these clusters were subject to differentiated responses by government and law enforcement, as will be seen below. The scale in New South Wales was primarily local government areas (also LGAs or municipalities), and different clusters were subject to different treatment based on their location within New South Wales and within Sydney in particular.
the response to the crisis unfolds there is a need for geographers and others to document the ways in which a new surveillance and biopolitical regime is being produced through the alliance of government control and surveillance capitalism and their use of a range of technologies.
And as Tan (2022) also wrote in the case of Singapore, the pandemic almost completely eradicated cash, creating more data and producing more digital traces for commercial entities and enrolling citizens and non-citizens deeper into digital banking, payments, digital health consultations, and online shopping and delivery apps. In comparison, the pandemic brought millions of people onto digital platforms for the first time in countries where digital subjectivity was uneven, such as India through “compulsory” use of the Aarogya Setu app (Basu, 2021).
Alongside apps and networked surveillance infrastructure, local surveillance practices include contact tracers, CCTV control room operators, and programmers, producing a complex series of inter-legalities (Robinson & Graham, 2018). As Hu et al. (2021) demonstrate, the relationship between human mobilities and COVID-19 transmission is analysed with a range of data beyond purpose-built COVID-19 apps including big data generated by tech companies through location services on mobile devices, public transit data, census data, and primary or small data surveys in different spaces—including with COVID-19 patients. In some contexts, governments also relied upon citizens practising surveillance on one another for breaches of lockdown orders and other restrictions (Bray, 2020).
As mobilities started to resume after lockdowns were lifted, the requirements of overt COVID-19-specific surveillance began to wane, and so too did citizen adherence to surveillance practices. The trade-off between public safety and restrictions on mobilities was difficult to sustain, especially when means such as lockdowns, surveillance, or mobilities tracking no longer led to the promised ends (zero or low cases). We explore these events in Sydney, under the authority of the New South Wales Government during the lockdown of 2021 when the Delta and, later, Omicron variants of COVID-19 arrived in Australia. As rhetoric about a “return to normal” became an important part of public communication by government, an important inference in commercial communication, and an essential part institutional practices such as returning to schools and offices, there was a strong sense that surveillance of mobilities was over. This sense was reinforced as governments began decommissioning COVID-19 apps and other specific surveillance tools such as health declarations and vaccination certificates. As will be discussed in the following sections, the idea of a return to normal raises critical questions over what normal is in relation to sensory power, and more specifically, where and for whom normal has returned?
3 PEAK PANDEMIC: PHYSICAL RESTRICTIONS
Different restrictions were imposed on people’s mobilities and activities in Australia throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, which initially started with the National Cabinet establishing a nationwide lockdown on 23 March 2020. However, from that point forward, each of the Australian states and territories implemented its own public health orders and measures at different times. New South Wales had what can be considered its first “lockdown conditions” from 23 March 2020. On that date, the then New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced new restrictions in which non-essential activities and businesses would be temporarily shut down and people were encouraged to work at home and stay home unless exercising or shopping for food and essentials (Storen & Corrigan, 2020). While schools would continue to remain open, parents and caregivers were encouraged to keep their children at home unless they could not be cared for at home. People were limited in their mobilities particularly in terms of their work, schooling, shopping, entertainment activities, and public gatherings—they were restricted in various ways unless under certain exemptions or for essential services, emergencies, or similar. The following day (24 March), the New South Wales Government introduced the COVID-19 Legislation Amendment (Emergency Measures) Bill, which would establish in law a series of temporary public restrictions in many areas, including health, justice, corrections, planning, and local government (Storen & Corrigan, 2020). Mobilities were often restricted and changed through New South Wales public health orders on the advice of the Chief Health Officer and through monitoring of reported COVID-19 case numbers.
The first New South Wales lockdown from 23 March 2020 saw restrictions easing from 1 May and with further easing on 10 May (in other words, approximately 39 days of harsh lockdown with people unable to visit most types of shops or people’s houses and then 48 days inclusive of looser lockdown restrictions where visits in smaller groups were allowed to houses or cafes). During the 2020 outbreak, a different kind of spatial mobility restriction was also introduced within New South Wales; for 61 days from 31 March to 1 June 2020, Sydney residents could not leave the Greater Sydney metropolitan area unless for “essential purposes” (Storen & Corrigan, 2020). After that time, most freedoms on mobility increased for New South Wales residents as COVID-19 case numbers stayed low. A smaller lockdown of suburbs in Sydney’s Northern Beaches (north of Narrabeen bridge) occurred for 22 days from 19 December 2020 to 10 January 2021.
In 2021, the New South Wales COVID-19 Delta variant outbreak led to the most severe lockdown in Sydney and New South Wales. The lockdown was 107 days from 26 June 2021 to 11 October 2021 (ABS, 2022). Under New South Wales public health orders, leaving home was only permitted for essential reasons and mask wearing was mandatory and enforced (NSW Government, 2021a). Polymerase chain reaction testing ramped up, and national and state governments strongly encouraged Australians to get vaccinated (ABS, 2022). Targets for vaccination rates were set across states and territories with the incentive of easing restrictions and ending lockdowns when these targets were met. Throughout that period (and during the earlier lockdown), rules and restrictions on mobilities, gathering, mask wearing, limits to exercise and time outdoors, and other constraints were regularly changed and conveyed in successive New South Wales public health orders (NSW Government, 2021b). This strategy often led to confusion and criticism from media and the public about the justification, effectiveness, and social effect of the rules (Cockburn, 2021).
There were 55 amendments to the New South Wales Public Health Orders on “Temporary Movement and Gathering Restrictions” and “Additional Restrictions for Delta Outbreak,” meaning changes occurred to the rules every day or two of the entire 2021 lockdown (NSW Government, 2021b). Changes resulted in frustrating geographical and temporal constraints on people’s mobilities and daily lives. Often these frustrations occurred because of geographical quirks in the way the restrictions were introduced with different severity for different local government areas in Sydney. For example, Newtown’s King Street is the boundary between the City of Sydney and Inner West local government areas. Businesses on the City of Sydney side were put into lockdown from 11:59 pm on 25 June 2021 as the Delta variant of COVID-19 initially took hold in the eastern and city suburbs (Cockburn, 2021). People in those areas could not leave their homes unless they were shopping for essential goods and services, receiving medical care, exercising, or conducting essential work or education. Non-essential businesses were forced to close. Local government areas in the inner-west remained unaffected by stay-at-home orders at the time, with businesses on the other side of King Street allowed to remain open with social distancing of people according to a one person per 4 m2 rule (Cockburn, 2021).
As the Delta variant spread, the western suburbs of Sydney saw the most significant growth and spread of COVID-19, resulting in stricter lockdowns for most of the period in 2021, starting with announcements on 7 July 2021 and police crackdowns from 9 July. These suburbs were labelled “LGAs of concern” in daily news briefings by the Premier and Minister for Health, while Eastern suburbs municipalities—the origin of the Delta strain in Sydney—had their rules eased. It was reported that the Western Sydney municipalities received disproportionate police surveillance on people’s mobilities and significant enforcement through fines for non-compliance, mostly with stay-at-home orders. Western Sydney reportedly received double the number of police fines compared with other parts of Sydney such as the Eastern suburbs (Knaus, 2021; Nilsson, 2021).
Although Melbourne has been widely recognised as having the most severe lockdowns in Australia (totalling 262 days since March 2020), Sydney residents also suffered from severe restrictions on mobility, particularly communities in Western Sydney during the lockdown in 2021. Cumberland Mayor Steve Christou was outspoken during and after the lockdown. He said his community had felt it was targeted: “Western Sydney residents are more vulnerable, have lower socio-economic status and are often migrant families—they don’t have the same power to make noise and really worry these politicians, they’re an easy and vulnerable group to target” (Nilsson, 2021). These reports and police data on fines both highlight that there was inequitable enforcement and surveillance of people’s mobilities between the municipalities in Sydney, with Western Sydney local government areas bearing the brunt of the strictest rules, the strongest police presence, and the most fines.
Many of the physical constraints on people’s mobilities were introduced by the New South Wales Public Health Orders on “Temporary movement and gathering restrictions.” To minimise community transmission of COVID-19, from 26 July 2021, the New South Wales Government introduced severe restrictions on people’s movements and gatherings, particularly within Greater Sydney. These included the following restrictions on (a) the number of visitors to residential premises, holiday homes, and short-term rentals; (b) the number of persons in certain non-residential premises; and (c) singing and dancing and on consuming alcohol while standing in non-residential premises. People were also required (d) to wear fitted face coverings in indoor non-residential premises and at COVID-safe outdoor gatherings or controlled outdoor public gatherings. The Order also imposed additional restrictions on certain persons who had been in Greater Sydney and required them not to leave their places of residence or temporary accommodation without a reasonable excuse. Examples of a reasonable excuse included leaving for reasons involving food shopping, employment, and exercise.
Amendment to the Public Health Order No. 4 on 9 July 2021 introduced some of the most severe restrictions on the physical mobility of individuals across Greater Sydney (NSW Government, 2021b). These included requirements to (a) prohibit persons entering Greater Sydney for exercise or outdoor recreation; (b) limit outdoor public gatherings in Greater Sydney to two persons; (c) require adults over 18 leaving Greater Sydney to (i) carry evidence showing their address and (ii) produce it if required to do so by a police officer; (d) only permit one member of a household to go out to obtain food, goods, or services once per day; and (e) require persons in Greater Sydney who go out for exercise or outdoor recreation to (i) remain within their own local government areas or within 10 km of their homes, (ii) not carpool with persons who are not part of their household, and (iii) for adults to carry evidence showing their address and produce it if required to do so by a police officer.
The spatial aspects of sensory power were evident in restrictions targeting Western Sydney from 14 July 2021 onwards with Public Health (COVID-19 Temporary Movement and Gathering Restrictions) Amendment (No. 6) Order 2021 and subsequent orders. These restricted people’s movements within those areas, with limitations on movement and limits of one hour only of exercise outdoors. There was a dystopian atmosphere within these “LGAs of concern” and considerable fear and anxiety, as noted in numerous interviews with residents in news reports, as soldiers were called in to support police (Knaus, 2021; Nilsson, 2021). Western Sydney municipalities operated as one form of intermediary cluster for both assembling and testing the effectiveness of a range of governance and technological interventions. In the case of physical restrictions, the municipalities were objects of governing that mobilised pre-COVID policing and military practices and technologies to focus on bodies that were, or could be anticipated, to be contravening spatially specific health orders. These Western Sydney local government areas were surveilled for weeks in ways materially different from other areas of Sydney, including through police helicopter observations over rooftops, with a heavy police and military presence on streets and shopping areas (Khalil, 2021), and police issued a disproportionate number of fines in these areas (see below).
4 PEAK PANDEMIC: APPS AND QR CODES
During the COVID-19 pandemic, sensory power was accelerated, or so it appeared at the time, through the creation of a national COVIDSafe app that had variations in different states, including New South Wales. In May 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, the Australian Government launched the COVIDSafe Act along with amendments to the Privacy Act 1988 known as the Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Act 2020. The amendment was made during, and then subsumed, a 3-month biosecurity emergency declaration under section 475 of the Biosecurity Act 2015 (Du et al., 2020). The COVIDSafe app was based on Singapore’s pioneering TraceTogether app, and as Goggin (2020, p.63) notes, “where public concern regarding and discussion of privacy issues was clearly presented but publicly muted in Singapore, in Australia there was furious debate.” Foreign investment from Amazon Web Services and resultant concerns about the legal geographic and jurisdictional distinctions on data use and access, delays in rollout for certain devices and operating systems (iOS), delayed release of source code, security concerns (hacking Bluetooth, for example), and privacy concerns were all debated in public and in parliament (see Wang & Burdon, 2021).
Despite these controversies, enrolment into the COVIDSafe app was rapid, the trade-off of intensified live, intimate surveillance for increased mobility offered in dire circumstances to a weary population (Floreani, 2020). The app was not compulsory, and effectiveness of the app depended on a high rate of voluntary uptake. Ten days after being made available, over five million people out of 16 million adult phone users had downloaded the app and almost eight million users had registered by the time of decommissioning in mid-2022 (Black, 2022). However, this number obscures the use of state apps that fulfilled many of the functions of the national COVIDSafe app, and in many cases—such as in New South Wales—went further in tracking mobilities. In their study of public perceptions of tracking during the pandemic using smartphone apps, Garrett et al. (2021, p. 18) found that those who downloaded the COVIDSafe app were “motivated by government policy and a desire to safeguard public and personal health, and to return to normal activities sooner.” Whereas those who did not “were motivated by concerns over privacy, a lack of government trust, battery usage, and a fear of normalising government tracking” (p. 18). Garrett et al. also found that while public acceptance of the need for some kind of tracking by government during the pandemic was high, this did not necessarily translate into actions such as downloading the app or using it as instructed.
As Vogt et al. (2022: e255) conclude in other work, “COVIDSafe generated a substantial additional perceived workload for public health staff and was not considered useful.” In September 2021 during the peak of the Delta outbreak in New South Wales, it was reported that the state government had not used the national COVIDSafe app at all to track the movements of, at the time, 55,000 cases of Delta (Conifer, 2021). By December 2021, the federal shadow Health Minister, Mark Butler, called for the app to be decommissioned, citing ineffectiveness and a cost of AU$21 million dollars by the time it was decommissioned (Black, 2022). After the Australian Labor Party won the federal election in May 2022, Butler became the Health Minister and the app was decommissioned a few months after. At the time of decommissioning, it was reported that the COVIDSafe app had identified only 17 close contacts not found manually through its entire period of operation of 28 months (Lowrey, 2021), fulfilling a warning from Du et al. (2020, p. 8) about the app being a “useless technologic Tower of Babel.”
You can delete the COVIDSafe app from your phone at any time. This will delete all COVIDSafe app information from your phone. The information in the National COVIDSafe Data Store will not be deleted immediately. It will be destroyed at the end of the pandemic. If you would like your information deleted from the storage system sooner, you can complete our request data deletion form. (See Figure 1.)
By January 2023, the same site declared that all data had now been deleted from the National COVIDSafe Data Store, suggesting the “end of the pandemic” has come, activating deletion of the data once and for all (see Figure 2).
The dismantling of COVIDSafe sent several signals into the public sphere about the status of the pandemic (it is over!), the possibilities for mobilities (go anywhere!), and data (no more tracking!). However, as we argue below, while the national app was jettisoned unceremoniously, sensory power remains ascendant, and the memories of excessive enforcement of COVID-19 surveillance in parts of Sydney are a powerful legacy of COVID’s geographies within one city.
4.1 QR codes and mobility
The rise and fall of the national app are well-chronicled. Less attention has been given to the other digital tools used to monitor COVID-19 cases, track mobilities, and vaccination status. Following the spread of the Delta variant in New South Wales from June 2021, mandatory check-ins using QR codes were put into place, changing the calculus of sensory power from proximity and temporality to a full tracking of mobilities, vaccination status, and time and place at commercial venues and public institutions. The key shift here is from the national COVIDSafe app to the New South Wales COVID Safe feature on the Services NSW app, which was already in existence but was modified for use in 2021.
When you check in to a business using the Service NSW app, only the location of the business and time of visit is recorded. This information is stored for 28 days and only for the purpose of contact tracing, if necessary. It’s a secure way for your information to be stored so you can be contacted easily if required.
During the acceleration of cases in New South Wales through the last half of 2021 until mandatory check-in were stopped and then reinstated in early 2022 (see above), users would be notified if there had been a positive COVID-19 case in the same space at the same time. Users were urged to monitor for symptoms and get tested if necessary. At times, these alerts reached farcical frequencies, with users receiving notifications multiple times a day. As Delta abated and the Omicron variant began to spread in late 2021, the precise geographies of COVID-19 dissolved into a hazy digital map of constant alerts and constant proximity to infection, muting the hypervigilance of earlier periods of monitoring. Confusion for users between the national COVIDSafe app and the Services NSW app was widespread during that period and was even acknowledged by the New South Wales Government in 2022 (NSW Government, 2022).
Unlike the COVIDSafe app, the COVID-19 feature on the Services NSW app has not been decommissioned. It can still be used to check into businesses, used to register positive COVID-19 cases identified using self-testing kits, to access vaccination certificates for domestic use (international use is through a different app), and for check in at schools for a period.
Along with the challenge of roll-back, which we discuss in Section 4.2, the tools of sensory power that accelerated during COVID-19 are deeper than the failed national app and its state-level variants. As Goggin (2020, p. 67) reflected early in the pandemic, “the app-based contact tracing represented by COVIDSafe, and other apps around the world, represent a deepening of technologies of surveillance in social life.” Even the very idea that the apps are now benign means accepting assurances about the use and/or deletion of data gathered during peak pandemic. The status of data deserves critical attention for “function creep … when a technology deployed for benign purposes slowly gets repurposed for problematic ends” (Vitak & Zimmer, 2020, p. 3). Dismantling the COVIDSafe app garners most attention; however, along with the persistence of the NSW app, physical surveillance measures and the continuity of existing surveillance technologies are crucial components of the surveillant assemblage operating during COVID-19 and extending into the period beyond. This assemblage is a form of intermediary cluster that comprises accepted and enduring technologies, along with redundant, resisted, and visibly failed sensory objects. It highlights that the sensory power operates in multiple and fluid ways, across a range of scales and in often contradictory ways.
4.2 “Back to normal”
Dominic Perrotett replaced Gladys Berejiklian as New South Wales Premier in October 2021, after Berejiklian stepped down amidst a corruption investigation. Perrotett immediately set about lifting restrictions in various ways and, by December 2021, had removed almost all restrictions, including mask wearing, favouring “personal responsibility,” an approach that required revision as cases spread quickly and the workforce was decimated. Perrotett often used phrases such as “back to normal” and “return to normal.” “Back to normal” was picked up in the media and stuck to Perrotett, epitomising his approach to rapid dismantling of almost all restrictions regardless of public health advice and vaccination coverage (see Davies, 2021).
While the immediate period of “back to normal” was chaotic, by March/April 2022, most restrictions overtly associated with COVID-19 had been lifted, aside from mandatory periods of self-isolation for positive cases. The pro-business logic of lifting restrictions aside, freer mobilities without mandatory COVID-related tracking appears as a gain for privacy and citizen rights. The vocal critics of sensory power in this period—under various labels and from various political positions—got what they wanted, as it were, once the system of check-ins, contact tracing, and vaccination declarations dissolved. Furthermore, the ineffectiveness of the COVIDSafe App affirmed criticisms of overreach. However, we contend that “back to normal” is a narrow way of analysing the relationships between and across mobilities, surveillance, and space in Sydney and beyond. We put forward two alternative readings of “back to normal” in this section.
First, only specific tools of sensory power were dismantled. The pandemic enrolled millions of citizens into tools of sensory power for the first time and deepened the enrolment of others. While the extraordinary tools such as the COVIDSafe App, mandatory check-ins, and the need to present vaccination status have gone, other tools have become routine. Returning to Isin and Ruppert (2020, p. 11) what “we are observing through the coronavirus pandemic is the acceleration of strategies and technologies of sensory power that have emerged over the last forty years.” Many, though not all, of these tools track location, and in turn, mobilities. QR codes are a pertinent example. QR codes spatialise data into the physical environment. QR codes were becoming common in urban landscapes prior to COVID-19, activating what Greenspan (2021, p. 207) calls “a bridge between the physical and the virtual, the digital and the analogue, allowing spaces, images and objects to immediately connect with the unseen wireless atmosphere.” QR codes were ubiquitous during the peak pandemic, a requisite for entering enclosed space, producing data on one’s movements through the built environment.
Beyond registering presence in space, QR codes also became necessary to avoid human contact and maintain distance. For example, in restaurants, cafes, and bars, scanning QR codes replaced handling a menu, ordering food and drink from staff, and paying, connecting banking details to location and services. These practices have remained in place throughout New South Wales, routinising the production of data for multiple commercial entities in everyday mobilities and consumption. Surveillance creep into the workplace, the classroom, in-home entertainment, online shopping, exercise, and healthcare with apps generating data on location, what people consume, and their productivity, sketching a broader picture of the depth of enrolment intensified during the pandemic. It is unclear whether most people are aware of the number of systems in which they are enrolled, and whether they can easily withdraw from these systems of data generation. It is also unclear whether many people want to, given the convenience, and the rhythms made routine during the pandemic. The point we make here is that the anxiety over privacy pinned to COVIDSafe Apps and mandatory vaccinations does not appear to have been redirected towards commercial uses of sensory power in the “back to normal” period. In other words, resistance to sensory power and surveillance during the peak pandemic was asserted in the public sphere. In the period since, resistance is more muted. Crucially, enrolment in sensory power is scattered across platforms and systems making empirical data difficult to accumulate and track, and well beyond the means of this article. Indeed, exactly what deep enrolment in sensory power means for geographic research is a critical question for post-pandemic research.
Second, the idea of “back to normal” is troubled by the experiences of lockdowns and policing of mobilities in different parts of Sydney. The geographic divide between western Sydney and the rest of the city was exacerbated by COVID-19. As discussed above, municipalities in Western Sydney had stricter distance controls in place for longer than other areas, night-time curfews were put into place, and workers were subject to a complex and punitive system of permits to travel outside their municipality to work, including having to test negative for COVID-19 every 3 days at already overcrowded testing centres, which changed to tests using Rapid-Antigen tests (in short supply) and or proof of vaccination in August 2021. Barnes and Crosbie (2022) show that in the “LGAs of concern,” workers were less able to work from home, were more vulnerable to catching COVID-19 while performing “essential” work, and were dramatically impacted by the reduction and cessation of government payments to offset COVID impacts. Over AU$2.5 million was reportedly handed out in fines during the Delta outbreak in these LGAs, with reports that fines in Western Sydney totalled double the amount of Sydney’s affluent east (Nilsson, 2021).
A surge in police presence on the streets, and the use of helicopters, and patrol cars and door-knocking to check on the number of people inside residences characterised the months from July through to September 2021 in Western Sydney. In early August, 300 military personnel were deployed in Fairfield local government area (Daley, 2021). For many communities in Western Sydney, responses during lockdowns were a continuation of decades of harsh policing, of specialist taskforces targeting alleged organised crime, overzealous police responses to community, and alleged religious extremism (see White, 2009). Police and military presence on the streets and helicopters whirring overhead exacerbated experiences of violence, fear, and loss by refugee and asylum seekers in these communities.
Deeper than the physical restrictions were the affective responses of residents who felt unfairly targeted when compared with other Sydney LGAs, the idea of “second class citizens” gained currency in the media (Hayman, 2022) and aligned with findings in social research (Mude et al., 2021; Muscat et al., 2022). During daily COVID-19 briefings to the public, patronising and culturally insensitive remarks were routinely made about sociocultural and ethno-religious norms that may be exacerbating the spread of the Delta variant, slowing vaccination uptake. These norms were immediately mapped to particular municipalities as part of a strategy of “blame shifting” (Dau & Ellis, 2022). Translation of health advice into community languages was often lacking, and even when operational, the confusing, nuanced, and constantly shifting rules discussed above were difficult to grasp in any language (Khalil, 2021; Mahimbo et al., 2022).
Photographs in the media often depicted these stark differences. A photo essay in one newspaper in August 2021 entitled “A Tale of Two Sydneys” (Sydney Morning Herald, 2021) typifies the ways mobilities and surveillance across Sydney are juxtaposed. The 28 images depict Western Sydney municipalities as spaces of ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, operating at low volume: streets are empty or near empty—some have barriers preventing movement; housing and streetscapes are weathered; the police and military are present; and individuals photographed are isolated—staring out of windows, moving through space as lone figures, or sitting alone in empty space. In contrast, images depicting Sydney’s “east, north and south” show crowds gathered at beaches and promenades, obvious violations of strict distancing measures—streetscapes are full of people who appear White/Anglo. The photo essay clearly has flaws; ethnic diversity in “east, north and west” Sydney is kept out of the frame; so too are images depicting isolation and loneliness in these areas. However, the juxtaposition reflects the primary geographic divide through the period of lockdowns and the differentiated experiences of communities in different clusters of LGAs.
There are scores of other depictions of life during lockdown period in Western Sydney, including a public exhibition by the photographer Sally Tsoutas at the Margaret Whitlam Galleries at the Parramatta campus of Western Sydney University (Tsoutas, 2022). Tsoutas’s photographs depart from the photojournalist’s gaze by depicting slices of joy in lockdown life in Western Sydney. Most striking is the series “Connections,” taken just as restrictions were beginning to ease. Residents pose in the suburban streetscape, smiling. An image titled Ilhan, presumably named after the young woman depicted standing in a street in Regent’s Park (Canterbury Bankstown LGA) beaming at the camera. Ilhan epitomises the unexpected power of Tsoutas’s photographs. In contrast to interior images in “A Tale of Two Sydneys,” residents are shown indoors laughing, chatting, and cooking with family members or posing with pets. Lives are shown as resilient, defiant, and joyous. There is hope in the images, and agency too, suggesting that life may indeed resume some approximation of pre-pandemic connections, although mistrust, trauma, and economic dislocation will be much more challenging to repair.
5 CONCLUSION
During the peak of COVID-19 in Sydney, physical, temporal, proximate, and volumetric restrictions on mobilities were deployed in various laws that were enforced unevenly and that were bypassed or resisted by an exhausted public. During the period, enrolment in sensory power was crucial for carrying out day-to-day movements and spending time outdoors, epitomised in the national COVIDSafe App and the COVIDSafe Check-in on the NSW Services App. For a time, people appeared to be “rushing into invasive surveillance with immediate and downstream consequences concerning civil liberties, citizenship and surveillance capitalism with little benefit in return” (Kitchin, 2020, p. 364). Anxiety over the trade-offs between privacy and safety was at a pitch during this period in Australia and globally (Glitsos, 2021). The future of mobilities and city living was open for reinvention. Public and political debate was full of discussion around ethics, privacy, and the trade-offs between health and surveillance.
Then, suddenly, it stopped. COVID-19 specific tools and requirements were dismantled in New South Wales—not without major risks and ramifications for public health—and things were declared to be “back to normal.” Once the national COVIDSafe App was decommissioned in mid-2022, the showpiece tool of specific COVID-19 sensory power was gone. Clusters were absorbed back into the larger urban milieu. Analysts of surveillance and privacy were left with a strange sensation; criticisms of sensory power rolled out during COVID-19 were now, seemingly, void. Civic rights had won, even if by accident.
Yet, we urge caution in analysing the “back to normal” period. Physical restrictions have been lifted, and layers of sensory power with overt connections to COVID-19 have been dismantled. Left behind are two important domains for critical geographic research in Australia and elsewhere.
First, one layer of sensory power might have been removed but the peak pandemic enrolled millions of people into sensory power for the first time and deepened the enrolment of others—in terms of both the frequency of use and the extension into other realms of life. Sensory power has become routine. The ubiquity of sensory power has implications for surveillance and mobilities, namely, the ways bodies are tracked as they move through space, dwell, work, and consume, without the same levels of attention and resistance directed at specific COVID-19 tools. Members of the public are far more open to the tools of sensory power in the aftermath of the pandemic. The dimensions of enrolment into sensory power, the data produced, and the ways these map spatially, within, and between different polities form a fascinating avenue for future research. So too is the future possibility of rapid identification of intermediary clusters of risk between individual bodies and whole populations.
Second, the experiences of physical and technological surveillance during peak pandemic assuage the idea that life is “back to normal” for everyone in Sydney. The experiences of COVID-19 rules and laws and their enforcement in Western Sydney created and/or exacerbated distrust and feelings of persecution and intolerance. Surveillance and the enforcement of restrictions played out unevenly between and within different parts of Sydney, spatialising clusters at the intersections of race, religion, and location. Furthermore, woeful public communications have left scars that remain long after the dismantling of restrictions and the decommissioning of apps. More research into experiences among different communities in different locations is necessary and will help inform the prospects of cooperation with, and resistance to, authorities in future crises.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Open access publishing facilitated by The University of Newcastle, as part of the Wiley - The University of Newcastle agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
ETHICS STATEMENT
No direct research was conducted with human participants.
Open Research
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
