It’s no surprise to me Barnaby Joyce is one of a number of politicians who will refuse to use the official COVID-19 contact tracing app. I mean, the guy ran two lives and kept an affair from his family. He made a name for himself attempting to be stealthy, so a government-sanctioned electronic fingerprint wouldn’t really be his thing, would it? However, and it pains me to say it, on this one occasion, Joyce is right.

Australians, in general, aren’t too worried about privacy. That’s not some sweeping generalisation, that’s the conclusion of Deborah Lupton, professor in the Centre for Social Research in Health at the University of NSW, who’s been researching Australian attitudes to health privacy for years. Basically, we are chilled. For example, we know about Cambridge Analytica yet we will use Facebook. We don’t really worry about targeted advertising. We know about #censusfail yet will still fill in the forms.

Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

There is one problem, though, for a government attempting to roll out a new application that isn’t tested in the market. Australians don’t trust governments to manage technology. We don’t fear conspiracy but we do think our leaders will cock it up. “Australians don’t think that the government is going to do anything creepy [but] we don’t trust the government to ‘know where the on switch is on a computer’,” says Lupton, quoting one of her research participants.

There is a health app tension between our various rights. We want the right to be free, to be private, but we also want the right to stay healthy.