Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to follow a caretaker health Minister who replaced a caretaker health Minister. I challenge the Minister: when he said that we need to have no room for complacency answer the question I asked him in the oral question section when I said to him Are you using the QR app at every single QR stop?" And furthermore when we're having that discussion go back through the Official Information Act request that Stuff put to all 20 Cabinet ministers—have you asked them the same question? Is Cabinet using this Government app and are they signing in at every—we'll hold you to that. I can see the Minister nodding his head. We will hold you to that. Every Cabinet Minister is using the New Zealand COVID Tracer app and signing in at every single poster stop. I doubt that but we shall see. I want to talk about the app and I want to put on record first of all and say we want to help and we believe there is a health information technology (HIT) component to improving the coronavirus response. We absolutely believe that. We did in the very beginning. The problem has been several-fold. First of all the development of the app and its very late deployment—way past the time we were at the peak of our infectious cases. We have to ponder back and say well why was that? Why was that when purportedly the Prime Minister was having conversations with Australia and with Singapore? Why was that when large companies approached me and said "Dr Reti we'll give this to the Government"—not small firms—"we'll give this to the Government free of charge?" This was early March early April and the Government never took it up. They never took that up but what they did take up—if you look at the copyright to the New Zealand COVID Tracer app you see two teams the Ministry of Health and the Privacy Commission and then two individuals David Britten a 24-year-old PhD student who actually did a prototype on the QR scan first of all and Alan Chew who built the core app. Both of them were ready in early April. The ministry approached Alan Chew in early April when he offered it free and took it up. They heard nothing more from then onwards until about six weeks later when finally it was deployed. When they saw what their work had turned into they were aghast. The shape and functions of the app was nothing that they had given to the ministry. I mean no disrespect to the team of developers inside the ministry but sometimes you need to collaborate with professional expertise outside and that did not happen. Well one of the developers who wrote the core of the code said "I am of the view that the app is entirely insufficient for businesses to meet their contact tracing obligations". What a lost opportunity that was. So we can look backwards and say it was deployed too late—OK it was. Let's then look at here and now. What we need is uptake and we need use. When we posed that to the Minister around the percentage of New Zealanders who have taken up the app—he avoided it here today. It is likely to be less than 10 percent. The target we need to get at is 60 percent of New Zealanders taking up the app—that will give us maximal traceability. There are benefits the lower we get but we have to be at 50 to 60 percent and we are way short of that. Again I posed the question as to why that was and I think there is some argument to say that New Zealanders have lost some of the urgency—I get that. I understand that. But having deployed apps myself you have to make it user-friendly. You have to say "What's in it for me?" You have to make it easy for people to do the right thing. And it's not clear to me that that's happened. It's not clear to everyone on the Google store who has rated it as one star that it's easy to use. If you read those 1558 reviews they've all said it's difficult to use there were times when you were blocked and it was hard to download. I take on board that the Prime Minister indicated that in fact it was three stars on iPhone. That's only 700 reviews so half the amount that the Google store—just so we're dealing with facts; just saying. When we look at experts in the area Professor Nick Wilson from the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago who's been advisory to this Government on coronavirus as well describes the uptake as being microscopic: "It's just not working."; "It should probably be abandoned." I think that would be a shame. That's not what I'm calling for. What I'm calling for is for the Government to work with us to figure out how we can make it worthwhile for New Zealanders to take up this app first of all; secondly how we can look at other HIT additions to this which is primarily just a QR code. Where's the Bluetooth technology? We've had people talk about smart card technology. Where is all of that? It was great discussions early on nice to be having gentle chats with Singapore etc. but in reality delivering that has not happened. We think there's a place for an HIT component to improve our coronavirus response. It's our role to lift that corrective bar and that's exactly what we're going to do. Thank you Mr Speaker."