Emma Hossack: This radical transparency principle, I think it’s super. I really like it, because in Australia, it’s not like that. It causes a lot of mistrust, because things happen, and you never know quite why and how. I mean, ICT, it’s so opaque that a lot of wrong decisions are made. You just don’t even know how and why. I think the greater transparency, the better.

Audrey Tang: Awesome, good.

Emma Hossack: Totally good with that.

Audrey Tang: Glad you’re good with that. How many days are you in Taiwan?

Emma Hossack: In Taiwan, four. I’m here, at the moment, for the health tech forum and the expo. I came, as you know, in July for the Digital Innovation Forum and I just thought that Taiwan was such an interesting place. I didn’t have any time to explore, apart for two hours, and I got the opportunity to come back, obviously.

Emma Hossack: I just thought that from a business perspective, that it seems, and I might be wrong here, but I get the very strong impression that there’s an opportunity for a collaborative platform, which is what I do.

Audrey Tang: Very much so. Very much so.

Emma Hossack: I thought that the people are really kind, as opposed to some countries you go to and you just don’t feel any simpatico. That, to me, is key. I just thought it was a really beautiful city because of all the different influences.

Emma Hossack: All of those things meant that I thought this time I come, I’m not leaving until Tuesday afternoon. I have some time after the conference to just get more of the vibe of the place. Last time, I went to the old tobacco factory and a couple of art things, but two hours. I thought that if I came back, I could actually meet people and see if my instinct was right.

Emma Hossack: You were key to that because the way that you talk, as I read it anyway, sounds like you are looking for social exercises that are going to make the lives of people who have got issues, be they health -- there’s a hell of a lot of health ones -- better.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s right.

Emma Hossack: I am involved with doing that in Australia. Disabled people, indigenous people, chronic disease.

Audrey Tang: Oh yeah. Definitely. I just came from the indigenous elders.

Emma Hossack: Oh, did you?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. In Taitung.

Emma Hossack: If it’s like Australia, not good. They don’t have a fair treatment.

Audrey Tang: There’s room for improvement...

Emma Hossack: I saw something which you think, "Why would I be interested in this, in the expo?" It was someone in Taiwan has developed this cream. I hope it’s not snake oil and it actually works.

Emma Hossack: There was a picture of a person with a five-centimeter abscess in their foot. Obviously, a diabetic patient. If the thing was allowed to go on, like it does in Australia, their foot gets cut off. You’ve got 30-year-olds having their feet cut off in Australia. It’s a first-world country.

Emma Hossack: This cream, after five weeks, heals the abscess over so it’s just a scar. That’s in the expo. It’s actually an impressive expo. [laughs] I’m thinking, we’ve got all this problem happening in Australia.

Emma Hossack: My technology goes up to the indigenous people. It’s used in a big pantec van. They use it to share information from eye imaging for diabetics. That thing goes to the ophthalmologist in Sydney University who grades it. It doesn’t just go point to point.

Emma Hossack: It’s on a platform that allows the patient then to see it and his providers or her providers in Palm Island or far, remote communities which otherwise, they don’t travel. They don’t want to travel. They don’t want to leave their home country. They don’t feel supported, so they stay up there with diabetes and either go blind or have an amputation.

Emma Hossack: It’s all so easily avoidable. Using technology for that, that’s something we do voluntarily. We provide the platform. They use this and go around to all of these communities. I think it’s wonderful. It saved lives.

Emma Hossack: You can afford to do some of that. You have to sometimes cover your costs. That’s our company philosophy. We do what we can, and most people take the pay cut. I try not to take any path I can, so you can do these things.

Emma Hossack: That’s the whole point, isn’t it, to do that. I like the way that you talked about it. I thought that sounded good. I thought if I was able to come up with a community, I’m sure there’s plenty of community problems, like you saw the elders today. Say, "OK, what would fix that? Is it something we could fix?"

Audrey Tang: That’s what we’re working on. When I was with the elders, I actually did a presentation and talk. I was virtually visiting Adelaide. Did I pronounce that right?

Emma Hossack: Yeah, yes. Good. Adelaide’s good.

Eliza Chui: My city. [laughs] That’s where I come from.

Emma Hossack: Technically, it’s a little hot spot.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. They’re, of course, charged with the entire south and also covering the long-distance telemedicine and things like that. This year, we’ve started qualifying the telemedicine diagnostics and so on. Previously, it has to be over-the-counter or face-to-face and so on, but it’s all relaxed as of this year.

Emma Hossack: That’s so good. The doctor gets paid even it’s through the internet.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. We have a pretty good single-payer system. The indigenous people, they all pay. The service they got from the doctors who were willing to travel to them is, on a per capita basis, is not sufficient coverage.

Audrey Tang: We really need to, if there’s doctors willing to travel all the way. Currently they have to have four kilogram or more of equipment and things like that. We’re going to massively simplify the experience.

Emma Hossack: That’s good.

Audrey Tang: Using telemedicine.

Emma Hossack: The thing, as I see it, for telemedicine, because we’ve been doing that a while in Australia, and you should learn a little bit from us as far as the pain. Quite a few of the doctors gamed it. That was really disappointing. They gamed it.

Emma Hossack: What Australian government did was to...you probably do it better from the start or not, but it happened in Australia. They said, "For the first 12 telehealth consults that you do, you get paid for specialist." Quite a lot of money. Let’s say $1,000. I think it was 1,000. They got $1,000 for telehealth consult.

Emma Hossack: They didn’t have to prove anything, except that they had contact. They’re contacting their friends.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Emma Hossack: That was very, very disappointing. It didn’t have any good impact, obviously. They’ve tightened it up, but then they go the other way and tightened it too much. It’s a bit disappointing.

Emma Hossack: Where telehealth is great is obviously covering the distance, but where I can help that is that if you’re sitting as an endocrinologist looking at someone with diabetes, you’re in, say, Perth. The person is in Mulloon or in the desert. I’m sorry, I use Australia because I don’t know all your places.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine. It’s good. It’s good. Yeah.

Emma Hossack: OK. Perth’s four hours flight from Mulloon or in the desert. You’re the specialist sitting in Perth. You’re looking at the person, who’s sitting there with a GP. You’re going, "OK, well, that looks OK." Then, you look at your record and you start going, "OK, well, I think this is where I see the patient, from last time. They were on this and that."

Emma Hossack: The GP’s record’s quite different. You’re both working on different systems. There’s no unified platform where the patient and their caretaker, such as your mom or something like that, can actually go and say, "Well, this is where mom was last time." They can all look at it together and say, "Look, her steps should be different. She should change medication. She should change diet. She needs to have a diabetes educator."

Emma Hossack: If that’s all in one platform, the patient and or their caretaker can control. Everyone can see that they consent to. You save not only time, but also you get better health outcomes, much cheaper because people hate duplicating.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Emma Hossack: Faxing a copy of my computer record? Hello?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Emma Hossack: That’s what happens. That’s the problem. We’re there to make, not only that possible by letting them share. We have an open API, obviously. No one is that keen on FHIR in our client record, but we’ve got ready to go. It’s a SMART on FHIR app.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, FHIR.

Emma Hossack: Yeah. Graham Grieve is a friend of mine. We’re trying to get the Argonaut’s FHIR project off in Melbourne, and in Australia, sorry. I’m just writing a thing. This is a side project, but this is for the health industry. I’m trying to do a separate proposal for us to try and get all of our members supporting it and to get the government more on side, just get all the forces aligned. That will make businesses like mine much more efficient.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, very much so. We’re building a similar ecosystem also based around FHIR.

Emma Hossack: Good. Do you have the Argonaut’s SMART on FHIR app?

Audrey Tang: At the moment, it is starting with remote islands because we already have good cases for them. When we use helicopter and so on, it’s very expensive, and also it takes trust out of GPs. It’s a very clear thing. We already piloted starting last year actually. It’s pretty good signature from the experience that we got.

Audrey Tang: The signals that we got is we should expand first to the elders in the First Nations, in the indigenous because, as I said, per capita coverage is different. Also, the GPs there may actually be of their tribe. We want to encourage more people getting medical training and returning to their homeland. That’s doubly true for indigenous people, of course.

Audrey Tang: I just visited a tribe that does not just GPs, but actually with the water energy, solar energy, everything is self-sufficient. They’re now actually looking to expand their model to more tribes of their kin. It would be seen more as appropriate technology if all the GPs are their people and they know how to own the technology.

Emma Hossack: To trust.

Audrey Tang: This is why open API and things like that are so important because otherwise, it’s another colonizing technology.

Emma Hossack: No. Can’t have that. The philosophy behind what I do in my company is that you got to let people use what they’re using and they’re comfortable with. Sometimes that might be with an old supplier, like a GP who’s 65 or something. They’ve got all the specialists more like.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Emma Hossack: "I never want to use the computer." What do you do about those guys?

Eliza Chui: [laughs]

Emma Hossack: They’re not going to change, and they still want to practice, and they can’t trust it. We let them upload their paper into our system. Not ideal, because it’s not itemized, but it’s better than nothing.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Emma Hossack: It still allows them to work with the project, rather than saying, "No, you’ve got to be on a computer or you’re out."

Emma Hossack: The philosophy is we want itemized, structured data, but we’ll take what’s around. In Australia, there’s a lot of hospitals that still have paper too.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Emma Hossack: There’s a lot of small clinicians, like Allied Health, that don’t even have a clinical system. With us, they can actually upload, as long as they’ve got Internet. In the desert sometimes, there’s ADSL, too, like really slow but it works.

Emma Hossack: They can actually use our system to put their notes in digitally as well. Rather than paper, they can do it directly.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Emma Hossack: As well as if they want to go from system-to-system is better, but they can do it directly. We don’t do billing, because all the systems we interact with do billing...

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Emma Hossack: ...and we don’t need to do prescribing, because they upload that into our system.

Emma Hossack: It allows everyone to use the system they like, so the hospital continues to use Cerner or Epic. The GPs use their bit, the specialists. Everyone uses their thing. They keep it on their system, but they upload the bits that’s relevant for me as a diabetic to have, and for the rest of my providers.

Emma Hossack: It’s really like it’s autonomy.

Audrey Tang: It’s great. It’s full, the data agency thing. It actually knows where things go.

Emma Hossack: Exactly. I kind of laughed when I read your thing about transparency. I think my title today was the beauty of transparency and health. That’s autonomy. It’s for procurement.

Emma Hossack: Governments, the way that they procure whole things, it’s always...Well, I shouldn’t say that. But it’s often not great.

Audrey Tang: You can totally say that.

Emma Hossack: I think I said it in the hall today, anyway, didn’t I?

Eliza Chui: Yep.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Emma Hossack: So I’ve said it.

Emma Hossack: And the patients, for them to be able to see exactly what’s going on. If they’re not happy, it’s not that terrible sense of, "Oh, I can’t move, because he’s got all my data." You have your data. As long as you’ve got Internet, you have your data. You have control over who can access it.

Emma Hossack: That’s powerful. That means also in the final bit...Do you know about OpenEHR?

Audrey Tang: OpenEHR?

Emma Hossack: Open E-H-R?

Audrey Tang: Open A-H-R, mm-hmm.

Emma Hossack: About 20 years ago in the UK -- this would interest you...

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Emma Hossack: ...I decided that healthy is an international language.

Audrey Tang: Oh, E-H-R?

Emma Hossack: Yeah, EHR.

Emma Hossack: We have an OpenEHR template server inside our technology. We’re not totally an OpenEHR shop, so we’re a shared platform, and we have a template server that allows the different clinicians to create their own templates if they don’t like the ones we already have.

Emma Hossack: You’ve got for your first people, for example, they might have a particular problem with Kawasaki disease, that you want a special template. The clinician, within half an hour of being trained, can actually create a template, and upload it into our system, without having to come back to us and go, "What’s the spare? How much will it cost? How long will it take?" All the usual software stuff.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Emma Hossack: They can do it themselves. Which means they love it. They’re not being shoehorned into something.

Emma Hossack: That’s the philosophy -- transparent, flexible, autonomy. Atomized structured data means that they can, with consent of the patient, have a really good reporting backend. You can actually do a population and risk analysis as well.

Emma Hossack: You might go, "Yeah, we can do that anyway." But you can’t do that from all the different systems based in one database like ours.

Emma Hossack: You might do risk analysis based on the hospital data, but with our system, it’ll be holistic. You’ll have it from Allied Health, from the patient’s carer, from maybe non-health services that are saying, "Emma’s having psychotic reactions."

Audrey Tang: Prevention or community action.

Emma Hossack: "She’s not able to get to her appointments because her transport doesn’t turn up." All of that stuff would come in. You can then go, "Well, that one looks great. That matrix overall would stem here." You actually have really good reporting information for research, only where there’s consent, though.

Emma Hossack: Some people just don’t want it. Other people go, "Fantastic, you’re doing research on breast cancer. My mom died. I’ll give you everything." It’s all very granular, but that means it’s 21st century, as opposed to the usual doctor kind of guidance, how you’re doing it and eye on it.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Emma Hossack: That’s what I’ve been doing for 10 years.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Emma Hossack: In Australia only. Asia has always frightened me a little bit. IP wise, I was frightened of China, when we had things like that. My experience in India, that would be fantastic. I worked a little bit the George Global Institute for Health in Sidney. We’ve done a trial there.

Emma Hossack: Also, with Monash University, we did a really interesting AIDS trial. People who have had AIDS and got chronic disease as a result. They got all of these multiple chronic disabilities and they need to manage them, so they use our system to manage that.

Emma Hossack: Other interesting ones, I talked about the isle ones, really in remote communities, where they want to use services that aren’t in the city. Not necessarily indigenous people, but just regional people. They’ve got very few specialists, for example. They can use our system to cover that.

Emma Hossack: When they need to go to a hospital in the city, already that hospital will have their information.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Emma Hossack: It sometimes means that the hospital can go, "Actually, she doesn’t need to come. That marker looks great. We can just prescribe online medication that she has it." They save all that transport and loss of productivity and disruption to people. There’re many different cases. Disabilities is a big one.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Emma Hossack: Disabled people are...

Audrey Tang: Also, in Taiwan, they now form groups like supports, but also community care groups.

Emma Hossack: I love that.

Audrey Tang: We are just now working on the co-op laws to make sure that there could be a multifaceted co-op, so that even the caretakers or care workers, they can form a kind of workers’ co-op. That doesn’t have to go through the usual company profit distribution models and can be democratic.

Audrey Tang: It’s especially strong in indigenous places, of course, because it fits with their tribal assembly, which naturally is democratic and not at all shareholder driven. That model, actually they really do have a lot of young people, who are tech savvy.

Audrey Tang: They want some help from the government to make sure that they’re treated equally with for profit companies, even though they’re just dedicated to support a certain disability group or a certain long-term care group or a certain community. That’s one of the big things I’m working on.

Emma Hossack: That’s interesting. We’ve got a system that’s not working awfully well called NDIS, National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Eliza Chui: Which is a disgrace actually.

Emma Hossack: Yeah, it’s a disgrace. It is a disgrace. We won’t go there, but it’s a good learning exercise. If you just Google that one, then go, "Let’s not do that." There’s too many of those, isn’t there? In health, it’s a tragedy.

Emma Hossack: The point being that they tried to do the right thing. The intention was good. They said, "OK. Disabled people at the moment that we’re giving, let’s say, $10,000 to a group that would accompany or a not-for-profit that would help them manage themselves. That company basically didn’t report, didn’t keep records.

Emma Hossack: There was a lot of rip-offs, there was a lot of people being done in the eye. Some of them did really well, but what the NDIS wanted to do was to give the disabled person or their carer the ability to pick and choose what they use.

Emma Hossack: That was a good intention, so you’re not trapped into a company that’s screwing you. The trouble is that it’s so complicated for them to have to work the case. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: To navigate, yeah.

Emma Hossack: There has been a disaster, and then these whole new businesses have spawn, grown up that basically like middlemen and take their money anyway.

Audrey Tang: Around their legal services.

Emma Hossack: Yeah, that’s right. Correct.

Audrey Tang: I’m using the neutral word, but Wikipedia is less kind. [laughs]. I see, I see.

Emma Hossack: That’s right. You can say they’re carpetbaggers. It’s not worked well, but that’s what we have technology for. To help you with that.

Audrey Tang: It could be done better.

Emma Hossack: It can be done a lot better. Do you have payment for the people in the tribes who want to look...They’ll get paid without being a certified disabilities carer or...

Audrey Tang: Not at the moment, we’re at a planning stage.

Emma Hossack: That would be good, too, because you need a business case to make these things work. Ultimately in health -- I didn’t realize for a few years -- they do have to make a living, obviously, but also there’s a lot of following the money with the way the providers work.

Emma Hossack: Unless they can see that there’s going to be a government rebate for them when they give the service or anything like that...

Audrey Tang: Even if it’s a co-op or a social enterprise, they still have to be sustainable economically.

Emma Hossack: It’s got to be sustainable. Really that’s what I do, and I don’t know what opportunities there are specifically, but...

Audrey Tang: There’s quite a few that I can think of. [laughs]

Emma Hossack: It doesn’t have to, also, if they just want it. If they’re compatible groups, they can share a platform. If they are not compatible, and they don’t have similar providers, then they should have their own, let’s call it the disability in A, B, C county, but they may well be...

Emma Hossack: I had one in West Australia that was originally for aged care, and then it worked really well, and I realized that I love the people, and aged care used the diabetes service as well. We let them join in, and then we had the Asthma Foundation join in, and I then in West Australia joined in.

Emma Hossack: All quite different, and we just said to the West Australian Government, "Well, that’s fine. There’s not more money, but the more people you get the better, ’cause it works better." It’s collaborative, and it’s organic the way it’s growing, because it shows that it’s working, so that’s the philosophy.

Emma Hossack: The only kind of real premise I -- after all this time -- like to make sure that there’s sufficient sustainability and just sufficient money on implementation, because otherwise technology’s...It should be probably 20 percent of finance to technology, 80 percent implementation and change management. That’s just I hate seeing things fail.

Audrey Tang: I do agree.

Emma Hossack: Otherwise it’s quite heartbreaking. That’s my only must do. I’d love to show you one day, if I can do a demonstration for you, and we can do it online.

Audrey Tang: We could do it online. If you have a YouTube video or something, we can attach it to this transcript so that people are reading it.

Emma Hossack: Absolutely, they would see it. Like I said, that would be great.

Audrey Tang: They can see it. What we’ll do, usually after meetings like this, is that the people who have already talked with me in my office hour, like the home care group, the First Nations and so on...

Audrey Tang: They know that we’re starting a pilot, as I’ve said, on people who are GPs who travel basically and using a Bluetooth IC card reader that massively simplifies the data entry issue and try to get some indigenous places or remote places into getting the habit of being FHIR compatible, and that’s our goal starting I think next year.

Audrey Tang: There’s many pilots starting at once, and so they are of course free to choose the technologies. That will be provided for the reference of course. As the vendors they’re all very keen on getting the network effect right. Even though there’s multiple pilots at once, there will be a strong incentive if they can meaningfully share data while providing autonomy, of course, to the people.

Emma Hossack: Otherwise it’s the duplication, the mistakes, and people don’t have time to do it. Let’s do that, and you can absolutely then connect it to the transcript. I regard it as a commercial conference, so it’s not really, because it’s what we do. If anyone wants to copy it, then they’ll take a very long time...

Emma Hossack: And good luck there. You can copy something, but if you don’t really understand it, and don’t have the experience that we have, it’s not much use. I’m very open to that and I think it’s good.

Audrey Tang: A lot of it is trust, right?

Emma Hossack: Yeah, of course. Absolutely.

Audrey Tang: If you put 10 years into it, you get a lot of trust.

Emma Hossack: That’d be super. I’d absolutely love to do that. It’s probably best if I do it when I get back to Australia. If you’ve got time end of next week or something, and if you have 45 minutes or an hour and have questions. Just run through how it worked technically so we can see it.

Audrey Tang: Right, right. Do you have some materials like a demo account or something like that?

Emma Hossack: I have a got a test that I’ll give you, but not until I do the demo on the basis that I like people to understand first what it is, and then I can give you our test.

Audrey Tang: Is there a demo video that I can watch?

Emma Hossack: Yeah, there is. Yeah, yeah. That’s on Silverlight or whatever, but I’ll send you the links. That’s fine.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, please do, please do.

Emma Hossack: It shows you how we make the archetypes. I don’t think it runs through absolutely everything, but it’s pretty good. I mean it’s not one of the jazzy ones with people on the beach and all that. It’s actually my senior architect at a conference talking to techs.

Audrey Tang: Actually, I find people on the beach is kind of distracting...

Emma Hossack: Yeah, I do, too. We had a few of those today, didn’t we, those videos?

Audrey Tang: It’s good if you only have two minutes, but for 40 minutes maybe not.

Emma Hossack: No, no, it’s just bare.

Emma Hossack: It has to be short in its weight.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Emma Hossack: It was to describe to a mixed group, some very technical, very not technical, the different types of shared records, why you have a platform like ours, showing you how you extract the data, upload it, and create archetypes, so you get a good sense.

Audrey Tang: OK, it’s good.

Emma Hossack: It’s a good base, and then we can give you, if you’re interested after you have a look at it actually working, because we’ve...Since that video, that’s probably about four years old, we’ve rebranded, we’ve done a lot more, so it’s quite different, but the principle’s the same.

Audrey Tang: The architecture is the same.

Emma Hossack: The fundamental architecture’s the same. Subsequently they’ve moved on our few different platforms, but it’s...Yeah, you’ll get a...

Audrey Tang: It’s good. I write software for architecture textbooks, [laughs] so I care about the architecture.

Emma Hossack: Yeah, you’ll get that. You’ll see the architecture, and you’ll understand why we will have obviously moved on, so that’s good.

Audrey Tang: OK, and then after that, I’ll hit you back with questions, and maybe we have a Q&A session.

Emma Hossack: Beautiful, perfect, so I’ll send you that. Do you want me to send you that and give you sometimes as well?

Audrey Tang: Sure, sure, sure, and also if that is a public demo, like if it’s on YouTube or something, then we just attach it to the transcript so people who are interested in next year’s pilot, they can also go through. If they have questions, they either bring it to me so I could forward to your team or they just join the Skype call or whatever.

Emma Hossack: Whatever they’re more comfortable with. Yeah, for sure. Perfect. That’s good.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, maybe give me a week or two, and then we’ll set up a video call.

Emma Hossack: That makes sense, so I’ll send you the stuff through when I get back or earlier, and then we’ll set up a week or something when you’ve got some time. Beautiful.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think this is great. This is great.

Emma Hossack: What are the islands like off Taiwan? How are they? Are they...

Audrey Tang: There’s 16 nations. 15 on the Taiwan island, and one on another offshore island. They vary a lot. There are very sophisticated and large nations like the Amis, so much so that actually I have a gift for you. Sorry, just a second.

Emma Hossack: That’s interesting. I haven’t thought of First...

Eliza Chui: Maybe go to see an island.

Emma Hossack: Yeah, absolutely. I haven’t thought of First Nations, of course. And why would they not be First Nations?

Audrey Tang: This is our open government training material, which is a gift for you.

Emma Hossack: Thank you very much. That’s appreciated.

Audrey Tang: I just want to highlight that in addition of publishing in English and Chinese and Taiwanese Hakka and Holo, we also publish in indigenous Amis, and that’s partly because our spokesperson of the administration is Amis, and we want to honor her people.

Audrey Tang: With time, of course, all this is free of copyright, so it will be translated into other 15 indigenous languages. The situation has really changed in the past couple of years, ever since our president -- herself I think is one eighth Taiwan Nation also -- formally apologized and promised transitional justice.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot more sovereignty in the Tribal Assemblies now, and also the Nations now, I think later this year, will get the right of educating, the material, like teaching calculus or astronomy or whatever using their culture and first languages.

Audrey Tang: We’re moving very quickly into these, the West sides do mostly English and ethnic Han, but the East side is 16 very different cultures.

Emma Hossack: Gosh, that’s wonderful, isn’t it?

Audrey Tang: Yes, it is. It is and requires lots of assistive machine learning and technologies. [laughs]

Emma Hossack: Must be.

Emma Hossack: This looks a little bit like pidgin to me, because I got married in Papua New Guinea, and my husband’s first language was pidgin. This looks a little bit like that, looks a lot easier than Chinese.

Audrey Tang: All the Austronesian languages share a common root. It all starts in Taiwan somewhere.

Emma Hossack: That’s amazing. How old are those cultures?

Audrey Tang: They’ve sailed out of Taiwan around 5,000-4,000 years ago.

Emma Hossack: Oh, my God.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and of course they’re around a bit longer. We don’t know exactly the year, but I think 10,000 something, like 7,000. Culturally, like the plants they use, they cultivate, spread from Madagascar to the Maori, so the language and culture spread even wider than the people, but the people already spreads pretty wide from Taiwan.

Emma Hossack: And they tend to stay there, or the children come and want to live in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: The Maori people do visit, [laughs] but I think to pay homage mostly to their ancestors’ spirits. It’s different cultures now.

Audrey Tang: But now, even when we sign a trade agreement with New Zealand, the ANZTEC, there is a parallel track between our First Nations and Maori, and that has a separate track of diplomacy as well. It’s very interesting.

Emma Hossack: That’s extraordinary. I had no idea, this is super interesting.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s very, very interesting.

Emma Hossack: You guys are way ahead of us in that side with our indigenous, aren’t you? We’re getting there.

Eliza Chui: I have to agree with this one unfortunately.

Emma Hossack: I’ve been telling you about the problems of people getting their arthritis at 30. You’re telling me about this very sophisticated language policy. Hopefully we can exchange on different things and do it a bit better.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Yeah, we’d love to, we’d love to.

Emma Hossack: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having the time today, and I love the sound of what you’re doing, and I’d be really happy to share what we do and see.

Audrey Tang: I’ll send you a link to our government digital service guidelines, the GDSG, which covers the user first autonomy, open by default, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s currently in beta, we just published it, so for the next year, if you see any part of it that you think maybe the translation is off, but... [laughs] That’s one part, but even the spirit you think could be better, and think could be better, please let us because it will be finalized a year after this and it would then apply to all the procurements...

Emma Hossack: That’s great. Your timing is very good because just on the way here...The government in Australia changes all the time, as you know, but they released ICT procurements guidelines, which I was involved with in the health industry, but it was multi-vertical.

Emma Hossack: It was telcos, banks, everyone involved. I was involved with that last year. We put in a submission. Surprisingly enough, all of the different disciplines had the same issues. The telcos had the same issue. The banks had the same issues as the engineers. It’s all in tick, but we all had the same problems.

Emma Hossack: We had the ICT Procurement Task Force listening to the roundtables. Then, we put in submissions. Then, the government responded. I can send you the link if you are interested.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’m very interested.

Emma Hossack: OK. Now, what’s happened? I think because the Digital Transformation Agency in Australia had three CEO recently. I’ve lost track of where it’s all got to. The government came back to them and said, "We agree with these fundamentally 10 recommendations on ICT."

Emma Hossack: They agreed with it, which was really good news, but nothing happened. That was a year ago. That’s because of all the churn in the government and the agency. It just came out, I just saw it today, they want comments now on how they can implement it by the 18th of December.

Emma Hossack: From our industry point of view is probably the biggest issue because you get bad IT because people procuring it don’t understand it.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Emma Hossack: They haven’t got no idea. They go back into what they think would be the best or safest mode, which is, "Let’s get Accenture, IBM, blah, blah, blah." I’m not saying they’re bad companies, but they’re usually just providing whatever is convenient for them to give that they used 10 years ago or whatever.

Emma Hossack: The bureaucrat, because they don’t understand the technology, is scared, so they were risk averse. They go with these old technologies. They alienate all of the innovation and all these people who put in investment into things that are new and cutting edge and would actually do it more efficiently.

Emma Hossack: It’s incredibly frustrating. They then find the project fails, but because they chose the supplier, they bury it. Instead of it being transparent and there being a case study on, "My God, why did we waste $2 billion on that pile of rubbish," they bury it. They try not to let anyone know what happened because it looks bad for them.

Emma Hossack: The cause of the lack of transparency, it just goes on and on and on. It’s terrible for technology.

Audrey Tang: I totally agree. This coming book describe one case, the national income tax filing systems failure...

Emma Hossack: Yeah. This would be easier for me.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s not quite dramatic or catastrophic, but it does cause a lot of backlash. Last May, when people find that they can’t really file income taxes on Mac and Linux because they used Java applets and things like that. Exactly as you’ve said because Java applets were hip when this was first designed.

Emma Hossack: Yeah, that’s right.

Audrey Tang: People expect. Occasion have arisen, and they have not kept up with times. Procurement only cares about the box ticking. It doesn’t care about user centric design. There’s even no word for user centric design.

Emma Hossack: No outcome, it’s actually the box ticking.

Audrey Tang: Right, exactly.

Emma Hossack: It must be because we got everyone registered, but do they use it? No.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. We’re totally changing that.

Emma Hossack: That’s so good.

Audrey Tang: The GDSG is the result of these pilots. People generally thought it’s a good idea, so we have a political mandate.

Emma Hossack: You can send me the link to the draft because that would time very well to the work that we’re doing in our software industry. I’m going to have to get our skates on because that’s due on the 18th and I called the members to come back. I’ll show it to you.

Emma Hossack: You get the vibe very quickly and it’s really nice. It’s quite succinct, the response the government gave. It’s quite succinct and it’s pretty amazing.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Yeah, let’s keep in touch.

Emma Hossack: Yeah, for sure.

Audrey Tang: Let’s keep in touch, for sure.

Emma Hossack: Lovely. Did I give you a card?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Emma Hossack: Did I or not? Probably not.

Audrey Tang: I think I have a card as well.

Emma Hossack: There’s a lot of similarities.

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

Eliza Chui: Surprisingly, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Emma Hossack: There we are. Thank you so much, Audrey. That’s lovely. There we are. It’s so nice that you’re digital minister for all different disciplines, yeah?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s right.

Emma Hossack: That’s so good. That’s great.

Audrey Tang: For all the 17 sustainable values.

Eliza Chui: Every time we come, there’s always a T-shirt of all of the things she’s doing.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Emma Hossack: We have Digital Transformation Agency, but none of the departments really know how to interact with it. They do their own things still. It’s quite hard, but you do it.

Audrey Tang: We start with values and outcomes and then work the way backwards. I think that’s the way to do it.

Emma Hossack: The departments are quite happy to work with you?

Audrey Tang: My office is literally one person poached from each ministry. Technically, I can have 34 staff, but now I’ve 22. 22 is a lot.

Emma Hossack: Yeah, that’s good because they just recruit externally and then everyone doesn’t trust them.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, exactly.

Emma Hossack: Gee, maybe we should advise them what you do.

Emma Hossack: It’s such a pity because it’s a good idea of having all of government digital, or else everyone does the identification differently and all the stuff’s wrong. Anyway, really nice speaking to you about it. Take care.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Very nice seeing you.

Eliza Chui: Good to you see you.

Audrey Tang: Very good to see you. Cheers.

Emma Hossack: Cheers.