A pledge that only fully vaccinated people would be allowed to access businesses and public venues once 70 per cent of adults were double jabbed has been a feature of NSW’s ‘roadmap to freedom’ since it was first announced by former premier Gladys Berejiklian in late September. Key to enforcing this stipulation, which remained a feature of current premier Dominic Perrottet's amended roadmap, the state government promised a safe and secure vaccine passport system integrated into the existing QR code check-in process. However, as the state prepares to reopen on Monday, October 11, Perrottet has admitted that this crucial piece of technology will not be ready by the time lockdown measures begin lifting.
Customer services minister Victor Dominello has been overseeing the development of the vaccine passport, but despite the government’s urging for people to accelerate vaccination efforts, the timeline for delivering the passport has seemingly remained unchanged since late September. A ‘closed pilot’ of 500 people in regional NSW, which commenced on October 6, will be conducting tests until at least October 18, leaving hospo businesses to manually check their customers’ vaccination status in the meantime. The vaccine certificates available via Medicare and the MyGov app will be the only way for people in NSW to prove they've had two doses, however cybersecurity experts have warned that these documents are easy to counterfeit.
Businesses across NSW have been calling for better guidance on how to screen the vaccination status of customers. Details of the legal protections in place to support business owners who bar unvaccinated punters are also sketchy at best. Justine Baker, the chair of the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) told Time Out: “The NTIA has been advocating for a clear compliance regime to be announced by the NSW government for months. The conflicting messaging from within the government on this matter has to stop, especially this close to the reopening date. We have asked the government to put the onus more on individuals to comply with the public health orders and risk penalties imposed by the police, rather than businesses bearing the primary responsibility of enforcing the public health orders and risking fines and closure themselves.”
Perrottet warned that the first week after lockdown measures begin lifting was going to be “a little bit clunky”, adding that “there will be challenges, but we can’t wait for perfection to open up”. However, despite the vulnerability of falsified immunisation certificates, Perrottet claimed that the secure vaccine passport app was “not essential", adding that it was merely “a bonus” for business owners. Victor Dominello attempted to explain away the state government’s failure to deliver vaccine passports by suggesting the development had been stalled because the federal government had been slow to hand over immunisation records. He also acknowledged that forgeries of vaccine certificates were a weakness of the stopgap solution until the ServiceNSW app finally comes online.