The government of St. Lucia has begun taking steps towards achieving universal health coverage UHC with the aim of improving health systems and ensuring that affordable and quality health case provided to St. Lucia. A committee comprising professionals within the Ministry of Health and professionals within the public sector met recently in a consultation focused on the development of a roadmap to outline the strategic direction of universal health coverage in St. Lucia. Acting Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs Jenny Daniel says this consultation will provide the opportunity for participants to develop a white paper which will shape the plan for implementation of universal health coverage. The white paper basically speaks to the policy, the major overriding and overarching policy that will determine how UHC is to be implemented in St. Lucia as in what is our starting point and where is the vision where we would like to, the place we would like to get to in terms of the provision of our health service and the impact it would have on St. Lucia. So the white paper is basically a structured document that would outline what our goals and objectives and vision are for UHC and how exactly we expect to get there. It will also touch on the funding or the financing of the initiatives and the project and exactly where we will be and giving a proper timeframe for it as well. Jenny Daniel also highlighted that in the coming weeks a series of consultations will be undertaken with the private sector, non-governmental organisations, NGOs and client group stakeholders. Minister for Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, the Honourable Mosey Jabatis spoke on his government's commitment to improve health service coverage for the St. Lucia population. We have also taken the recommendation of the Ministry that we create a specific unit for the universal healthcare programme and we have created that unit. We are now, we are currently looking to staff that unit and to ensure that we have focused attention on universal healthcare. We believe it's very important for the people of St. Lucia when we look at our disease profile and the challenges we have in healthcare and also when we look at the cost of healthcare. We know that the people of St. Lucia require that kind of assistance. Cabinet has approved the first phase of the implementation of universal health coverage which will commence with the performance-based financing components. Reporting from the Communications Unit of the Ministry of Health, Wellness and Elderly Affairs, I am Fennel Neptune.


Hello, my name is Nico Carver and I'm an astrophotographer. My website is at nebulaphotos.com and today we're going to look at what astrophotographers call narrow band imaging. The most famous application of this is the Hubble Palate popularized by the Hubble Space Telescope. In the videos that follow this one, I'll show you how I process narrow band images to make pretty full color pictures and you can find the links to those videos below. I have one for Photoshop, one for GIMP, which is an open source free application and one for Pix Insight, which is what a lot of more advanced astrophotographers are using. Before we get into all that though, I thought it would be a good idea to really understand narrow band first. We first have to understand a bit about the science of color and the science of color vision in the human eye and then how we try to replicate that with cameras and monitors and basically photography and anything in the modern age where we're trying to make a full color image to look like what we see with our actual eyes. And so we're going to start with this thing, we're going to start sort of at the beginning here with this thing called the electromagnetic spectrum and I'm sure a lot of you have heard of this, also called the EM spectrum for short. And it's basically this large range of radiation of wavelengths from a very low frequency radio wave and microwaves and things like that to very super energetic high frequency gamma rays. And there's a very small section of the spectrum that our eyes can actually directly detect these waves. And we call this section visible light, meaning the light that is visible to our human detectors, our eyes. With different sensors, we can now though directly image other parts of the spectrum. And so you may have heard of scientific missions that are doing X-ray detection or ultraviolet or different parts that we don't actually directly see, but sensors can. And the interesting thing is different animals are sensitive to other parts of the spectrum, just outside of what we think of as the visible spectrum. For instance, the lenses in our eyes block ultraviolet light. But recent research has found in other mammals, like my cat here, their lenses don't block UV. Now we're still not sure if that means Bubby here can really see in UV, but why is this? It's because the sensor of the eye is the redna. That's in the back of the eye where the rods and the cones live.  Trichromats are like most mammals and that they are dichromats, meaning their color vision is due to the interaction of two different types of cones in the eye. Humans and many other primates are trichromats, and that means that we have three different types of cones. And we can characterize these cones as short wavelength cones or S cones, medium wavelength M cones and long wavelength L cones. And so you can see from this chart each type of cone is most responsive to certain wavelengths. And a simple way to think of this is we have blue cones, green cones, and red cones, RGB. We don't have cones that see this particular color, for instance. But through the combination of response in the green and red cones, our brains can interpret this as yellow. Make sense? So note that the biggest area of overlap here for the cones in our eyes is in the green part of the spectrum. That's going to be important later when we get to color cameras. But we have to start with the black and white camera or mono camera. This is short for monochromatic. The earliest photography was all black and white mono, meaning we could measure the intensity of the light across the scene. But we didn't yet have a way of reproducing color. The earliest technology for reproducing color was very interesting. It happened before we invented color film. And so this is how it worked. You would ask your subject to stay very still and then take three photographs, each time placing a different color glass filter in front. And so I'm sure many of you can guess the colors of these filters. Yes, it was red, green, and blue. And by combining the relative intensities of the light captured through these three filters, we can fairly precisely mimic what the human eye sees. And back then, the only way to display this color film was by using three slide projectors displaying three distinct images, one on top of one another, onto the same screen. But how do we do it today? Well, an LCD monitor or a flat screen TV is just basically a light panel. The light panel itself is just white light.  And those polarizing filters control the intensity of the light at each pixel site. And then again, in front of that, we have the red, green, and blue filters. They control each array in the pixel with a sub-pixel. And so one pixel is lighting up a sort of pale green and then the one next to it is a little bit darker green. And when you combine all of this together, it looks like a color image. But if we use a microscope on a monitor that shows all white, we would actually see these sub-pixels. So each pixel is clearly made up of a red, green, and blue sub-pixel. A digital color camera works pretty similarly, but instead of a light panel in the back, we have the sensor. And a sensor is just a piece of light-sensitive silicon with millions of little pixel wells attached to electronics to turn the analog source, so the light coming through the lens and hitting that sensor, into a digital readout. So at each pixel site or photo site, it says this intensity of light hit right here based on the light coming through the lens. And so with astrophotography, a lot of times those signals are very small, which is why noise and minimizing noise is so important. If you have a model camera, then there's nothing in between the front of the sensor and the optics other than maybe a glass protect window. If you have a color camera, like in most DSLRs today, then in front of the sensor is what we call a color filter array, or CFA. And the most common color filter array is the Bayer array, named after Dr. Bayer, who worked at Eastman Kodak. And he invented it. The Bayer array is arranged like this. And so if you look closely, you'll notice that there are two green pixels for every one red and one blue. If we remember back to what I was saying about the cones in our eyes, the Bayer filter array is arranged with this oversensitivity to green light in our eyes in mind. The camera, through a computer on board the camera or software later, if you shoot raw, demosaics the image. This in effect interpolates the colors based on the pixel itself. So for instance, if light hit this green pixel, it would then interpolate what color actually goes there, not just based on the single pixel that with the light hit, but all the pixels nearby around it. And so this is how we end up with all the different colors, not just red, green and blue pixels, but all the different colors is based on this interpolation of where the light is hitting and the interaction of the pixels. OK, so to review, all sensors are actually mono sensors. But in a DSLR or a one shot color camera, there is a filter array in front of the sensor. However, the Bayer array or color filter array is not the only way to filter light hitting the sensor to make a full color image. Another type of imaging, often called mono imaging, is we use a monochromatic camera. So in this case, I'm using a ZWO astronomy camera called the ASI 1600 MMC. And so this is a cooled mono camera. This part right here, the red can like thing. And to capture different colors, I put different colored filters in front of the sensor. And I do this with this thing called an electronic filter wheel, meaning that it's a completely closed in design. This part attaches to the telescope. And then through a computer, I can move different filters in front of the sensor. So this is an A position filter wheel. So I have L, R, G, B, H, A, S2, and O3. And I'll get into what those different things mean. And I also have near IR, but I'm not going to talk about that. So the most common ones for putting in a filter wheel like this, if you're doing mono imaging, are red, green, and blue. Because if you just choose red, green, and blue, and you shoot those, it's like shooting with a DSLR. It's slightly more efficient since you're shooting all red. You're using all the pixels in the sensor at once, then all green, then all blue. But you end up with a similar image that you would get with a DSLR, because you're just shooting red, green, and blue. Another option is to shoot L, R, G, B. So you shoot luminance, where you're getting all the information, and then you mix that with the RGB. And the nice thing about shooting R, G, B is that you get really accurate star color, which you're often missing when you use narrowband filters, which is what I use a lot. And so red, green, and blue are what we call broadband filters. Meaning there is no one wavelength that equals red. What the filter does is it lets in a pretty broad range of reds. And so we call this broadband. And it's letting in wavelengths from a wave where peak to peak it measures 590 nanometers all the way up to a wave that measures 700 nanometers peak to peak. So a wavelength is if we look at a wave, we measure the length of the wave from this point to this point, and we call that a wavelength. It's literally 500 nanometers or 700 nanometers or somewhere in there. And all of those are we respond to as red in the eye. And so we can say that this red filter here has a band pass of 110 nanometers, meaning that anywhere from a red that measures 590 nanometers to one that measures 700 will come through with this filter. Everything outside of that band pass is rejected. A narrowband filter blocks more light. They look sort of more reflective like this. And a lot of times in the case of a narrowband filter, you're letting in just 10 or five or even three nanometer wide band pass. So you're blocking almost all of the visible spectrum, just except for the little small slice of the visible spectrum that you want. But why do we do that? Well, the reason is my very favorite thing to photograph are nebulae, hence my website, nebulaphotos.com. And there are different kinds of nebulae. And I'm not going to explain all of them here, but a basic division is there's reflection nebulae, where there's swaths of dust and things that reflect the light from bright stars, dark nebulae, which block out the light from the stars and also other nebulae. And then lastly, emission nebulae, which actually emit their own light, either because they are clouds of excited gases, where stars are being formed or they're part of the death of a star, either planetary nebulae or the deaths of a star or supernova remnants, which are one of my favorite kinds of objects. And it's this last class that we call emission nebulae, where we typically always use narrowband filters. The reason is these nebulae emit light at very particular and known wavelengths. For instance, singly ionized sulfur atoms, or S2, emits at 672.4 nanometers. That's it. Hydrogen alpha, also called H-alpha, emits at 656.2. And doubly ionized oxygen, or O3, emits at 500.7. And so I have narrowband filters, with band passes just a few nanometers wide, three to five nanometers wide, and the band passes are centered on these key emission lines. And so these essentially block out 99% of the visible spectrum. And blocking out this unwanted light is often a really good strategy due to terrestrial light pollution. It increases the contrast that you get. The sky appears almost pretty dark, almost black, and the nebulae really come out that way, the really high contrast. If I just use a more broadband filter, like a blue filter here instead of an O3, then I'm also capturing all these LED street lights around and all these other things that I don't really want in my picture. And so I'm sure a question I'll get is, should I use narrowband filters with my DSLR? And this is a big source of debate. What you're essentially doing is taking one filter, and a filter array of red, green, and blue, and then putting other filters on top of that. So it's not as efficient, but I know that people can get good results doing so. I've seen it online. I've never personally tried it, so I'm not going to comment from personal experience. I've only done narrowband imaging with my mono camera. I use my DSLRs, mostly without filters, and I try to travel to darker sites to use those. Okay, the last part that I want to... I'll talk about this more in the processing videos too, but I'll just mention briefly here. Once you have captured narrowband data, as opposed to red, green, and blue data, it's a little bit less clear how to actually make an image out of that. The reason is that O3 is actually somewhere in between green and blue. It's sort of a teal color. 500.7 nanometers is sort of right in between green and blue. It's sort of like a greenish blue or a teal. H-alpha and S2 are actually a very... They're both very deep reds. H-alpha is already a deep red, and then S2 goes even deeper, probably beyond what our eye can actually detect. So you have two basically red colors and one green-blue color. So what's cool about this is that if you are just doing what we call bi-color imaging, where you just shoot H-alpha and O3, you can just put the HA in the red channel and the O3 in both the green and the blue channel, and you get a fairly natural response from that, which is really nice. But when you shoot all three or more narrowband channels, then it gets a little bit more creative, and a lot of people find this really fun. If you're a stickler for what should this actually look like, then it might not be for you, but what we still can see from these images where we're a little bit more creative is how the gases are interacting, and the actual position of all the gases is still accurate. It's that the colors are just what we call false color if you change the mappings. So one of the most common mappings, meaning you're taking some narrowband data and putting it into the red, green, or blue channel is to put the S2 data in the red channel, the H-alpha data in the green channel, and the O3 data in the blue channel. And so if you think about that, that's S2, HA, O3, or show for short, SHO. SHO imaging where you put them in that order makes some sense because sulfur is the furthest into the red, and then H-alpha is less so, and then O3 is even less so. So it does make sense the order. When you do that, and then you sort of remove a little bit of the green, you get this really cool sort of golden orange and yellows and blue look. And it's sort of reminiscent of Hollywood film toning where it's like the orange and blue look. And this style of imaging where you do the show and then you remove a little bit of the green is known as the Hubble Palate because when NASA sent out the Hubble Space Telescope, there's all these beautiful images that they got back where they shot those filters, and people, including people who work for NASA, often processed it in this way. So it became known as the Hubble Palate. It's also, you'll also see the SHO Palate or SHO Palate, something like that. Okay, so that's really it for this intro, but I would encourage you if you are interested in how to process narrowband images from a mono setup to keep watching because I have videos for GIMP Photoshop and Pix Insight where I go through the process of stacking, registering and putting together a full color image using some sample data I shot with this setup of the Seagull or Parrot Nebula. It's called Both Things. It's IC 2177. And I'll explain a little bit more about palette choices and color in those videos, but I hope that this was a good introduction to the science behind color filters and what we mean by broadband versus narrowband and why we use those terms, what we're actually doing when we shoot with these kinds of filters. Thanks for watching. Again, my website is at nebulaphotos.com. If you're not already subscribed to my YouTube channel, I encourage you to subscribe. Thanks very much. I'll see you in the next video.


I got myself an important guest, I didn't have to introduce her to you guys She is a celebrity in Ghana, if you are looking for a celebrity to take pictures with, you can take a selfie with, you don't have my phone Can I take a selfie with you? Sure, why not? Call me a celebrity Let me tell you something, I'm just a celebrity, but some of them just inspire me to do a video Yeah We've been talking about Africans, this is African-Americans Exactly And we are here again It's been a while It's been a while Good to see you again Good to see you I'm seeing everyone And you don't pretend No, it's okay Why? My name is Ivy, Ivy Prosper Follow my YouTube channel too, which is just Ivy Prosper I work for you for a term I am a social media editor, contact creator for you in return I'm just under Ghana tourism authority But some of my friends are in Ghana with this accent Are you Ghana? I am Ghana, I'm also Canadian by naturalization Because I was born in Ghana, raised in Canada, but now I live in Ghana again What brought you back to Ghana? You know, it's a series of things, you know Initially I came, I was going through some challenges I decided to come from my mom Told me the contract I came And then I ended up working for a couple of years I know Went back when the contract was over And I feel like I need to go back, I need to go back And I think it was largely because I felt like I had a purpose And I had something I had to fulfill here in Ghana So I came back I hope you fulfill the posterity It's an ongoing process And your process Now we work for you for 10 years I know there are a lot of questions out there People want you to answer for us What is the year of attempt all along? A lot of people will know when the year of return Was actually a response to a U.S. law The United States passed a bill I don't remember the bill number but it was HR-1242 I don't know what we have on that But as a rule, there was a law that was passed To recognize for 100 years Since the arrival of a ship of enslaved Africans Into the United States at the time It was the colony of the British English colony but now it's Virginia And there was 20 people whose names were actually listed On this bill that arrived there And so recognizing that that was the beginning Of the legal enslavement of African people In the United States They recognized that And so the Ghanaian government Saw that initiative being done Because they also were looking at doing plans To try to understand some of the challenges That Black people have gone through In the United States as a result of slavery As a result of segregation Most types of things have happened with civil rights issues And so what Ghana recognized in the same 400 years Is that, oh, you know what? Ghana played a large role in the slave trade As far as having the most number of forts Along the coastline And the most that are still standing So it recognized that The president declared it President Namo Coado declared it The year of return of 2019 To mark the 400 year anniversary Which was August 20, 1619 When that ship arrived in the U.S. Now we know that slave We did begin before that There were people who were taken to the Caribbean There were people who were taken to South America But that specific date is directly tied Into the documented ship That arrived in the United States And so recognizing that It also opens the doors to people From the diaspora to come To Ghana, come and experience The heritage, the learning history And then learn the culture So the first step for a lot of these people Because they by no fault of their own Ended up in our countries So the first step is coming Learning the history, the heritage And then now learning the current culture Of Ghana and seeing if you love it enough That it's an experience you will come back All the time for I believe that's your decision If you want to collaborate with people here And that's great The first step is having them understand That we see them as Displaced brothers and sisters Who were taken away and it wasn't their fault And you're welcome to return That's the whole Basis of your return I know you watch my videos I do I know and believe that you've seen a video Where I interviewed a doctor He's historically Like incorrect Who do you agree with that? I would just agree I think he's looking at it in the context of A lot of people are looking at that 400-year mark And believe that The year of return is saying that Slavery didn't exist before that But that is not what year of return is saying Just like I was explaining Is marking that 400-year anniversary Of that particular documentation Of enslaved Africans Before that I know But it's marking that specific Share Who are the targets for the entire year of return? Because it was Based on what happened in the United States Initially it was people in the African-American community But a lot of people said The transatlantic slave trade did affect A lot of people than just the African-Americans So I know the president opened it up To not just African-Americans Anybody who is affected by the slave trade But who is an African descent So he launched his tour Around the Caribbean to visit some Caribbean Countries and when he went there It was all about building relationships With people in the Caribbean Because some of those people There was a lot of tension and animosity Because of what happened as well So he felt it was important to go there And meet with some of those people And tell them that they were also well done In the process he Worked on getting Transatlantic slave trade for Jamaicans To come to Ghana Ghanians already have visa free entry To Jamaica But Jamaicans didn't have the other way around Although it's still a challenge For Ghanians because There's a transit visa that's needed Because of the fact that There's no direct flights From Ghana to Jamaica So it causes a challenge because if you're a Ghanian You want to go to Jamaica because you don't need a visa You have to go through the UK And you're asking for a transit visa So that's the challenge that's faced Even for Jamaicans some of them Have faced that challenge too But I know that the Governments both of them are working together To try to figure it out I ask you this question Because I've been seeing more and more Celebrities moving to Ghana Just to call it the year of attack So I was just thinking that Only the American celebrities That walk up to Ghana Is number one as well Everyone is welcome Because they're high profile People tend to gravitate to one another Human beings Like flashy beings They don't know what they're Human beings like flashy beings Like celebrities So for example I can post something on the year of attack Of a regular person Who's come to Ghana and has landed And is giving their excitement As a celebrity Celebrities here So it's not That it's not open to regular people They came in To support their movement They came in to help promote The year of attack Because a celebrity coming in here Is going to want to get to know How they're going to come here Especially last year When Boris Pojo and When celebrities Post their experience Regular people I have friends in the US Who send me messages to say What's going on in Ghana? Why is this person there? Something's going on in Ghana Maybe I should think about going there myself So it's sort of validates Going to a country like Ghana People didn't think about it before People think of Africa Like people in America Canada I'll go to Cape Town Or I'll go to Nairobi To go to the safaris and all this stuff Or Morocco Is another place a lot of foreigners Think about it But now we're going to do this More people are actually thinking Of countries like Ghana for a holiday Because there are people who are coming Who don't have any ties to this country A lot of celebrities They don't have any friends They don't have any relatives And they just want to learn and grow And find out more about this country So what is that impact Of the year of return right now? I don't have the exact numbers But I have heard That there has been a huge increase In a lot of areas A lot of areas of business So for instance I spoke with One of the managers of a hotel In Elmina and he had said That he's seen two to three times Increase in bookings in his hotel Because of year of return He knows that because people would come And so we're here because of your return He started to come to Ghana So he said he's seen that type of increase There was a lady from a restaurant In Cape Coast who said that Muslims and people were coming to a restaurant That wasn't necessarily the case before So business people are saying They are seeing an increase I had an Uber driver Who said he's happy about people coming Because he's making more money More search pricing More increased prices of demand And I was like oh no He's making money So he's very happy So a lot of people It's just like one area Maybe making the money But everybody benefits in some way A tour guide was saying That his particular tour company Wasn't seeing an increase But his focus is in the type of tour He knows that he doesn't get a lot of people already And his colleagues He sees that they've had double Triple equal people Who are looking tours on a regular basis Compared to last year Which means the year of the day So he's making a lot of money And one of the hotels here Said that he's completely booked For December Moving X said they were completely booked For December a few months ago So these people are really seeing Business increase And they want to move to Ghana Especially in December They want to move Or they want to just visit But I don't want to move to Ghana I don't want to move to Ghana I don't want to move to Ghana If you want to be a patriot in Ghana Do your research Seriously do your research Before you move Because some people are in love With the fantasy The idea of there's a fantasy Oh I want to go back to the money And go back to Africa But I think When you're coming from A fully developed nation Remember that Ghana is still a developing country So there's things that You may have to sacrifice That you're not used to When you come as a tourist You won't feel the same experience as living here So when you're coming as a tourist You're staying at a hotel You have hot water And you always have your Wi-Fi But once you live here You may live somewhere and the power goes out Even in East Lebanon It's supposed to be a high end place The power goes out all the time So you have to be ready for that Adjustment Ready that the internet isn't everywhere Like in Canada, downtown Toronto The center of the city You walk there and your Wi-Fi pops up To say you have free Wi-Fi But you move one or two hours But here, you don't even go to the Independent square and there's Wi-Fi No! And most restaurants don't have Wi-Fi Or if they do, it's not working Every time you go, oh it's finished The data's finished So just adjustments I always say to people, and do your research Because I've heard somebody recently That she's moved to Ghana And now she wants to get a work permit And I was like, oh you didn't research Before you came Now she wants to figure out How to work, figure out all this stuff She doesn't even have a place to live yet She's sleeping in someone's house Until she figures out what to do So do your research That's what I want to say Before you pack up your food Or come for a holiday for like two or three months And you really get a moral experience And just coming for like two weeks Ivy gave us all this Crew information that Axel wants to pay But we have to pay her back All we need to do What's the name of each other? Ivy Prosper She got all the information about Ghana Just go subscribe You know how we do it I also have a book Yes, my book is called your essential guide On moving to Ghana It's a digital book on Amazon It's only five dollars and 95 cents I'll give you the link You know five dollars I'm going to send you ten dollars Thank you so much for taking to us And most importantly Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel It's your boy Mr. Ghana baby And I'll see you in the next video Bye


Welcome to the latest Lowy Institute long-distance event. I'm Natasha Kasam, Director of the Institute's Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program. I'm speaking from the Lowy Institute in Sydney. I acknowledge the traditional owners of country where I am today, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, as well as the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, and pay my respect to Elders past and present. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce Audrey Tang today, Taiwan's digital minister. She wrote a computer game at age eight to help her four-year-old brother learn fractions. She dropped out of school as a teenager to start a search engine company and left Taiwan to go to Silicon Valley before she was 20. She became involved in politics during Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Movement and is now Taiwan's government minister that is the youngest of her time and remarkably a self-described anarchist. She's become a leading figure in Taiwan's pandemic response and this week will represent Taiwan at President Biden's Summit for Democracies. Audrey Tang, welcome to the Lowy Institute. Hello, good local time everyone. As someone who has described themselves as a conservative anarchist, it is of course a bit of a surprise to see you now as a government minister. I want to ask you how today you would justify your choices to the you of before or do you need to justify them at all? Not at all. I'm working with the government but I'm not working for the government. I've never issued or accepted a single direct order since joining the government in 2016. So I remain kind of committed to the principle of voluntary association and all the staff in my team coming from all the different ministries while they join by their own volition. Well, actually maybe we can ask about that. I mean, what is the role of a digital minister? How did that come about? Are you the first? Is this something other countries have? Certainly. So, yes, I'm Taiwan's first digital minister but I'm a minister at large, meaning that there's nine of us in the Cabinet office that doesn't have a dedicated ministry. But rather we work, as I mentioned, with the contents from all the other 32 ministries on interagency issues. So, for example, my portfolio is open governments, social innovation and youth engagement and digital is kind of the way to transcend the space and time restrictions and boundaries to enable the kind of listening, mutual listening, a skill that would enable like open government work. Well, then maybe you can tell us about how you came to start doing this kind of work. You know, I believe it was through the sunflower movement. Could you tell us more about that? Certainly. In 2014, March, there were three weeks where we occupied the Parliament completely peacefully in a nonviolent way and deliberated with half a million people on the stream and many more online about the cross-strait service and trade agreement with Beijing which at that time the Nationalist Party leading the Parliament and the administration was trying to kind of force through the parliamentary process without much deliberation. So, there's many topics around 20 different NGOs that help occupy deliberated each corner of the street. For example, one corner deliberated whether we allow the 4G infrastructure and then a very new thing to have vendors coming from the PRC in the so-called private sector there. Now, whether they're state-owned or could be state-owned at any given moment and so on was the point of deliberation and we agreed that the systemic risk assessment which we'll have to do on each and every upgrade is much more expensive than if we went with some other more democratic and accountable regimes instruments, right? Their private sector is more fixed private sector. And so that was one of the consensus that was reached on the street in a non-partisan cross-partisan fashion and my role is just to ensure that there's sufficient broadband access in the occupied area as well as a transcript, a recording of the deliberations so that the people can cross-pollinate and starting each day deliberate based on the good enough consensus on the previous day like in other occupied movements where maybe it just diverges after a few weeks. So you were working to find consensus on the street and now consensus online potentially. Can you tell us a little bit about your ideas about open government and digital democracy and the way this is playing out in Taiwan? Yes, certainly. In Taiwan, we see democracy as a kind of social technology and it's better when more people improve its bandwidth and latency. And these two ideas are from Internet governance, indeed Internet itself. For example, voting the traditional way would be like uploading three bits of information if you choose one of the eight parties for example and the latency is very long, right, every four years. And so the bits that can be gathered for decisions is very low. When we see it in terms of Internet governance. So in Taiwan, we've been working, for example, e-petitions. Each and every one citizen or even resident can start a petition that collects 5,000 signatures and that warrants a ministry of response. If it's interagency, I personally in my office host twice a month collaboration meetings to figure out the solutions and mutual accountability with the petitioners, not just for the petitioners but with all the stakeholders. So that's one example. And we have, of course, participatory budgeting. We have the presidential hackathon where the social innovators can bring a local idea that's tried and true in a smaller region for three months or more and each time out of the 200 projects every year, President Dr. Tsai Ing-wen gives trophy to five teams committing herself to implement as if there are presidential promises in the next fiscal year with all the budget and personnel and regulation requirements to enable from the telemedicine to telecare to teleeducation. Many other social innovations that only tried on a smaller region have become a national wide policy through this high bandwidth collaboration. So I want to ask you about how these kinds of principles have been able to take hold in Taiwan. Is it because Taiwan's only been democratic for around 25 years? Does that help these ideas gain traction? Or do you think other countries could take a similar approach? I think before the sunflower movement, if you ask a random person on the street whether they think that the administration can work with the government, they'll probably say no, right? There was considerable political apathy, especially around young people, so not unlike the other jurisdictions as we are seeing now. So I'm not advising the activists to occupy the parliament peacefully in other jurisdictions, but there needs to be a comparable common urgency where the state's limits in responding in the here and now are challenged. And when the civil society proves itself by coming up with better or at least more legitimate responses. The silver lining of the coronavirus, the pandemic, and the associated infodemic in the past couple of years, I believe provides just such opportunities because we've seen the co-ops, charities, social entrepreneurs, and so on gaining a lot of legitimacy around all the jurisdictions when people perceive, sometimes even correctly, that the state is really constrained in its resources and response agility in the ever mutating coronavirus situation. So I'm definitely going to ask about Taiwan's response to the pandemic in a moment, but before that I wanted to ask you another question about digital democracy from the audience. Heather Rhea, who is an advisor for digital inclusion at Telstra, she's asked how you can ensure that everyone can participate in a digital democracy and has access to the technology and the skills to contribute. Yeah, that's a great question. In Taiwan, broadband is a human right. Any place in Taiwan, even on the tip of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters high, you're guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second broadband that can support this kind of video conferencing at just 15 euros per month with unlimited data. If you don't, it's my fault, like personally, and people do write emails to me. And so I believe this is the most fundamental strata. Of course, we also ensure, for example, starting next year, all the school children in the entire basic education range will have access not just to the highest speed Wi-Fi in their classrooms, but also the sufficient amount of tablets to enable the hybrid kind of classrooms. And we do this in spite of never going into a lockdown in the past couple years. And so I believe this is a very strong commitment ever since I was a teenager. When I was 12, I already learned that the government's committed to provide first telephone services and then affordable kind of dial-up services and so on to everyone in Taiwan. So it's a strong commitment, just like our national health care, that we must make sure that each and every one of our citizens is equal, but also on the digital equivalent of the public square of the public libraries and so on. So we also, starting 2016, classified the investment into digital public infrastructures as public infrastructure budget. Previously, it's only for concrete things like things made out of concrete, but we realized that the commons, the digital commons, including the digital equivalent of town hall and museum and public libraries, are every bit as much worth investing as the concrete counterparts. Okay, so this week you'll represent Taiwan at President Biden's Summit for Democracies. You wrote recently many democracies, including those in the Indo-Pacific, have been revealed as flawed or failing, either grasping for authority or grasping for relevance. Now, I want to ask you, why are they grasping? Is it because of their regime type? Is it because of the relationship between the public and the institutions? What does this mean? Yeah, I wrote that in the context of the pandemic response. So many jurisdictions, democratic ones around the world, are finding that there is a perceived dilemma or trade-off between going to the more authoritarian way in the name of public health and protecting the common good or staying on the liberal democratic spectrum of things but becomes less relevant when it comes to pandemic response and therefore perceived as less legitimate. That is a very common challenge in the past couple of years in many jurisdictions. But of course, your jurisdiction and mine are exceptions to this rule. I think we need to share to the world collaboratively that when the country not sees itself as constrained of only using the resources of global multinational corporations or the state surveillance, there are actually a lot more innovative possibilities that comes from the social sector, from the civil society and by empowering democracy. For example, in Taiwan, most of our most important pandemic response information systems are not government technology but invented by the social sector, by the volunteers including the masquerading visualization system, the contact tracing system based on SMS based QR code and so on. These are all the civil society inventions and continue to be co-governed by the people who care the most about privacy, about civil liberties and so on. So we can think beyond the false dilemma, not over-concentrating power to the state yet protect the public health in a very effective way. So that was the context that I was writing, I believe it was for the Sydney Dialogue, that we can rebuild the mutual trust together. It's really interesting because we've seen a similar phenomenon here in Australia where one of our most popular ways to find out about COVID statistics, where to get vaccinated, is a tool called COVID base that was designed by three teenagers. So we've definitely seen similar things play out here. Now, before we get on to the pandemic, I do want to ask you, because of the week that it is, about democracy as an organizing principle for international cooperation. There are many issues here where, for example, Taiwan has a lot of diplomatic partners that are not democratic. Australia works closely with countries that are not democratic or perhaps have illiberal values embedded in their democracy. So I want to ask about what you think about democracy as a kind of vehicle for international cooperation and whether it also presents risks. Indeed. Well, as I told Reuters, I believe, last week, there will be more summits for democracy in the future. So for all the governments and peoples that are not yet democratic and feel maybe slighted that they have not been invited as a participant, my suggestion is always to double down on realizing democracy. So maybe by the next round or the round after the next, that we will be sharing the same stage. So I think it's a summit for democracy. It's not a summit that defines democratic entities forever. And so I take the attitude that we can always share how democracy works, not just for the people, but also with the citizens. Do you think that technology has been empowering for authoritarians more so than for democracies? Is there an asymmetry, I guess, between the ways in which democratic systems can use technologies compared to authoritarians? Depending on what sort of technology, right, if all you have is radio, which is designed for, I don't know, a few people speaking to millions of people, but it could not let millions of people speak. So in that sense, the technology itself is asymmetric. I talk about the bandwidth of democracy. You can say that radio is definitely empowering the few people, the elites that can operate on the spectrums. And in democratic polities, of course, we evolved the ideas of the radio stations as gatekeepers, the journalistic sector to manage this very scarce and very important resource. But at the end of the day, I think it still gives authority to whomever holding the microphone of the radio stations. But the Internet is fundamentally peer-to-peer and it's fundamentally symmetrical in the sense of each and every receiver is also a broadcaster. And so in that configuration, they are symmetric. So in democratic polities, for example, each and every one of our middle schoolers can and some of them do race petitions. The quarter or more of our citizens' initiatives were from people younger than 18. And when the real-time fact check are three presidential candidates at their presidential debate and forum, and their fact check actually appear on the live stream that millions watch, that is pretty symmetrical if you ask me. So I think the Internet holds the potential and the reality now to empower the democratic society to truly be co-governing itself and making the state transparent to its citizens. Of course, the same technologies are still making in more authoritarian regimes their people transparent to their state. That is a fact, but I wouldn't say it's asymmetric. You talk about gatekeepers and I think it's really interesting to hear about how Taiwan has had progress in terms of these open forums and public participation. But there is, of course, the potential downside for having such a large role for technology in people's lives. You look at the Facebook algorithm, for example, where it provokes you to convince you to stay online and we can see because of that particular conspiracies gain even more traction because of these algorithms. So are you worried about those kinds of issues with social media and big technology? What do you think we can do about it? Well, I draw a distinction between assistive technology and assistive intelligence or AI and the more authoritarian technologies that concentrates power. Now, the prime example of assistive technology I happen to have it with me here is my eyeglass and it's aligned and it augments my vision but it doesn't try to replace my eyes or push advertisement to my retina and also it's accountable in a sense if there's bias. I can't take it down, right? I'm not addicted or glued to it. It's not sticky and I can fix it myself or take it to the repair person down the street and we don't have to pay tens of millions of dollars of license or reverse engineer with ten years, you know, black box algorithmic model oversight and things like that. So basically, pretty much all the technologies that we deploy are civic technologies, especially during the pandemic when people are wary of new technology that didn't exist before the pandemic. So we started with things that people already trusted for decades or more, right? SMS QR code, the national healthcare system and things like that. So I would argue that the intelligence is in the collective and connective crowd that the people, not in any particular one algorithm or individual that can kind of pretend to arrange for the maximal common good as in the kind of algorithm that you just mentioned. I think alignment and accountability are the fundamental pillars that we need to take technology and bring it to the democratic side, not to ask our democratic citizens to adapt themselves or addict themselves to the more authoritarian use of technologies. I think we've danced around it a little bit, but we've started really to hear more about your portfolio because of Taiwan's approach to handling the pandemic and the many successes that Taiwan has had in handling the pandemic. Can you tell us a little bit about your portfolio with regard to the pandemic and how digital innovation has really helped Taiwan in this regard? Sure, I'll be brief and just bring two examples. The first example is the digital civic infrastructure of PTT. It's a Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit, I guess, but it's completely free of advertisements because it's in the academic network governed by the academic norms of free speech and free assembly for the past 25 years. Now, in PTT, there's many people working on triaging the emergent ideas and some threats to our public. For example, in December 2019, when Dr. Liu announced a message from Wuhan that there were seven SARS cases in the Huanhan seafood market, I'm sure that it also spread to other social media networks, but factually only on PTT did people spend 24 hours to triage that information resulting in the very next day on the first day of 2020, Taiwan started health inspection for all five passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan and that we started our central epidemic month center complete with the daily two PM press conferences even before we had our first local confirmed case. So way ahead of pretty much all the WHO members. So I think the point here I want to make is that if the more profit seeking instead of purpose seeking social media which gravitates to a more anti-social corners of social media that you alluded to around polarization, around hate and discrimination and so on, then the same information coming from Wuhan may evolve into something that is just attacking each other or trying to find conspiracy theories as you alluded to or things like that, but would definitely not lead to the kind of early response of our pandemic countering measures. So that's my first example. The second example relates to contact tracing. So last year already a group of people called GovZero, GZeroV that looked at all the digital services inside one government, something that GOV, the TW, and brings out forks. There's alternatives of those services, something that GZeroV, the TW. So just changing an O to a zero on your browser bar and you get into the kind of shadow government which works in a cooperative and collaborative fashion. The same bunch of people who successfully designed the mask rationing visibility maps, more than 100 of those different maps, chatbots, and voice assistant enable people to not panic and always queue effectively in the pharmacies to receive the rationed mask back when mask was as scarcity. This year the same bunch of people designed this system where people do not have to install any app and do not have to concentrate any of their data on any multinational corporation or the state, but rather kind of post a post-it note in their telecom SMS inbox. So they just scan a QR code using their built-in phone and sends a toll-free SMS to 1922, but the five telecom carriers stores those venue codes that's part of this SMS which you just scan and type nothing and just send, so it's like two seconds. They store these check-ins a quarter of billions of which are sent since this May in each and every telecom operator and they do not hand over to the contact tracer at last. It's actually a confirmed case that needs contact tracing and even then the contact tracer need to ask the QR code printer for the mapping between the 15 digits and the venue so as to ensure this multi-party computation to protect the privacy of the out-of-purpose uses or preventing each of those participating parties from compromising the privacy of citizens. So it's a privacy-preserving contact tracing design that won more than two millions of venues adoption on the very first week and enable us to shorten the contact tracing from more than 24 hours to less than 24 minutes which resulted in us in just a few short months counter our first real wave of variants and later on the delta variants and so on never had a R value of above one and never got into the community spread. One of the questions that has been asked about the contact tracing system here in Australia is whether it does have the potential to be misused. For example, whether the police could ask for that information if they were investigating a crime. Is that a discussion that's been had in Taiwan around the system? Yes, definitely. And we actually did have a police person who received via the wiretapping system some of the 15 digits of a suspected criminal and of course our wiretapped laws I think similar to the Australian ones are quite restricted in the sense that it can only be applied to more serious crimes when investigating. But because of the multi-party design and remember we didn't design the system it's a civil liberties group designing the system so from the day one it's multi-party so the police could not reverse engineer what those 15 digit means unless they visit and knock on the door of each and every venue I guess so they filed a search warrant to the QR code printer asking them to hand over the mapping table between the 15 digits and the actual venues and then the judge denied the search warrant and then the judge wrote a whistle blow on the public newspaper saying that I wouldn't ever grant such a search warrant and I want to make it very clear that each and every SMS printed on the SMS text indeed on the QR code itself that this is reserved for pandemic control use only so if we use it out of purpose we'll be breaking, breaching the social contract with the people because the SMS-based contact tracing is not voluntary, has never been voluntary so that would mean that if people lose the trust they will go back to pen and paper and if they do we're back to 24 hours or more of contact tracing which would be really bad against the delta variants and so this logic is impeccable so by the time that the judge files the search sorry denies the search warrant we already have some internal discussions but this public exposure made sure that GovZero hold many discussions around this very topic and are a center for epidemic control and the very next month issued an interpretation in conjunction with our Ministry of Justice saying that because those SMS were not sent to any particular person it's to an automated account and also it's specified it deleted after 28 days unlike the wiretap which only deletes after 6 months so they are legally different things so if the telecom operators do not hand over even the 15 digits to the wiretap that's entirely legal they should be classified as different things so no matter how serious is the crime the investigators must not use the wiretapping dating coming from the 192 to SMS and it should also be solved technologically at the source of the wiretapping apparatus and so I believe that's a very different decision made compared to our nearby inter-Pacific jurisdictions some of which said that the police should have free access some of which actually the police designed a contact tracing system in the first place some of which said if the crime is serious enough it warrants a search warrant and things like that but Taiwan said no from day one this is not a government technology this is civil society technology we didn't procure that it's a reverse procurement they procure it from the government which provides the real-time API and so on so we need to adhere to the norm that's already set by the social sector so I call it the people-public-private partnership where the people and the norm around which are designed in the social sector it's really interesting to hear you talk about trust and the preservation of that social contract because one of the other pervading themes of the pandemic has been disinformation of course and that spreads on PTT the platform that you mentioned as well so I want to put a question to you from one of my colleagues here at the Lowy Institute Sasha Fegan she asks democracies around the world from the United States to France, Ukraine and Taiwan they've been dealing with state-sponsored disinformation campaigns especially during elections Taiwan set something of a gold standard countering the line narratives during the election campaign can you talk a bit about what those disinformation campaigns were targeting and why during the election but also tell us about the strategies using to counter those narratives both during the election and during the pandemic? Certainly well I talked about humour over rumour quite a bit including a couple of talks so I would advise searching for humour over rumour and see the entire playback but I will also want to highlight the other strategy which is notice and public notice and the theory is this Outrage spreads very quickly and many of the leading conspiracy theories in disinformation especially around election time is not pro any particular candidate or pro any particular political party but rather is against democracy itself it's against the democratic process the legitimacy of voting and things like that so for example I would like to highlight in addition to the humour over rumour strategy that please search for more in our playbook I would also like to talk about notice and public notice because a lot of conspiracy theories travel our outrage especially before the election they target against the democratic process the legitimacy of the votes of the entire democratic system rather than for any particular candidate or policy for example in 2019 again I think it was November a couple of months before our presidential election in January 2020 there was a viral disinformation that said and I quote the people in Hong Kong, the teenagers they're not fighting for democracy they were being paid to 100,000 or 20 million dollars to murder a police on the street they are rioters mobsters and of course now it was a very scary looking kind of in a full gear protestor that looks rather young the photo was recorded it was a rioters photo but initially the rioters' caption was just they were a teenage protestor in Hong Kong so the alternate caption tries to deliver a different message try to paint those who fight for democracy as something else now the information doesn't trend in Hong Kong you can see through the live very quickly but in Taiwan because the civil society again provides a real-time dashboard of which variants of conspiracy theories are trending by asking people to voluntarily kind of flag email as a spot flag incoming instant messages as potential disinformation to realize real-time clarification in a kind of weekly survey going on in this information space so we see the R-value the basic transmission rates of that particular disinformation growing and so the Taiwan fact-check and immediately respond to action is an independent journalistic fact-check part of the international fact-checking network and they discovered that this alternate caption came overtly, not covertly overtly from the Weibo accounts of the Chang'an sword of the Zhongyang Zheng Huawei of the central political and law unit in the Chinese Communist Party in their Weibo accounts so they immediately provide the public notice and now because PTT and Facebook Yahoo and Google, YouTube and Line and so on have signed on the notice and public notice self-regulation accord so when you for example spread this message on Facebook click and share you will see at that time very quickly that this message is sponsored by the central political and law unit as discovered by the Taiwan fact-checking center so in a sense we're not taking anything down just like we counter the pandemic with no lockdown, we counter the infodemic with no takedown, we just make sure that we transform the same messages kind of mRNA strands into kind of the vaccination of the mind so that when people see this kind of alternate shell like mRNA vaccine they develop antibodies develop immunity in themselves and then can participate in a much more competent manner on the internet social media Now I am going to come back to humor over rumour in a moment but because you mentioned this campaign from a part of the Chinese Communist Party I want to ask you a question from Valerie Tan at Merix who says how sophisticated and effective are China's online influence campaigns in Taiwan and do you see them as having an impact on the elections? Well in 2018 we've discovered because that was also the year that our national audit office and the control unit published the entire campaign donation and expense, the finance records as open data previously it was paper only back of zero again kind of occupied the control unit and brought out the A4 paper printed copies and did a crowdsourced OCR to make sure that we can reverse engineer the previous campaign donation records and so because of that we adopted the open data, structural open data starting 2018 as a way for investigative journalists to look at not just a control unit to look at the financing details and we soon discovered that the social media advertisements which at that point bypassed the fact-checking mechanisms especially on Facebook but also on other internet platforms was not declared as campaign donation or finance and also a lot of it especially on Facebook was funded by jurisdictions outside of Taiwan which would be illegal if it's campaign donation because only domestic actors are permitted in a transparent way to donate to political campaigns so the same bunch of people who argued for radical transparency in the control unit talked to Facebook saying you know Taiwan did not pass any law mandating you to do this but we are ready to start a social sanction on Facebook unless you adopt exactly the same norms that we have set to the state that is to say radical transparency as soon as anyone starts an advertisement it must be radically open in the advertisement library and also ban the foreign sponsored advertisement on social and political issues in the next election which would be the presidential election so comparing the 2018 mural election slash national referendums and the 2020 presidential election we can see that the internet platforms adhered to the local social norms and the extra jurisdictional disinformation campaigns and so on therefore did have a much lower impact during our presidential election it's interesting actually because the last time I was in Taiwan was observing the 2020 presidential election the last time I was overseas and Taiwan is such a high technology kind of society and then you have a different kind of radical transparency in your elections where it is pen and paper and a chop and people holding up the votes as they're counted do you think that that will continue like what accounts for that contrast between elections and pen and paper and then all of the technology that you're talking about in Taiwan we count on paper with as you said kind of announcing each vote and if you were at a counting booth you will see that the paper is shown to various different angles and the reason why is that there's YouTubers among the observers there are people who are holding their smartphone or their camera recording the entire process and the major parties have their own apps to do the telling so it's not that they're not digital it's that the digital was on the kind of auditing part of things and the paper made it easier for the YouTubers of various different political parties to livestream the entire counting process and that led to a very quick counter disinformation campaign because if there is kind of conspiracy theories I remember there were one in the presidential election right during the counting process there was a viral conspiracy theory that says there's invisible ink going on whomever you vote to the ink will disappear and Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen will receive another invisible ink and those ink were and I quote sponsored by the CIA end of quote so basically it's a conspiracy theory but it never really got viral because people can see which party they support their partisan YouTubers actually at that particular voting booth and there are video recordings to show that nothing like that has taken place and so on so I guess unless we find another more accountable way of counting that could enable this sort of participatory audit people would not want to give up this very legitimate way of participatory audit especially on the votes to people with potential kind of exponential capture if you vote for a president the president can then work on changing the voting system the same goes for the legislature and the same for the city council and the mayors so we do have electronic voting and internet voting but not for people we do have them as I mentioned for e-petitions for the e-collecting for participatory budgeting for ranking the priority of the sustainable goal projects in presidential hackathon but because the theory was that there were no legitimacy based on paper in those particular newly invented democratic institutions and also there's no exponential capture because it's just voting for one piece of budget instead of a single person you mentioned before Taiwan using humor not rumor to combat disinformation now I don't mean to be impolite but governments are not traditionally very good at humor so I wonder if you could comment on how that's been working but also whether you think this approach can be exported to other countries well definitely yes I think many of our government ministers now realize that humor is pretty much the only positive emotion that spreads faster than outrage so really if we want our science our clarifications to kind of outrun the conspiracy theories based on outrage we have to engage people in a spirit of humor over a rumor and that's just a fact now it doesn't really mean that each minister need to be a comedian although I did kind of shake bubble tea on the top of my Twitter if you search for my Twitter account and pinned the pose of me shaking the bubble tea explaining digital democracy so that's I guess quite humorous but we're not asking our fellow ministers to do that we're asking them to engage with their team of participation offices a dedicated team of career public service within each ministry in charge of coming up with engagement strategies and it's both ways it's symmetrical it's not just about pushing via the very cute Spokes dog, a Shiba Inu named Song Chai a cute dog saying don't put your food in your mouth sorry your hand in your mouth wear a mask to protect you against your own unwashed hand which went absolutely viral and which is partly one no conspiracy theory around masked use is popular inside one because the cute dog is just too cute but it's also about engaging the YouTubers and comedians in the civil society by providing them with the real-time data by offering to use creative commons to enable three remakes of not just Song Chai but our reports of the real-time counter epidemic statistics and so on it enabled the creators in the citizenry to also come up with their own humorous way to even start a very popular campaign called Taiwan can help that us that posts in the I think New York Times advertisement on paper but also working with YouTubers around the world to share the very popular massive online open course taught by our then vice president and also the textbook author on epidemiology on the Taiwan model and the YouTubers in other jurisdictions are very happy also to share the message using their own language and coaches and so on so I would argue that as long as we contribute to the digital commons and as I mentioned treated as an infrastructure with the same personnel and budgetary commitments the government can learn social technology as they can learn from the industrial technologies well I do remember the cat memes all over Taipei when I was there last time so that makes sense we had Taiwan can help ridden in the sky by a sky radar across Sydney actually last year so it's definitely gone global one more question about COVID so even though Taiwan is one of the only countries that has zero COVID and has also successfully combated a delta variant it's been slower than some others in the region to vaccinate so I wanted to ask about how you explained Taiwan's success in managing vaccines but then slower rates of vaccinations I think the vaccine coverage as of this week in Australia is 78 percent of the population and Taiwan is 77.6 so we're not very similar level of vaccination as of this week but it's true that we started later than Australia it's just we were faster and so the reason why we started later was because of vaccine hesitancy and that was because we've had a run of 10 months of essentially no COVID at all so when I vaccinated AstraZeneca in I think mid-April nobody wants to get vaccinated there's plenty of vaccines and not enough people willing even when our premier and Minister Chen Shizhong of CECC all demonstrated by vaccinating themselves I had a very difficult time convincing even my executive secretary and my family to get vaccinated by vaccinating myself of course that changed when we faced our first and real early wave in May but it takes time to procure those vaccines and in the earlier rounds of negotiations we basically could not make a case that if you send millions of doses to Taiwan actually there will be people willing to receive those doses so we had to scramble and arrange the delivery which only started around July so it took a couple months to secure the vaccine supply but once we started to secure the vaccine supply and roll out the nationwide vaccination appointment in July the vaccination rate is very very quick so I think by now we're on par with most jurisdictions in Indo-Pacific and personally end of this month I'm going to receive the booster dose as well Yes to be clear Australia was also I think slower perhaps for very similar reasons but are catching up now or doing quite well in particular parts now I want to ask about Taiwan can help whether you think that promoting democracy should be a key part of Taiwan's foreign policy as it goes out in the world That's a great question indeed previously Taiwan can help mend the healthcare system which will help many jurisdictions to set up it bonds broadband access it means agricultural technology to improve the soil and local supply of foods and so on that's what Taiwan was known for but open government I believe started to be one of our kind of exports of the Taiwan model because of the pandemic but it's not just because of the pandemic I remember a couple years before the pandemic already our counter disinformation playbook is already being adopted and adapted in other jurisdictions even the non-democratic or not so democratic ones see the value of consumer protection or in clarifying conspiracy theories around medical information and things like that people trust their local experts not necessarily the government on these matters so the things like humor over rumor notice and public notice and things like that were already available playbooks in those kind of slightly less democratic regimes and embraced by their civil society and NGOs and indeed Taiwan was at the same place when I was born Taiwan was still under the martial law and during the decades of the 70s 80s and finally the direct presidential election in 96 those two decades and more we see the social sector focusing not on politics or campaigning for democracy itself but just with the government to be more open when it comes to the charitable issues of providing education of health of disaster recovery of credit union movements consumer co-op movement and things like that so we're seeing that these movements which are based on open government principles but not directly saying we need to democratically for president tomorrow in a kind of softer way of Taiwan can help because we can share the entire experience transitioning completely non-violently from authoritarian regime all the way to one of the world's leading liberal democracies well on this I might ask you a question from our audience Matthew Newman from the Tony Blair Institute he asks how do we combat the rise of fake news laws in the region in Taiwan in 2016 when we tackled this question the first decision we did was not to call it fake news in Mandarin news, Xinwen and journalism, Xinwen Ye or Xinwen Gongzuo literally has the same root journalism is literally news work and so there's really no way to say fake news without offending journalists unless it's a journalist saying that which would be okay but otherwise people would naturally think of Xinwen or fake news as a journalist not holding themselves up to the journalist's standards but as we know most of the so-called fake news are actually information manipulations so the manipulators were not journalists to begin with which is why we call the misinformation or this information the infodamic which concentrates on a public mental health like public health, public mental health aspect of these things instead of targeting journalists we see the journalists the fact checkers as a valuable indeed a vital skill just like public health is the most important field of study when countering the pandemic journalism, public mental health is the most important thing when countering the infodamic and we need to publicize professional journalism beyond the elites in the media but also as I mentioned the middle schoolers the primary schoolers who measure air quality and contribute to the weather reports of PM2.5 and air pollution to determine whether their parents will go out to jog in the morning and so they are also the weather station so by democratizing the media, by making sure the young people as well as people who are very senior learn about journalism I believe these are the true vaccines of the mind to counter against the infodamic now we're almost out of time but I do want to ask you briefly about Australia Australia and Taiwan have more in common than most people would realize where island nations of around 25 million people with rich indigenous history grappling with multiculturalism more recently we have more shared experiences in terms of how we've combated COVID-19 and of course being on the receiving end of economic coercion from China do you see more that our countries can do together? Definitely, I think there's a global cooperation and training framework the GCTF there was initially a US-Taiwan bilateral thing but it's now grown to have the co-hosts also Australia and Japan so I think based on this I think many people call it a mini-lateral or a plurilateral idea of international engagement we are working with the like-minded countries more than I think it's around four different countries now who have participated in the GCTF framework and we also look forward of course to work on the Summit for Democracy the Open Government Partnership and many other international arrangements of democracies I believe that's also one of the very valuable coalitions of alliance that we need to work together So my last question for you Audrey a lot of talk about Taiwan's future and the scenarios range from the optimistic to frankly quite dire and various countries talk about how to react to these scenarios you know here in Australia this has received a lot of attention as we're heading into an election what I want to ask you is what kind of conversation do you think the world should be having about Taiwan and its future? That's a great question Personally I think the hashtag Taiwan Can Help Taiwan Is Helping says a lot it's not just about the democratic institutions or the bubble tea or the agricultural or broadband or many other things that we have to offer but we also sincerely want to offer on any of the sustainable development goals all the 17 goals that Taiwan needs people working on not necessarily made in Taiwan products or services but rather the models of the cross sectoral collaboration to help us to tackle the most important problem that confronts the global people including climate change and emergency and the kind of biological and virus of the mind that we have talked about because fundamentally these issues are global and can only be tackled if people of various different jurisdictions, cultural backgrounds and so on form shared goals so I want to say that Taiwan Can Help is not just about specific technologies that can help to amplify existing goals but rather all the kinds of people public-private partnership we've been talking about are the social technologies for goal formation for making sure that people of various different positions can come to shared values in an almost predictable fashion in Taiwan like every 24 hours after each CCC press conference or every 7 days after the crowdsourced counter-pandemic systems iteration every 60 days after citizens initiatives every year after presidential haggathon and so on we're working on such technologies that can help to tackle whatever issues that result of the lack of mutual trust brings about so that's the main thing Taiwan has to offer and to me what Taiwan can help signifies Audrey, thank you so much for joining me today we are so grateful for your time and wish you the best of luck this week at the Summit for Democracy Thank you Leif Long and Prosper Thank you again to Audrey and thank you to my colleagues Andrea Pollard, Josh Goading and Shane McLeod for event support and thank you to you, our audience, for joining me in another long-distance Lowy Institute event