 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