Pandemic surveillance and mobilities across Sydney, New South Wales

Abstract

In response to the acute public health crisis of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, governments in Australia and around the world rushed to institute technologies to track human bodies with “live” surveillance. In Australia, “lockdowns” halted human mobilities in all states for different periods, and technologies for tracking bodies and collecting data were introduced after and between physical lockdowns. In this article, we analyse both the monitoring technologies developed to contend with COVID-19 and the complex array of regulations and public health orders governing space and mobility in New South Wales and Sydney. Our focus on monitoring technologies is based on the COVIDSafe App (National) and the New South Wales COVIDSafe Check-in App. These apps enabled the surveillance of individual mobilities before their sudden demise apparently unrelated to the public health scenario at the time. We argue that these technologies are examples of sensory power which rapidly enrolled human bodies in systems of surveillance that were difficult to unravel through 2022 and beyond. Our focus on regulations and public health orders outlines the shifting legal geographies during public health crisis and the ways these were enacted as mobility restrictions, surveillance, and punishment in western Sydney. We argue that the scars of the peak pandemic will endure in particular locations and communities, signalling the persistence of sensory power beyond the life of specific COVID-19 tools.