Australia’s controversial contact tracing app is officially on the scrapheap. 

Once declared by then Prime Minister Scott Morrison as the country’s ticket to freedom, the COVIDSafe app only identified two positive cases not already picked up by manual contact tracers.

At a cost of $21 million, the app — which relied on bluetooth technology to register users in close proximity — also found just 17 unique close contacts.

This is despite there being more than nine million cases of COVID-19 reported in Australia since the app launched back in April 2020.