I was fortunate enough to attend last night’s TVNZ7 Internet debate. The participants were Labour’s Minister of Communications Hon David Cunliffe, National ICT Spokesperson Hon Maurice Williamson, ACT Leader Rodney Hide and Greens ICT Spokesperson Metiria Turei. The session was hosted by Damien Christie who was assisted by journalists Fran O’Sullivan and Russell Brown. The main topics up for debate were broadband, convergence, copyright, cyber safety and the digital divide. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, the latter topic received very little airtime however the topics that did get covered made for a lively, interesting and entertaining debate.

Rather than go through the debate point-by-point there’s a couple of key takeaways I’d like to focus on. Firstly, I think all of the parties understand that ICT has the potential to help make NZ a better place in a number of different ways and, while they all have slightly different viewpoints on how it can make a difference, I am encouraged by the level of understanding they have of the topic in general and the resources they appear to be dedicating to writing (or at least thinking about writing) applicable policy.

Secondly, and, for me, the really interesting point was this… I believe NZ’s political parties now see the Technology Advocacy Constituency (“TAC’s” – you read it here first folks) as a unique and addressable political group and they are starting to think about how they should go about appealing to them. At the last election the digital natives, FOSS advocates, GenY’s and broadband-starved-and-vocal-about-it’s etc were all hidden amongst the normal demographic groups but I believe those sub-groups are starting to be viewed collectively by politicians as a new individual constituency (a bit like “soccer moms” were when Clinton was first elected). The reverse is true too, that same group now understands that they possess a collective political force of some sort and are beginning to use it to push politicians to implement change where they see it is needed in the technology arena.

This latter part has actually been happening for a while – the ongoing public discussion about NZ’s broadband situation is a perfect example – and I think we will see this phenomenon develop over time. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see parties start tweaking their policy to appeal to specific sub-groups within the TAC and, in fact, I believe the Greens are already doing this – portions of their ICT policy are clearly designed to win the hearts and minds of the FOSS community. While I might not agree 100% with all of the FOSS community’s viewpoints (or those of the Greens for that matter) this is a smart move and one which I suspect the other parties will analyse and learn from. I’m not saying that every party is going to specifically target the FOSS community but I do think we’ll see efforts to fine-tune ICT policy to appeal to specific voter sub-groups (e.g. very high bandwidth users, those who make a living from writing software, those who invest in ICT startups, the ICT R&D community etc).

Finally, throughout the debate TVNZ were running a text-based poll which asked the question: “which party's ICT policies most appeal to you?” and these were the results:

My interpretation is that no one party stands out above the rest as a clear leader in the area of ICT (Hmmm… maybe some policy fine-tuning is needed….). Having said that, it would appear that the one party who have done some fine-tuning (i.e. the Greens) have not seen that translate into increased support for the intended audience. Of course, if that’s the case then most of what I have written above has just been rendered completely incorrect.

For that reason I shall use the oldest of political tricks and state that the poll is obviously flawed  :-)