Slow progress on digital inclusion

Given this was a priority area first floated by Labour while in opposition in 2015 after Miriam Lips’ 2014 study, that’s not a lot of action.

According to the new Inclusion Blueprint, 2020 and 2021 are designated for ‘‘filling the gaps’’ by developing new approaches to facilitate digital inclusion.

Hopefully that means doing something, but it’s not entirely clear from the public-facing material when inclusive rubber will hit the road.

Two years ago I listened to previous minister Clare Curran promise the Government would ‘‘never leave anyone behind’’ when it came to doing something about inclusion and that the Digital Inclusion Blueprint would be delivered with 100 days.

So it’s fair to say that not only is the recent document low on action, it’s also two years late.

Reading between the lines here I’m guessing there are a couple of things at play behind this overdue and unambitious initiative.

The first is that the Department of Internal Affairs (which is nominally the responsible agency) has no budget for it that I can find in the publicly available documents. So perhaps at this stage a stocktake is as good as can be done without some cold hard cash.

The second thing is that the Government is likely to be pondering what is the nature of its role when it comes to digital inclusion. There’s a range of answers from facilitator, to enabler, to delivery agent. Allied to this are some discussions that if it’s done on a regional level then the Provincial Growth Fund could help out.

Lastly, it’s likely that this wasn’t a question that the smart but super-busy Woods had time to reach a position on before she lost the digital services portfolio and picked up KiwiBuild. Good luck with that one.

So now the baton has been passed to Kris Faafoi, the man who’s developing a reputation as the ‘‘Mr Fixit’’ of the Labour Cabinet.

The new digital services minister has a reputation for helping people battling at the coalface. People like small business folk, the elderly and migrants.

People that sound a lot like the folks I saw in Timaru.

Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director, facilitator and digital adviser. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he hates being excluded.