Digital exclusion creates hardship

Six months ago I penned an article about digital inclusion and the lack of progress being made to address it.

Put simply, digital inclusion is about how we ensure that the estimated 15 per cent of the population who don’t have internet access don’t get shafted in an increasingly digitised world.

In a previous column I bemoaned the dearth of progress since former broadcasting, communications and digital media minister Clare Curran gave assurances that ‘‘no-one will be left behind’’ back in 2017.

The motivation for the piece came from being a fly on the wall at the Timaru Citizens Advice Bureau where I witnessed the scale and diversity of the digitally disenfranchised.

This week Citizens Advice Bureau New Zealand released a report snapshotting the state of digital inclusion in Aotearoa and how digital public services are affecting citizen wellbeing.

Drawing on insights from a ‘‘small’’ sample of 4000 bureau inquiries last year, it paints a sobering picture.

The report shows that a range of people experience digital exclusion, not just the oldies or the rural folk. However, it did find that Ma¯ ori and

Pacific peoples were overrepresented, accounting for 20 per cent and 17 per cent of digitally excluded people respectively.

The report identified seven barriers that bureau clients faced as a result of government services moving online. These barriers included a lack of access to computer and internet, limited digital literacy, financial barriers to device acquisition and language constraints.

The report found increasing numbers of government agencies are not only digital first, but also digital only.

Examples here included Immigration New Zealand closing all its public counters and ceasing the printing of visa-related forms, Tenancy Services making the option of completing a paper-based application almost invisible on its website, and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment making the system for requesting Employment Mediation Services online only.

The Ministry of Social Development also got a bit of a drubbing, with the research outlining the many barriers some people face when they are told to apply online, or to use the MyMSD portal.

The report also found that RealMe – the government-operated online authentication process – is a nightmare to use and surrounded by widely varying advice from officials as to how to use it.

No surprise there. But I was surprised to find out the digitally excluded often found it tough to withdraw their money out of some KiwiSaver accounts when they turned 65.

More broadly the report found that some agencies seem to be doing the opposite of what Apple founder Steve Jobs advocated. So instead of human-centred online processes, it’s often tech-centric design instead.

While the Citizen Advice Bureau is far too polite to say so, I got the feeling that overall it gave the public sector a C grade for inclusion – it’s enough to get through but only just. Mind you, I’d hazard a guess that their privatesector counterparts may have got a D.

So having talked about it in muted voices from 2014 and in loud ones from 2017, what’s happening in central government land in terms of a response? Not a hell of a lot that I can see.

Following the launch of the Digital Inclusion Blueprint last year, the Department of Internal Affairs ran a one-day symposium on digital inclusion with speakers including Spark chief executive Jolie Hodson, Nano Girl Michelle Dickinson and your humble scribe.

It was a good day, but it wasn’t hard to smell the frustration emanating from various officials.

The poor buggers have had three ministers in less than two years (one who went super nova), endured a drawn-out and ultimately flawed process to find a national chief digital officer, and had to support the slow death of digital ministerial advisory groups.

But most of all, what the officials have had to endure is an absence. An absence of funding to actually do anything. From what I can see, to date Parliament hasn’t seen fit to directly fund any citizen-facing digital inclusion initiatives.

As a result it’s a handful of corporates – including Spark, New Zealand Post, Kiwibank, Chorus and N4L – plus a broad ecosystem of non-profit community groups that have stepped up. And it’s the community groups who have shouldered the main load.

The Citizen Advice Bureau plays a critical role here, as do the likes of the 2020 Trust, Digital Seniors and the Taka Trust, to name just a few.

Last year, the Taka Trust provided more than 200 Chromebook laptops to digitally disenfranchised families in the Hutt Valley. Digital Seniors help thousands of older folks with everything from buying groceries online to staying on top of their health online. I could name many others.

Call me a digital redneck, but I find it a bit ironic that despite all the noise made about digital inclusion by central government, it’s the locally based community groups doing all the heavy lifting.

And they are doing it on the smell of an oily rag. In fact, many of these organisations dream of an oily rag.

Right now the Government is in Budget mode as agencies submit their bids for the next 12 months. I just hope that as the Government slices and dices around $14 billion of capital and operational funding, the community groups doing the heavy lifting don’t get left behind.

Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director, writer and digital strategist. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he hates being left behind. While this column is MOD’s personal opinion, he was a presenter at the DIA Digital Inclusion Forum in 2019, is a former director of NetHui and a director of Kiwibank.

Increasing numbers of government agencies are not only digital first, but also digital only.