Can NZ become a Pacific techtopia?
Estonia has become a tech utopia. In advance of New Zealand hosting a conference of the most digitally savvy countries, wonders what we can learn from the Baltic state.
For some in the technology world, Estonia has taken on the shape of Utopia. The tiny state on the Baltic Sea has a population smaller than greater Auckland and much larger countries – Finland and Russia – to the north and east. Estonia has radically reinvented itself after decades of Soviet rule, when ethnic Russians were imported in large numbers, Estonians were deported and it was a base for the Soviet navy. The Soviets were eventually seen off in the ‘‘Singing Revolution’’, as Tonu Loorparg, New Zealand’s honorary consul of Estonia, explains.
‘‘I was there in 1989 when things were really coming unstuck,’’ Loorparg says. ‘‘When there was no food in the shops. They were pulling down statues of Lenin and Stalin all over the place.’’
Loorparg, known as ‘‘Tony’’, came to New Zealand as a World War II refugee but stayed in touch with the old country. Its technological advances have made that easier. Skype was created by Estonians, as was the file-sharing programme Kazaa, and Loorparg suspects that when his nephew first Skyped him from Estonia in about 2004, that made him one of the earliest users of it in New Zealand.
The new Minister for Government Digital Services, Clare Curran, has been keeping an eye on Estonia. In 1991, when it became independent, less than half the population had a telephone line.
‘‘Reportedly, its only independent link to the outside world was a Finnish mobile phone hidden in the foreign minister’s garden,’’ Curran says. ‘‘Now it is a world leader in technology.’’
Estonia became the first country to allow online voting in a general election in 2007. That year, it so effectively fought off a Russian cyber-attack that Nato shifted its cyber-security headquarters there. It has fast broadband speeds and the record for startups per person, as well as the lowest business tax rates in the European Union and light regulation. It leapt from having no land registry to having a paperless one.
Health records live in the cloud. Justice is streamlined by technology. Online tax returns take five minutes. There is transparency and buy-in. Citizens and e-residents can log into their records and see who last looked. No matter if it was a bureaucrat, your GP or the police, you get to know. Even your cat’s vaccination record appears in your digital profile.
All the normal services of government are linked across one platform, accessed by an ID card. The government data platform, X Road, links servers through encrypted pathways, with private firms also on the network.
Government becomes both allpervasive and invisible. They call it e-Estonia. As The New Yorker magazine put it in December, ‘‘its government is virtual, borderless, blockchained and secure’’. The magazine asked: ‘‘Has this tiny post-Soviet nation found the way of the future?’’
In New Zealand, we might ask a different question: Can we be Estonia?
Estonia had the advantage of starting from scratch after winning independence, Curran says. ‘‘Unlike the Estonians, we are not able to design a whole new government system from the ground up. Our digital transformation must take place within the existing government structures we have.’’
Also, ‘‘New Zealand does not have a social licence to build a population register’’, making an Estonia-style ID card that accesses all services an impossibility.
There are other differences, Curran says. ‘‘Estonia has a ‘once only’ policy, meaning that no piece of citizen information should be given to government more than once. This ‘tell me once’ concept is one New Zealand is looking at, but the Privacy Act provides some constraints.
‘‘However, where it is possible with an individual’s consent, New Zealand, like Estonia, is joining up transactions and reusing citizen data.’’
Does this lead to a surveillance state, and, if so, is it worse than Facebook and Google hoovering up personal data? Would New Zealanders be comfortable with so much data being stored and shared?
Curran cites a 2016 Privacy Commission survey that showed 65 per cent of us continue to be concerned about privacy, and 46 per cent have become more concerned about individual privacy issues over the past few years. Between 75 per cent and 81 per cent were concerned about identity theft, credit card and banking details, businesses sharing personal information and security of information.
The majority willing to share data wanted to be able to opt out and wanted strict controls on access.
Curran believes our privacy laws are outdated and inadequate and will overhaul them in collaboration with Statistics Minister James
Shaw.
There has been a lot of attention on Estonia’s ‘‘e-residency’’, which allows non-citizens to sign up as virtual citizens online. The consulate has not exactly been flooded with New Zealand applicants – Loorparg says he has just one e-resident on the go.
How about online voting? The Estonians have done it for a decade. New Zealand could see a trial as soon as the 2019 local elections or future by-elections. But there is a philosophical hurdle to get over.
‘‘In theory, it can be done,’’ says Graeme Muller, chief executive of NZ Tech, which acts as an intermediary between tech companies and the government. ‘‘But there is just something fundamentally different about electing a government versus going online and ordering the groceries. That’s a national debate that needs to be had.’’
Is the Estonian model a cultural fit for us? Or do we fear a Black Mirror Big Brother world. Muller suspects it is much easier to ‘‘do things like make everyone have an ID card and put all the information on that card’’ if you come out of decades of Eastern Bloc totalitarianism.
‘‘While we will probably never be an Estonia, because none of us will ever put our hand up and say we want the government to control everything, we will learn from it and see the opportunities and benefits that can come from better use of the data,’’ Muller says.
‘‘We will be a country that has discussions and works out how to use artificial intelligence and deliver better services, but we want to control it more ourselves.’’
Loorparg sees it differently. He thinks the new Estonia’s tech culture is contrary to decades of totalitarianism rather than a sequel to it. He remembers the Soviet towers that jammed radio signals in Tallinn, ‘‘the KGB constantly surveying those who were politically incorrect’’. This is not that.
‘‘The fact that this has been accepted to the degree that it has is quite amazing,’’ Loorparg says. ‘‘Therein lies a lesson for New Zealanders. If you use the right technology, there is no conflict between Big Brother spying and privacy. The power is in the hands of the individual.’’
Go overseas and you find that some are even talking about us, Muller says. A few have noticed how New Zealand uses technology in education. Services like passports and births, deaths and marriages have become more rapid. We can move faster than countries with more layers of government.
But the image of hi-tech Kiwis doesn’t fly far. ‘‘We’ve looked into it and found that nowhere in the world thinks we’re good at hi-tech, unless they’re dealing specifically with us,’’ Muller says. When they think of food, sport, Hollywood special effects or even the environment, they rarely think of how technology underpins all that. Tourist images of a remote, pristine natural paradise also don’t say connected or hi-tech.
On the other hand, the Digital Planet report released by Tufts University in the United States last year rated us highly. It created a Digital Evolution Index, grouping 60 countries into ‘‘stand outs, stall outs, break outs and watch outs’’. It said three countries stood out even among the stand outs: Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and New Zealand.
It seems to be a wellkept secret in the local tech sector that New Zealand is also a member of the D5, short for Digital 5. Representatives of five nations gather to talk about digital government issues. There is blue-sky thinking, pushing of envelopes. Besides us, it involves the UK, Israel, South Korea and, of course, Estonia.
Wellington gets to host the next D5 summit this month, preceded by a twoday Digital Nations conference in Auckland. Muller, whose group is organising the conference, pitches ‘‘a unique opportunity to bring together New Zealand’s digital leaders, with international experts, business leaders, societal change agents and policy makers to envision what New Zealand could look like as a digital nation by 2030, and then agree on investments and policy to help us get there’’.
One of those international experts is Siim Sikkut, Estonia’s Deputy Secretary General for IT and Telecom.
Muller praises the new Government’s push into this area, and especially Curran’s drive and interest: ‘‘They’re talking about it all. I think we’re in a good spot. They’ve very actively picked up on the D5.’’
Curran says she has three initial priorities ‘‘to maximise the opportunities of the digital economy and improve digital inclusion’’. She wants to close the digital divides and ensure New Zealanders have digital skills.
Loorparg likes to say that no consulate is further from Estonia than his, in Waikanae. But technology makes the world smaller, easier to navigate. Physical borders become porous or illusory. We can all be Estonians, just for one day. Or as Oxford University professor Helen Margetts concluded in a recent piece on Estonia: ‘‘Government is just a website, really, going forward.’’