Editorial: It's time for more of us to get wired

When New Zealanders put out their inorganic rubbish for councils to take away, it is not uncommon these days to see a computer on the pile. Among the old furniture, broken appliances, rotting timber and rusty tins there is quite likely to be a keyboard, a monitor and box with at least some of its innards intact. It is barely seven years since the personal computer and the internet captivated households and already many have bought several upgrades.

As a people we seem to have taken to new technology more easily than most. Applications such as electronic banking caught on quickly here. A survey last year found that New Zealand spent a higher proportion of its national income than any other country on information and telecommunications technology. But at last count only 45 per cent of working-age New Zealanders had access to the internet. As Simon Collins reports in the Our Turn series today, not everybody can afford the hardware and telephone connections that are rapidly becoming essential tools of economic life.

Some countries he has visited have gone to considerable public expense to help people to participate in the new economy. Ireland, with the help of European Union grants, and Singapore are subsidising fast internet connections. Australia is doing likewise for its rural areas. New Zealand is offered a better solution for farming areas: wireless telephone companies say they could provide fast internet connections for no more than farmers pay Telecom for the slow internet. The Government should let them try.

Computers, if not telephone charges, have steadily dropped in price since their introduction to households. In the United States, 58 per cent of homes now have access to the internet. In New Zealand, the figure is just under 40 per cent. The country could aim to lift that figure to match that of the US, the world's most wired country. But first we need to be sure that computers in homes are the best way to raise the national performance.

There are those who say the investment would be better put into schools, especially in teachers. There is not much point having banks of computers in classrooms if teachers do not know how to extract full value from them. But our schools already have one computer for every 11 primary pupils and one for every six pupils in secondary schools. That is a significant investment. Let's hope it is being put to good use.

Some countries pay for their citizens to have free internet access at public libraries. It is doubtful that is an efficient benefit. Patrons of public libraries are likely to have the internet at home, anyway. But there must be many ways to make computers available to children of households that are not well-off. Why not catch those cast-offs before they go out with the inorganic waste?

We have innumerable tertiary training courses in computer technology today. Those students can probably repair and install computers and give a household basic training in using them. Their institution could easily offer to collect the cast-offs, overhaul them and give them or sell them cheaply to households that are without one.

The more New Zealanders who are computer literate and know their way around the web, the more opportunities we will discover. With instant global communications, isolation no longer matters. In fact, it creates opportunities to provide overnight services to industry in Europe and the United States. And an English-speaking, computer-literate society is attractive to industry which is looking to locate where skills are plentiful and leading research can be done.

The question, as always, is whether we need to offer extra incentives to high-technology manufacturers and how we would ensure value from that investment. At this time last year the Government was being urged to offer whatever was needed to attract America's largest telephone maker, Motorola, here. This year, facing falling sales, Motorola has closed a factory in Scotland and the British Government is trying to recover $US25 million paid to the company in regional development grants.

Our best investment is in developing a society skilled in the ways of a wired world.

Our turn

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Simon Collins

Letters to the editor (newspaper)

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