Government website opens access worries

By CHRIS BARTON

The Government launched its new $5.6 million internet portal yesterday amid concerns it may be lessening access to Government services rather than improving it.

The Citizens Advice Bureau is worried the move towards e-government is a continuation of a cost-cutting trend that has seen many departments close their front-line offices and rely on call centres for communication.

"Our concern is that the Government is overly emphasising the electronic means to relate to people," said CAB chief executive Nick Toonen.

He said while online access would improve information flow it was no substitute for person-to-person contact - something the CAB was increasingly having to provide as the Government withdrew its physical presence from local communities.

The Government wants the portal, which costs $4 million a year to run, to become the dominant means of interaction with citizens by 2004.

But the CAB was concerned that the 63 per cent of New Zealand homes that don't have internet access would miss out online information and social services.

Prime Minister Helen Clark said holding the portal opening at the Mt Wellington Community Library showed how citizens could get public access to the site.

The library charges $8 an hour for internet access on its computers. Asked if there was any policy to provide free public access to the portal Clark said "one step at a time".

The site, which replaces the Government's previous portal - www.nzgo.govt.nz - features an improved search function using "meta-tags" to index information across 90 Government agencies and 3500 central and local government information sources. Information is updated weekly using an automated "spider" to crawl the websites contributing to the portal in search of new meta-data.

The new home page provides several different paths to the online information through heading such as "Services", "A to Z Government" and "Things to Know When".

The site has few services allowing citizens to complete transactions online, but there are plans to increase these over the next two years.

The method chosen for online authentication of citizens will be key. Both State Services and the Inland Revenue Department are investigating technologies to uniquely identify users over the internet.

Other policy decisions still to be made include whether departments such as Justice and Land Information New Zealand - which charge users for paper-based information - will reduce their charges for electronic information or provide it to citizens for free.

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