Amy Adams is our new Minister of Communications, making her
the first woman to hold the role. I’ve already written an email congratulating
her on her appointment and inviting myself over for a cup of tea and strategy
session (no point mucking about), and I’ve already written here about what we’d
like the new minister to look at, which should keep her occupied for the first
few months if not the entire term (hint: the digital divide; NZ Inc; barriers
to uptake of UFB).
So who is Amy Adams and how will she fare?
She’s something of a dark horse, coming into the role
without any of the pundits (including me) picking her for the role. It was
widely assumed Steven Joyce would be moving on, but we’d all (more or less)
opted for Craig Foss as his replacement, given his hard work on the Telco Bill
select committee. Clearly Foss has impressed others as well, as he’s now to be
Minister of Commerce, which is no small mission in New Zealand.
Adams is a lawyer by training and while we’ll forgive her
for being a Shore girl (she attended Rangitoto College) she’s long since
transplanted herself to Canterbury with nary a backward glance. There she married and raised her family and lives
on a 600 acre farm.
None of which really singles her out as being an ICT kind of
person, at least on paper. But, according to her website’s blurb, she has sat
on the boards of several companies in the primary, tourism and technology
sectors. Plus she has a website, and a Facebook page and a Twitter account,
albeit one that only gets updated every two or three days and which doesn’t
really include any conversation but rather a list of things she’s doing.
Still, it bodes well. If anyone understands the problems
facing rural New Zealand with regard to connectivity (and the drivers behind
the need for that connectivity) it’s someone who owns a farm in Canterbury.
At our recent Rural Broadband Symposium, I noted that women
made up nearly 10% of attendees – a figure which is interesting because it’s simultaneously
very high for an ICT conference and stupidly low when you think that half the
world’s population is female. Someone pointed out to me that in rural New
Zealand it’s the women who lead the ICT charge, predominantly because the “farmers
wives” tend to do all the book-keeping, and are more aware of the limitations
of fax machines and dial-up in this broadband world.
Outgoing minister Steven Joyce may well have sorted out the
big ticket items in terms of breaking up Telecom, re-writing the Telco Act and
introducing both UFB and RBI to the vernacular, but the challenge Adams faces is
in many ways tougher – she has to find a way for New Zealand to benefit from
the investment. That’s a trickier proposition, but not without its rewards. New
Zealand’s high tech sector is already our second largest exporter – if we can
grow that, we have a sustainable economic story that will be well worth the
effort.
No pressure, Minister. Good luck in your new role.