The other night Ernie attended the book launch of Connecting The Clouds; The Internet in New Zealand by Keith Newman and the next day he gave me the TUANZ copy for review on the blog.
At just over 700 pages, I could see there was a danger of a serious work/life imbalance if I read the entire book from cover to cover this weekend, so instead I decided to open it up at random and read the first section that caught my eye for discussion on the blog.
Which is how I came across the following vignette on page 249 under the heading ‘Passion Primes Portfolio”
“In 1990, under Jim Bolger’s new National Government, Williamson became the country’s first information and communications technology minister. It wasn’t a designation he was appointed to; rather one he lobbied for. He recalled telling Bolger that the ICT portfolio would be bigger than any other portfolio in terms of its importance to the nation in 20 years’s tie (sic). While Bolger rubbished the idea, he wasn’t closed to the possibility. “I said, ‘We should try to give the portfolio some credibility and status now.’ It was like I was asked for a budget, because Bill Birch had said, ‘There’s no money and a new ministry is the last thing we need.’” Williamson was simply volunteering to be ‘a sort of a flag-waver and a banner carrier’ for the concept.
His passion for taking advantage of technology and making sure everyone knew about his exploits and breakthroughs included assisting Finance Minister Ruth Richardson when she put together the presentation for her ‘mother of all budgets’ in 1991. He managed to get a copy of PowerPoint 1.0 and made a slideshow on the computer so she could present her major reforms with graphs of expenditure and an outline of what she was planning. There were no data projectors in those days so he went a company in Auckland to convert the PowerPoint images into 35mm slides, which she could show on the wall from her rotary carousel projector.”
If only Williamson had paid as much attention to the consequences of Telecom’s iron grip on the copper network as he did to Ruth Richardson’s rotary carousel projector!!
Look forward to discovering more hidden gems in Newman’s book.