Transcript
GRAHAM HASSALL: I think we first of all have to realise that small states like those in the Pacific Islands have all the functions of government that large states have. So they have to look after their income, they have to look after births, deaths and marriages, they have all of the payroll issues of public sector - that's just within government, and then there's communicating with citizens, there's communicating with business, there's just so many dimensions to the ways that ICTs can improve communications. So we're really just getting started in the Pacific with the potential that's there to improve people's lives and also improve the work of the government, you know, people who work in government and want to make a difference but don't have the tools to do it. So e-government helps to fill that gap.
JOHNNY BLADES: There are some things coming on stream soon, aren't there, like some big cable developments which should help, I guess?
GH: Well cable is very important. There are two ways to connect to the world. One is satellite, and then other is cable. And they both have their roles to play. Cable is regarded as being slightly more reliable, it's not subject to weather conditions etc. But the cable connectivity in the Pacific is very expensive because of the long distances and the small markets at the end of it. So internet's always going to be more expensive in the Pacific than in the Europe or Asia. But the economic models are starting to emerge where over a period of decades, this hardware can be paid off through a combination of partly through government funding and partly through private sector collaboration.
JB: What do you hope to achieve with this anthology, this book?
GH: Well there are some lessons that can be learnt in the planning for example of infrastructure, and also on the policy side, what you want to make use of with this technology. If you are a health department and you know you have a lot of health data that you have been traditionally handling on paper, and then that paper is hard to store and retrieve, and records are very hard to maintain; or if they are computerised but not in ways that can be shared with other computers. So health systems... every country requires a national health information system; the same for a statistics department, the same for customs and immigration; the same for the judicial system; the court records, land records that in the past were just paper records for land registration. One they can be digitised it can completely transform the efficiency, also the transparency of these records. But you can only do that if you have strong systems in a physical sense.
JB: You mean there are some vulnerabilities still?
GH: There are tremendous vulnerabilities. And they start at the physical level. You're in the tropics, you've got erosion of then physical hardware, and then you have adverse weather events, cyclones etc that can cause havoc with technology. So they need good backup systems as well. If they're going to put the time in to getting systems in place, they also have to have strong backup in place.
JB: Would it be wrong to assume that all Pacific Islands governments are actually on board with this, interested in this? Are some even resistant?
GH: Well our studies have shown there's different levels of awareness of the potential. So you might get awareness in the business community, certainly the public are aware, and government officials are often aware. Sometimes the gap is in the political leadership. To be fair they have a number of competing imperatives, and getting e-government as one of the top priorities is a task because it's very expensive and needs a lot of close attention; and it needs to be whole of government. So in some Pacific countries there's not as much rollout of the potential performance as we think is possible. And it's to do with leadership, it's to do with the ability to bring together the people and the resources to put in place the programmes that they can do.
JB: Do you see any particular regions in the Pacific which have done better on that front, which have achieved more?
GH: Well we were very impressed with the levels of co-operation in Vanuatu in particular. They have an office of the Chief Government Information Officer, OGCIO, and that office has a very strong connection through government, but also beyond government to the business sector and the community. For example they have a national ICT day and they invite the public to come and see what they're doing. And they spread awareness amongst government agencies and departments, and we didn't see that occurring in every country. So sometimes we went into government agencies that were a decade behind another agency because they didn't have the leadership in place and they didn't have the co-ordination across government. So the sort of lessons from this book are that leadership is very important to get all government agencies co-operating so that they can reduce the levels of duplication, for example in primary data about their citizens. So you know you've got a tax office collecting; then a births, deaths and marriages (office) or registry; and then you've got an electoral office; and there might be others as well. And each government agency says that their records are precious and need to be independent. In some cases that's a good argument, such as maybe the electoral office needs to be completely independent of other government branches. But on the other hand there could be some small states where if they had one central registry that had information about their citizens they could fo a lot of savings, less duplication of this data.
