Dileepa Fonseka: An overwhelmed bureaucracy

Tuesday, 31 January 2023

The torrential rain has led to desperate scenes in West Auckland as flash flooding caused widespread chaos.

Dileepa Fonseka is a Stuff writer on business and politics.

ANALYSIS: Why did the response to the Auckland storms seem all over the place on Friday evening?

Was it the absence of new mayor Wayne Brown? Was it Auckland Council’s communications staff? Was it the emergency management apparatus in the city? Was it the lack of care and concern for other people from Waka Kotahi as it appeared to shut off updates just as the storm hit?

Or was it the comparatively exceptional performance of some of Auckland’s councillors and MPs who seemed to fill the vacuum that all those other parties left empty?

Perhaps it was all of the above and something else too: maybe our society’s needs have changed, and central and local government bureaucracies haven’t kept up.

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The response to Auckland’s stom has come in for criticism.

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But with climate change and technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the horizon, these changing needs are not going to get any easier for the bureaucracy to keep up with.

A visitor to Auckland recently told me what happened to them when they tried to fulfil the basic task of moving from point A on the North Shore to point B in the city using a bus.

The bus arrived on time, but the problem turned out to be finding a way to pay for their bus fare.

Trains don’t run from the North Shore and you can’t use cash on a bus in Auckland.

Buses also do not take credit cards, so your only option is basically a public transport card called the AT HOP card.

A new ticketing solution is coming for public transport, but some argue it has taken too long to develop.

But there are some suburbs in Auckland where you can’t buy the card, and you also often can’t buy one at the automated AT HOP machines that are present at major transport hubs either.

Even if you manage to get such a card, it won’t work outside Auckland.

Government and councils have been trying to solve this problem for a surprisingly long time. Originally the AT HOP system was supposed to be the national ticketing solution, but Wellington wanted to continue using Snapper cards, so a team at Waka Kotahi spent years designing a new card that would work across all public transport.

Artificial Intelligence is another storm cloud on the horizon that the bureaucracy will have to keep up with.

At the end of last year we found out this team had been unsuccessful and instead a new system, costing $1.4 billion, would be created. Christchurch will be the first city able to use it, in 2024. The system should allow people to pay for their public transport fares using not just a credit card but Apple and Google Pay.

Good news, right?

Sure, but as Rush Digital chief technology officer Danu Abeysuriya points out, given how long this has taken – and how expensive it is – maybe we would have been better off if we had just taped a cheap Android phone with a banking app to the dashboard of a bus.

While various government agencies took their time developing a solution, the expectations of citizens around how they should be able to pay for things evolved. It meant the original idea for a public transport card in year zero became obsolete while the new system was still being developed.

Likewise, perhaps at one point in time having a council that only issued sporadic updates during a storm, a transport agency that updated you about the condition of roads only during peak times, and a mayor who made statements only occasionally, would have been acceptable, but in the age of instant and frequent communication, through Twitter and TikTok, the public’s hunger for information means that game has changed.

Traditionally governments have been able to watch, wait and see what works, then act, but the window for doing this has shrunk as technology and fast-moving markets have supercharged progress.

And we are not done yet – not only is climate change making the very ecosystem we rely on increasingly unpredictable, but AI is on the horizon, with all kinds of implications for how power and wealth get distributed around the globe.

A white paper produced in the 2021 by the Artificial Intelligence Researchers Association of New Zealand – a representative organisation of researchers from all the major universities studying AI – highlighted the major reasons why regulators and policymakers need to pay urgent attention to the technology.

If the Government sits back and lets New Zealand become solely a user of AI systems developed overseas then it will be ceding a lot of future sovereignty. Other countries will design solutions suitable for datasets for them, but not us, and relying on cloud AI systems based overseas could also leave the country vulnerable if access is somehow cut off.

You might argue we could just go back to the old ways of doing things if this happened, but just like today, by the time this technology becomes ubiquitous people will have adapted to life with it and will expect to be able to use it.

Once we get through this latest crisis, there are plenty more storm clouds on the horizon.