Griffin on Tech: NZRise remit still valid, stripping the humanity from science

Wellington’s Welsh Dragon pub was a fitting location to farewell NZRise, the advocacy group that lobbied for New Zealand-owned tech companies to be given fair treatment alongside multinationals.

It may well have been over a beer in a Wellington pub that the idea for NZRise developed more than a decade ago in response to the frustration of Catalyst IT founder DonbChristie and other tech business owners at the government’s woeful tech procurement policies.

Over the years, NZRise made a real difference, particularly on the procurement issue, highlighting the flaws in the Government Electronic Tender Service (GETS) and demanding more transparency in tendering processes.

That work had tangible results, not only NZ-owned tech companies, but for taxpapers too. Despite those gains, we still see a tendency in government towards favouring big multinational vendors and consulting firms. Is that because they offer better products or services, or is it due to their lobbying power and already entrenched position in government departments? 

“No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft” seems to be the 21st century version of the well-worn saying that instead featured IBM in the 1980s. As Microsoft starts transferring customers to its new Auckland-based Azure data centre region, which it has invested more than $1 billion in, and AWS and Google prepare to follow it, the risk of our local tech sector being hollowed out is real, given the cloud-first mantra in government. The fight for a fair playing field in the multibillion-dollar govtech space needs to continue. 

But at at time when every non-profit group is doing it tough, strapped for cash and struggling to cope with bewildering government-driven change, it will be a big ask to rekindle NZRise’s early momentum.

As IT Professionals CEO and former NZRISE co-chair Vic MacLellan pointed out earlier this month reflecting on the NZRise wind-up, it isn’t a task for the faint hearted. 

“When I stepped down as co-Chair, I felt an immense relief at no longer having to fight against a government procurement system stacked unfairly against us or banging my head against the impenetrable brick wall of bureaucracy designed to ensure multinationals have a voice while NZ companies do not,” she wrote.

Over beers, those of us gathered to celebrate what NZRise achieved had a brainstorming Post-it note session overseen by Wellington tech stalwart Mike Riversdale. I’m not sure we came up with any decent answers on the night, but the same themes of fairness, transparency, championing NZ-owned and run enterprise came through in the notes. These things are still important.

Thank you to everyone who gave their time and energy to NZRise over the years. You really made a difference.

Don Christie and NZRise contributors share a drink to celebrate over a decade of successful advocacy on behalf of NZ-owned tech companies.

Blue skies thinking?

The removal of social science and the humanities from the Marsden Fund, the country’s largest blue skies research fund which distributed around $76 million this year to researchers across the country, came as a shock to many.

For nearly ten years, I sat on the same floor as the Marsden Fund team at the Royal Society Te Aparangi, which administers the Marsden Fund on behalf of the government. The strength of Marsden is its high quality, internationally peer-reviewed selection processes, and the fact that it had a broad remit.

Yes, some of the funded projects in the social sciences and humanities may have sounded wacky and frivolous. But so too would some of the successful projects funded in the hard sciences, if journalists or the public could make any sense of the abstracts. Blue skies research is about backing risky, unusual ideas, and Marsden does a deft job of doing so. It’s telling that the most strident criticism of the removal of social sciences and humanities, which claimed around $15 million of this year’s funding, came from physicists and chemists. 

They know that pursuing science in isolation of proper understanding of how science interacts with society, will not end well. I’d argue that we lost 20 years of progress in developing genetic technologies in New Zealand because the social licence to pursue it was never established.

Still, the larger focus in Marsden on fundamental research that can stimulate growth and economic development will please many in technology and engineering. Computer scientists have never done well from Marsden, which has a success rate of 10 - 13%.

The change is accompanied by the refocusing of the Catalyst Fund, a much smaller pot of money ($35 million approx) for facilitating international collaboration, on AI, quantum technologies, health and biomedicine, space science, Antarctic research, and biotechnology. 

That’s a move I can get behind. These are areas that deserve a larger focus and which require our researchers to foster strong international collaborations. Sir Ernest Marsden, who partnered with Nobel Prize winner Sir Ernest Rutherford on some of his pioneering experiments in nuclear physics, was skilled at looking for international opportunities for New Zealand in science. He even facilitated a handful of our own scientists getting involved in the Manhattan Project. Our recently negotiated access to Europe’s massive Horizon science fund, is the big opportunity currently.

But at home, the erosion of research funding in general, our lagging performance on R&D spending, and the lack of a strong plan for where to focus our limited resources are holding us back. Closing the door on social scientists, historians and anthropologists who collectively received what amounts to a rounding error in funding annually, could end up costing us dearly in the long run.

For more about the history of the Marsden Fund and the changes to funding, listen to my discussion with Wallace Chapman and guests on RNZ The Panel.