Fast track or slow track? The data problem that could hurt development
"I think inevitably the lack of information does mean a slow track," Simon Upton says.
Photo:
VNP/Louis Collins
The government's fast track for building big infrastructure will be a slow track if New Zealand does not get its head around its hotchpotch of datasets about what is all around us.
This warning about "globs" of siloed data hurting development is coming from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.
It follows years of failed attempts to unlock billions of dollars of growth from getting a better grasp on everything geospatial - that is, what is in the physical environment and how it interacts.
"It's a place-based thing", said commissioner Simon Upton.
"If you want to know about where you're going to farm something or where you're going to build something, you need to put together a whole lot of place-spaced or geospatial information, and that's currently held in all sorts of dispersed places."
The three-decade struggle with the Resource Management Act had showed up what was at stake.
But though this law was in for another overhaul, the key data piece was still missing.
"The reason I think that the current moment really is a critical, is that this government is the second government in a row that's trying to completely upend the resource management system and do it all differently."
The gap would bog down the government's controversial fast-tracking of big projects, Upton said.
"From what I can see, the fast-track process still requires people to pull all the information together and so the panels that are looking at this, they're going to have to give people the time to pull that together and then analyse it.
"I think inevitably the lack of information does mean a slow track.
"The time has come when we need to be able to 'federate' or pull together that dispersed information so that people can make good decisions."
His new report lists a whole raft of shortcomings in the geospatial system: It was "plagued" by duplication, overlaps and significant gaps, was poorly accessible, lacked leadership and was dispersed across scores of councils, agencies, catchment groups and other community bodies.
"Without robust environmental information we won't be able to judge if costly actions and mitigations undertaken are making a difference," the 19-page
report
said.
Upton has campaigned for a joined-up - or "federated" - system for years.
In a 2022 report, he pointed out how the info gaps around land use, and water quality and use - at many of the 1500 water monitoring sites, for example, only a few types of measurements were made.
"Compared with surface water, groundwater is even less well understood."
In the marine ecosystem, "luck has driven much of what we know. For example, the early discovery of large submarine volcanoes in the Kermadec Arc, north of New Zealand, was largely the result of serendipitous mapping".
The country has tried to get serious about geospatial before, with little to show for it.
Over 15 years ago, the first national geospatial review said a massive jigsaw of joined-up datasets constantly being added to, would be worth billions to the economy.
So the government set up a geospatial office, its job was to set up the technology, policies, standards and human resources for networks of "open, accessible and interoperable" data.
But by 2014, the office (NZGO) was writing a 40-page report about the bureaucratic indifference and fragmentation that had derailed attempts to set up a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) framework by 2014. RNZ got the report under the OIA.
"Despite a review and reset in July 2013, low attendance and low engagement in ... governance groups was ongoing and meetings were frequently cancelled," Land Information NZ told RNZ in an OIA response to questions about the fate of a system that was promised to deliver billions in benefits.
The geospatial effort dragged its feet for a host of reasons.
"Organisations tended to participate in the national SDI for their own ends rather than because Cabinet has directed them to, or to deliver a public good", agencies "didn't have the resources to participate if they didn't get direct benefit"; or they found it "difficult to understand let alone explain to others" so could not get a budget for it.
It did not help that it lacked "identifiable measures towards a defined 'end game'".
By 2017 the NZGO "was effectively disestablished".
The geospatial strategy still exists, but orphaned and without a champion, multiple geospatial industry players told RNZ.
Simon Upton put his shoulder to the uphill push years after this drawn-out (2006-17) and failed attempt - he was not in the country at the time it was going on.
"But I'd make this observation," Upton said.
"This is not sexy stuff. This is scarcely a vote-winning territory, talking about data.
"It is not something that is likely to enliven government officials or politicians.
"This is really the the engine room stuff."
But the government wanted to do spatial planning, so a big job was there to be done, he said.
"If you want to do it differently and do it successfully, you are going to need much better information."
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