Jesse Mullighan (00:00):
R N z, national Time for Tech Tuesday, Daniel Watson from Vertech IT Services joins us now. Hi Dan.
Daniel Watson (00:06):
Good day. It's a shiny afternoon.
Jesse Mullighan (00:08):
Yeah, it's lovely isn't it? In Auckland and Well, I guess it was inevitable. You like everyone else are beginning to think about the general election.
Daniel Watson (00:17):
Yeah, it's something I think about once every three years and the rest of the time I focus on all the other things I'm busy with in my life, but most of the time I don't really pay much attention to politics, but it's not good to be completely disengaged from politics. So there's a couple of things I tend to do to try and get me back into the swing of things and understanding what's happening around great
Jesse Mullighan (00:42):
In
Daniel Watson (00:42):
The political way.
Jesse Mullighan (00:44):
Yeah, there's a couple of, and you're not talking about s spooking for one particular party. In fact, you're finding neutral websites that might help people make a decision.
Daniel Watson (00:55):
Yeah, and in our family, because our kids are now voting age, it's actually spawned some quite interesting conversations. The first one I'd mention is excellent because it's been going for a while. It's political compass. If you just google that political compass.org, they do it for multiple countries, but there's some good commentary on there as well. But what it is is it's a questionnaire and they're putting to you in this one not specific policy questions that are happening, but more about finding out what your opinions are on certain topics that might be related to the published manifestos or political stances of various parties or in their speeches for that matter. So it's a pretty comprehensive kind of questionnaire. It runs through various different topics of social, political, economic type facets and then it gives you a result and where you sit according to various political parties positions and it's quite interesting, it splits between authoritarians versus libertarianism and what's the other aspect
Jesse Mullighan (02:31):
Of it? Left and right, left and right in the political spectrum.
Daniel Watson (02:35):
Yeah, left and and authoritarian versus libertarian. I guess because a party, you can have parties that are diametrically opposed on one scale but actually could be both very authoritarian or both very liberal, but their political, their economic might be quite far apart. So it's interesting to see where you come out on that.
Jesse Mullighan (03:05):
Yeah,
(03:07):
Sorry. I was going to say there's an economic scale and a social scale. So the economic scale is left and the social scale is libertarian authoritarian. I think members of our political parties might be quite surprised where they find themselves on the political compass analysis. For example, New Zealand first and national occupying almost the exact same spots in that double axis diagram and labor very close to them. Labor put very far right. I guess that's right economically, but also on the authoritarian side. I dunno if traditional labor supporters or traditional labor idea ideologues would agree with that or not, but certainly still provoking.
Daniel Watson (03:56):
I'm pretty sure it's changing over time. And New Zealand, the word our political system is quite a bit different from where we hear about, because often we are consuming news from the United States and from Australia. I mean most of our political parties are to the left of most other right-wing parties. Yeah,
Jesse Mullighan (04:18):
That's why I found this so interesting. I mean labor and national would be probably by most people's analysis to the left of the US Democratic Party for example. Quite, yeah. Interesting. I'd love for people to have a look at politicalcompass.org. Click on the New Zealand general election and tell me what you think. Yeah, what's the other one? Yeah.
Daniel Watson (04:42):
Oh, the other one at the risk of sending people away from the R N Z website is vote compass.tv nz.co nz. That one is so different. It goes economic and social, but it's looking at progressive versus conservative policies left versus so it doesn't look at the dictatorial versus that slant, but it does have similar results. I was quite surprised that I ended up when I did this questionnaire, questionnaire being more closely linked with the opportunities party, which I'd never heard of before. So that in itself
Jesse Mullighan (05:14):
Generates. I hear that a lot. I hear that a lot. That's often where people end up on that spectrum and I think it's kind of quite telling that party only the polls somewhere between one and 4% depending on what poll you look at. So it kind of suggests that we kind of like having a bit of a club, we like having a team.
Daniel Watson (05:31):
Yes. More than we
Jesse Mullighan (05:32):
Voting for exactly the policies that we are aligned to possibly. It's a theory.
Daniel Watson (05:39):
The thing is probably more about the human condition and tribalism and that's just how we are. However, looking through. So to get, what I tend to do in these situations is that I go, oh, that's interesting. Okay, I'll go and have a look and I'll go look at their websites and read up on their policies and that might actually change my decision. Otherwise, if you just kind of go, this election is the same as the last election, I'll just continue to vote in the same way, then you get a bit ossified and you're not really understanding where the ground is right now because parties change their direction. I remember what happened in 1984, Rogernomics was a big shift coming out of the Labor Party, complete deregulation that would be more akin to well act, which it ended up forming, which as a result of that,
Jesse Mullighan (06:31):
Along with Richard Preble, who was also in that cabinet. Interesting. So I said there's 30 propositions on that one news vote compass that you've given an answer to, and at the end it spits out a solution of who you should vote for.
Daniel Watson (06:47):
Well, how much you agree with the parties, whether you choose to vote with 'em is up to you, but you are better informed as a result or it piques your interest and you can start doing some investigations, which is worth doing, I think just so that people understand what they're actually voting for. Because like you said, actually one thing in that one I did not like is it asked you the question of how much do you like, and then it gave you a selection of different political leaders and it's like, well, how much I like them? It shouldn't really matter all that much. That's
Jesse Mullighan (07:19):
Interesting. Yeah.
Daniel Watson (07:21):
We're not picking who's going to be leading the game of bull rush in school yard. I like this guy, so I want him to be, I'll pick him first. No, it's actually the leaders should be less important, I believe, than their ability to be a good manager of basically a herd of cats, which most politicians are.
Jesse Mullighan (07:46):
Got it. Well, I have far fun playing with that one. People, a couple of other politically themed websites you've spotted or news you've spotted around the globe.
Daniel Watson (07:56):
Google and YouTube have announced that they're going to put some restrictions on artificial intelligence in political ads, which given that we now know that you can use AI to generate quite impressively realistic deep fakes, it's no longer something relegated to shadowy governmental organizations. This is something that anybody can do and produce at relatively low cost, and this is the kind of stuff which can end up poisoning the political discourse. It will affect how people ultimately will vote that first mover type advantage that if a lie gets around the world before then truth gets its boots on. So that's a worry that I have and it's good to see that Google is doing something about it. However, that other big monster in the room, Facebook, its stance on this kind of thing is it's up to the local laws. It will abide by local laws and New Zealand is somewhat kind of the wild west of the internet. We're quite progressive and we're also quite liberal. Even if most people think we're a nanny state, we actually, it's very easy to do business here. It's very easy to do pretty much anything, which means that
Jesse Mullighan (09:20):
Liberal in a conservative sort of way, liberal in that we kind of take quite a while to get around to doing anything about adapting to the world around us, I might argue.
Daniel Watson (09:31):
Yeah. Yeah. We kind of unique, it's not a terrible thing, but it's something to be aware of that we need to be looking out for these kind of things and then educating our rangatahi to be aware how they might be manipulated in ways that the traditional schooling syllabus probably isn't even picked up on this kind of stuff yet. It may do.
Jesse Mullighan (09:52):
Very interesting. Great chat, Dan. Thank you for those pointers. The political compass and the TV NZ Vote Compass are the two ones Dan recommended for thinking about this year's election. Dan Watson, head of Vertech IT Services, great chat to you today.
Daniel Watson (10:06):
Yeah, I hope that generates a whole bunch of interesting conversations at home. Not too many fights.