 Good afternoon. Yes, I'm Tim Jones from Christchurch Art Gallery, and I had the pleasure of spending six months in Bougainville in Papua New Guinea this year, so yay to Christchurch City Council for letting me go. Yay to VSA for sorting it all out. Six months and seven minutes to talk about it, so we'll whistle through this without further ado. That is a map of where Bougainville is, so that you can imagine where it is. It is the most extraordinarily beautiful place. It has fantastic scenery, fantastic beaches, fantastic people. It has active volcanoes which bubble away like that. That's Mount Bangana. It has the most amazingly rich cultural life, particularly song and dance and poetry and music and musical instruments and stories and oral histories. My project there was to gather oral histories. I'm not really talking about that now, but that's why I was there to set up a system for them to record their oral histories, which they were hitherto rather failing to do and they were under threat from the dominance of English and all the usual things. That is the town of Arawa, which is a sort of Australian mining town built in the 1960s and 70s, not terribly pretty and made even less pretty by the fact that for ten years they had a civil war there and so half the buildings in Arawa looked like that still because there's no money and various sort of political problems that surround the country, so tough place. The power supply was extremely intermittent. There were lots of power cuts and all the electricity came from diesel generators and half the time they weren't working or they ran out of diesel so the power was very intermittent. There was really only one internet provider and that was DigiCell. I don't remember any customer of DigiCell ever smiling as happily as... I don't think any customer of DigiCell ever smiled at all, but he looks pretty happy, but I wasn't. DigiCell run the show. They're based in Jamaica and they make a habit of offering their services in developing countries and their headquarters is actually in Ireland for tax purposes so you smell a rat. They offer these extraordinarily expensive and small data packages. There's one and so you can get right down to a 250 megabyte package and if you do the maths that is unbelievably expensive even by our standards, by local standards it's just unimaginable. Having said that, cell phone use is pretty widespread. Those are kids at the local high school photographing a fashion show, but they didn't have cell phones. They didn't really know about the internet. They didn't know what Wi-Fi was. The little database that I set up was made available to them on their phones using Wi-Fi, but they never used Wi-Fi. Nobody knew what Wi-Fi was. There is a bit of a web presence. That's the government's internet page, but talk about an echo chamber. There's a small elite of government people talking to each other, writing web pages for other government people to look at and precious few other people. Some of the things that annoyed me were things like even to get help on word, you have to go online. It's so annoying. Even to register your high score of playing solitaire, you have to go online. Why do you have to go online to do that? It's just nuts. Free basics is another whole seven minutes all to itself. Free basics is Facebook's. You can have a little bit of internet for nothing. The one thing you can have of course is Facebook plus a few other bits and pieces and they're free. It's supposed to be an on-ramp to the real internet, but in practice it isn't because the real internet isn't affordable. So you are stuck with what Facebook dishes out to you. A terrible poverty of information is the consequence. The only place you can get information is at the market. It means that the public library, which looks very pretty, doesn't have any computers in it, doesn't have any internet access. It means that if you want money out of the bank, you have to queue for hours and hours and hours to make that happen. Tourism and other businesses are absolutely stunted. There is a tourist company and there they are, but how do you make a booking? How do you email them? How do you phone them up? How do you arrange anything? It will be ages before they get back to you. So that's the situation. I then thought what are the consequences? What's the take-home message for New Zealand? I originally thought that, oh, I know what it means. You must keep your pages very lean and you must have great alt text and you must have pages that work on really slow connections. Then I thought, no, this is absolute nonsense. It's not like this at all. I turned my mind back to 2004, if you remember that document there, which recorded the important things that our then digital strategy needed were content, confidence and connection. Connection is just, you cannot imagine how disempowering and how poorly informed you are if the connection is non-existent or outside your budget. So in developed countries, it's very hard to see these children having a healthy informed prosperous future if they live lives starved of information. In developed countries we fret about too much information, just as we perhaps fret about eating too much food. But if you think too much of either is a problem, just wait until you have too little. Thank you very much.