Friday, August 19, 2005

Labour/National Science R&D Policies

I thought i'd at least try and see if there was anything on their websites discussing Research & Development policies, you remember, Knowledge Waves and Innovation Cultures, that sort of thing. Sadly, i can't find anything on the Labour website, there is no specific policy area shown (i even tried looking under Education) and searching for 'science' comes up with a few puff pieces (and the two URL's i tried both came up 404...) but nothing mentioning policy. In case Labour has forgotten, the taxpayer pays a fair bit of cash to the CRI's (or whatever they're called this year) and they deserve to know what the govt expects for their cash and as a scientist, i'd like to see some coherency on their funding policies and in what areas they think NZ should excel (and conversely which areas we decide to not pursue). In desperation, i've emailed my enquiry for a URL direct and i just hope i don't end up on a spam list somewhere.
Sadly, exactly the same problem over at National's webpage, i managed to find the minister responsible for Science/CRI's at least, a Dr Paul Hutchison and fired off an enquiry.
I can't say that i'm impressed with either of the websites - full of clutter and very 'busy'. It looks like they've used the same media strategy as all their other advertising. I think this misses the whole point of have a detailed website, if someone turns up and wants to do some analysis you should be able to allow a search into some detailed policy. Basically we've got some glorified brochures on-line - aaahhh, takes me back to mid-90's when the web was young (and functionally useless for most people)...

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