New Zealand tech group urges cross-party digital strategy

The Tech Users Association of New Zealand has urged political parties to adopt a cross-party national digital strategy, warning that repeated policy resets are holding back the country's technology direction.

Speaking at the TUANZ Tech Users Summit, Chief Executive Craig Young said New Zealand could not keep changing course with each election cycle while other markets pressed ahead. He argued that technology investment, digital transformation, and workforce development need a longer policy horizon than the three-year political cycle allows.

Digital activity already contributes more than $17 billion in annual exports in New Zealand, and artificial intelligence has been identified as a potential $76 billion economic opportunity. TUANZ warned those gains would remain limited if governments continued to rely on fragmented approaches and separate party policies.

Young used his address to delegates to call for greater stability in national planning.

"We can't afford to reset our national direction every three years while our global competitors move ahead," said Craig Young, Chief Executive of the Tech Users Association of New Zealand.

"What's urgently needed is certainty, coordination, and commitment across political lines to deliver a joined-up national strategy," Young said.

Policy concerns

TUANZ has republished its election policy positions in a single document aimed at giving political parties and decision-makers one set of proposals covering digital equity, cybersecurity, data governance, and workforce development. It presented the document as a blueprint for a more durable national approach rather than a series of separate policy responses.

The group's concerns extend beyond industrial strategy. Board Member Haley Mortimer told delegates that basic gaps in access, trust, and security remain unresolved across the country, despite years of technology investment and public debate about digital transformation.

Figures cited at the summit showed that one in 10 households in New Zealand still lacks internet access. New Zealanders also lose more than $200 million a year to online scams, while 35% of small businesses have insufficient cyber resilience.

Mortimer said those shortcomings should not be treated as secondary technical issues. She linked internet access, digital capability, and cyber preparedness to broader questions of economic resilience and social inclusion.

"While New Zealand will never be the largest tech market in the world, we can become one of the most trusted places in the world to innovate," said Haley Mortimer, Board Member of the Tech Users Association of New Zealand.

"Human oversight, data sovereignty, and digital inclusion must be designed into our systems so that technology supports better decisions without removing human accountability," Mortimer said.

Broader backdrop

The summit's message reflects a wider debate in New Zealand over how to turn technology strengths into sustained economic growth. The country has developed digital export businesses and invested heavily in communications infrastructure, yet industry groups have repeatedly argued that policy consistency remains weak.

TUANZ pointed to its own history in that debate, marking 40 years of advocacy on user-focused technology issues. The organisation said its work has spanned major infrastructure changes, including the rollout of Ultra-Fast Broadband and mobile number portability.

The historical reference underlined a central argument: large shifts in infrastructure, skills, and trust are built over long periods and cannot be managed effectively through short electoral cycles alone. In that sense, the organisation's appeal is not just for more spending or more policy papers, but for a different model of political agreement on technology.

The issues raised by TUANZ also mirror policy questions facing other markets, where governments are trying to balance artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, workforce preparation, and digital inclusion at the same time. For New Zealand, the group argued, those debates are especially pressing because of the country's size and the need to compete through trust, coordination, and effective execution rather than scale.

With an election cycle approaching, TUANZ is seeking to place digital policy alongside more traditional economic and social issues in political debate. It argues that internet access, cyber resilience, data governance, and workforce readiness now sit at the centre of how the country grows, protects consumers, and prepares communities for structural change.

For businesses, the message is also practical. Frequent shifts in policy priorities can affect investment planning, skills programmes, and decisions on how organisations adopt emerging tools such as artificial intelligence. A clearer long-term framework would give both public and private sector organisations more certainty when making those decisions.

The association's central demand is for political leaders to move beyond piecemeal positions and commit to a lasting national strategy for technology. "What's urgently needed is certainty, coordination, and commitment across political lines to deliver a joined-up national strategy," Young said.