Supported by Victoria’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies and hosted by website The Spinoff, Policy is the brainchild of Victoria alumni Asher Emanuel and Ollie Neas.
Ollie and Asher both completed a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Arts at Victoria, and were joint editors of Salient following their studies.
Together with fellow alumnus Chris McIntyre and designer Racheal Reeves, they wanted to create a politically-neutral tool to help New Zealand voters compare and engage with parties’ election policies.
The tool covers more than 30 issues across topics including health, housing, the economy, education, the environment, justice, te ao Māori, migration and transport.
Policy is updated daily by a team of researchers, including Victoria alumni Sam Bigwood and Michael Graham. All information is presented in plain English, eschewing the rhetoric of campaign flyers.
“The basic idea of summarising policy platforms in a comparable way is fairly conventional,” says Ollie. “What we hadn’t seen anywhere else was a tool that did this for policies across the board in a way that wasn’t super abstracted.”
The pair say they were also motivated by the desire to inject hard facts and policy information into New Zealand political discourse, which often tends to revolve around leaders’ personalities.
“The media coverage in New Zealand definitely skews towards covering politics as a horse race and focusing on personalities,” says Ollie. “When you’re voting, you’re looking at lots of things—and policy is one of them. But there has been a dearth of coverage that provides policy information in a clean way.”
Asher agrees, and says while it’s natural to affiliate with a candidate based on how they project their values, the public has a right to easily accessible and clear information.
“I think it’s totally legitimate to vote on the basis of personality, but the current state of coverage means that if you want to see what’s behind the personality in terms of actual ways in which they’ll change the conditions of your life, it’s hard to get that information easily. I think that’s the gap that Policy fills.”
While there are already other interactive tools available to New Zealand voters, Ollie and Asher feel that Policy adds a level of autonomy to the electoral landscape.
“The other tools are useful if you have no idea which party’s values you fit with, but a lot of people already know what their values are and want to see where parties stand on the key issues,” says Ollie.
“Policy puts the information there for people to do what they want with—it doesn’t tell you who you should vote for.”
The pair say the response to Policy has so far been overwhelmingly positive.
“In the first three days we had 50,000 people through and half a million page views,” says Asher. “We’re looking forward to more people engaging with it as we draw closer to the election.”
In 2014 the same team made a tool called Ours, a youth-focused election lift-out which ran in the New Zealand Herald ahead of the 2014 general election.
They say they’re hopeful Policy will find future applications beyond the upcoming election.
“The infrastructure is all built now so it will be ready to be rolled out for future elections, as well as local body elections,” says Asher.
“We’ve had some generous supporters who have helped us so far, including Victoria’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies. It’s just a question of finding support for future applications—we’ve done most of the hard work already so it would be a shame to call it a day after the election.”