Published on the 06/05/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
A NSW Government minister yesterday used the opening day of CeBIT to call for light touch regulation of the emergent “sharing economy”, in order to allow peer-to-peer services to flourish…
NSW Minister for Finance, Services and Property, Dominic Perrottet, stressed that it was time to have a “real conversation” about how emergent peer-to-peer services such as Airbnb, Uber or SocietyOne could be integrated in the mainstream economy.
“It makes little sense for governments on one hand to be preaching sustainability while at the same time seeking to suppress companies that promote better utilisation of existing assets like cars, houses and parking spots,” said Perrottet.
He said that the internet had flourished only because of a light regulatory touch, and maintained that same light touch was now needed to allow the “sharing economy” to flourish.
He argued against a knee jerk reaction toward such services which banned, overregulated or overtaxed new business models and failed to recognise the profound shift already underway.
“More than a third of millennials already belong to a sharing service, and increasingly from music to movies, cars to clothes, rooms to rides, people are choosing rentership over ownership.”
He also aimed a particularly sharp kick at his own political party for its sluggish embrace of technology.
“Political parties like my own Liberal party are often complaining youth are disengaged. But if you head on over to our website and try to join…you are presented with some kind of PDF form that you have to print out fill in the details, sign and then mail back in.”
Perrottet said that “for a generation whose primary form of exercise is simply swiping left or swiping right they are simply not going to bother”.
Perrottet appeared the most switched on of the trinity of politicians including Prime Minister Tony Abbott (albeit by video) and Sydney Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, who officially opened the CeBIT conference yesterday.
While the opening and keynote sessions seemed reasonably well attended, the crowds on the exhibition floor seemed thinner than last year, and there was a very slender roll up to the big data stream of the conference.
As far as technologies on display were concerned it was robots, drones, 3D printers and the Tesla which seemed to be the main crowd pleasers.
