There are concerns scrapping the traditional census won't deliver the desired results.
Stats NZ is moving to a system using Government collected admin-data, saying the current five yearly Census is financially unsustainable.
Census-style questions will still be asked in much smaller annual surveys looking at a small fraction of the population.
Former national statistician Len Cook told Mike Hosking data-wise, this won't cut it.
He says admin-data comes from about a dozen different sources, none of them complete.
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Not just monthly inflation numbers are coming our way, of course, which is the good news. We've also dumped the census twenty eighteen, twenty twenty three. They're a complete mess. So from twenty thirty onwards we will use administrative data and annual surveys. Linkork is the former National Statistician director of Britain's Office for National Stats len Bury, good morning to you, Good morning Mike. Eighteen to twenty three or eighteen and twenty three, that was a total cockup. Did that do the census in or do we just not need the census?
Look? What approved is that if you don't manage it properly, which we did for one hundred years, then you won't get it, you won't do a very good job. And that's all approved. We leave them both those occasions. The government statisticians at the time thought they knew better than to repeat what we'd learned at that.
Hundred year theery are we going to be able to cover ourselves data wise with this administrative data and annual serveys?
Well, if you know, if you think about it, a census as a rolling snapshot of every household in New Zealand at a five year basis administrative data. First, it comes from about a dozen or so different sources, none of which are complete for the population, and none of them tell you at any particular time what is happening to a single individual. So, for example, your dealings with the police department, your tax department, housing, social welfare, child protection do not all occur at the same time. So when we bring together your information from an administrative records of different departments, then some of it will relate to ten years ago, some of it possibly twenty years ago, and some of it more recently. So what we have to do out of that sort of hotchpotch is work out how best we can fill in the gaps to create a sort of a snapshot at any particular time. But it's not made up at all in that sort of very direct way that the census is is.
So they're making a mistake, the government of making mistake. We need to do should do Bettertainish.
Government thought they would try and look at this, they even did when I was there, and just yesterday they made a decision that in twenty thirty one they're going to carry on and do what they did since eighteen forty one. And I can assure you that the British think a lot more deeply about what they're doing, about how they use information, and they have a much more demanding community of users than we have.
That doesn't surprise me, funily enough, Sadly, Lenn Good catch up former National Statistician Director of Britain's National Office for Statistics, Lynn.
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