700,000 Kiwis didn't complete Census

Brian from New Lynn

The Ministry's chief statistician has reportedly told the country's politicians in a letter that 460,000 New Zealanders did not complete the Census - and 240,000 only partially completed it. Liz MacPherson has finally provided the full Census figures, more than a year since it was completed - after stonewalling Parliament's governance and administration committee over the number of partially and fully completed responses. Now the opposition is blasting the Government and calling for another Census. "It's been like drawing teeth to get information from Statistics New Zealand about the results," State Services spokesperson Nick Smith said. Smith says the record low response will not give the Government accurate results, and the problems with Census 2018 are not just the record low response rate - but a doubling in the partial response rate. That compounds the problems for the State Sector, which relies on hard data. "We now know over 700,000 people or one in seven New Zealanders did not complete Census 2018. This leaves a huge data hole that will create problems for years in allocating tens of billions of dollars in funding for central state services like health and education, as well as affecting electorate numbers and boundaries for Election 2020," Smith said. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern yesterday hit back at Smith, pointing out that it was the previous Government that made the decision to move to an online Census - which appears to have been part of the problem with the big drop in responses. But Smith isn't buying that. "Stats NZ needs to accept responsibility for the 2018 Census shambles. It cannot blame the funding when it was 36 percent greater than Census 2013 and when this budget was underspent. It cannot blame the digital strategy when Australia successfully delivered its 2016 Census with a 95 percent response rate using a similar strategy." Smith says Stats NZ botched the delivery of Census 2018 by excessively relying on online responses and providing insufficient neighbourhood backup for others. He's even calling for consideration to given to deferring the electoral boundary changes for 2020, as well as bringing forward the next Census to 2021.
===========================================================