Stats minister says census ‘pretty bloody remarkable’
It wasn’t question time in Parliament, but Statistics Minister James Shaw’s answers about the 2018 census at Wellington’s Rita Angus Retirement Village were just as important.
Residents of the home in Kilbirnie raised concerns on Friday about completing this year’s mainly digital census.
Many did not have access to computers, or if they did, they were not comfortable using them, they said.
But Shaw assured everyone in the village they would be able to complete the forms.
Statistics New Zealand census staff accompanied him, bearing hard copies.
Team leader Eryl Jones and field officer Yvonne Weeber scanned copies to assign each one to a person, rather than have residents access the online version with a code.
Jones and Weeber are just two of a 2500-strong taskforce who will be knocking on doors in remote locations across the country this weekend, either delivering copies and codes or reminding people of the due date.
Shaw said completion rates were tracking well so far, and he
''We are pretty confident especially given that we've already had half million responses.'' Statistics Minister James Shaw
hoped every Kiwi filled out a census form. About 500,000 people had completed the census online by Thursday, with more applications answered by people aged 65 and over than from people aged 15-25.
But in reality, the goal is to reach 99 per cent of people with 70 per cent of the population answering questions online.
Past census targets were closer to the 95 per cent mark, with about 34 per cent completing them online.
‘‘I mean it’s pretty bloody remarkable getting anywhere from 95 to 99 per cent of everyone in the country to fill out a form,’’ Shaw said.
‘‘It also includes homeless people. So, we have teams working with homeless agencies to literally walk around the streets finding people and working with them to fill out forms.’’
But the shift towards a predominantly online-based census did not come without its challenges, Shaw said.
Statistics NZ took direction from countries like Australia, where an overloading issue crashed the system.
‘‘There will be little bugs here and there, but we are pretty confident especially given that we’ve already had half million responses.
‘‘I think if anything significant was going to go wrong then we would have found it out by now.’’