Minister coy on Stats NZ chief’s exit
Shaw won’t say if he asked MacPherson to quit over Census
Statistics Minister James Shaw has defended the troubled 2018 Census after the resignation of the Government’s chief statistician, but has avoided questions about whether he asked her to quit.
Stats NZ chief executive Liz MacPherson stood down yesterday after the release of a report criticising the way the agency carried out the Census.
Last year’s survey was the first to prioritise online data collection and saw the lowest public response in decades, prompting the department to use data from other Government bodies to plug gaps.
MacPherson said yesterday she was taking full responsibility for the results.
“We were too optimistic, placed too much emphasis on the online Census, and did not have robust contingency plans in place for when things started to go wrong,” she said. “We let ourselves and New Zealand down.”
Shaw later said despite the low response rate, the department’s repair work since — including by using tax records, birth records and driver licence data to make up missing data — meant some information would actually be more accurate than in 2013.
He said for the purposes of electoral boundaries, health and education the data more than met its legal requirements.
But he admitted some other data sets would not be able to be used.
The response rate among Ma¯ori dropped from 88.5 per cent in 2013 to 68 per cent in 2018. Because there are no other Government agencies that fully track iwi affiliation, there won’t be any official data on iwi numbers released from the Census.
Other data sets would also not be viable — although which would not be clear until the release of the data began in September, Shaw said.
MacPherson said the decision to quit had been her own. But National Party statistics spokesman Jian Yang accused Shaw of using her as a scapegoat.
Shaw declined to say when he had found out MacPherson was resigning.
Asked if she had made the decision entirely on her own, Shaw twice replied: “She made the call to resign,” adding: “I support her decision.”
MacPherson will stay on until Christmas to oversee the clean-up effort and the Government will begin recruiting for a replacement in coming weeks.
A review by professional director Murray Jack and former Canadian Census assistant chief statistician Connie Graziadei found Stats NZ was slow to react as it became clear results were not coming in as expected.
“It is in our view that the focus on online responses and overly optimistic view of ‘Stay the course. The paper will come’, led to insufficient action being taken at the appropriate time,” they said.
Their review also said too much focus had been put into the online work with not enough testing or attention paid to the paper side of the process, and the burden of the North Canterbury earthquake — which closed Stats NZ’s offices in November 2016 — was underestimated.
The report has made 16 recommendations, including that the next Census still be held in 2023, saying 2021 would not leave enough time for a safe redesign.
MacPherson was first appointed in August 2013. She was reappointed after the Census last August, with her term due to end in 2021.