Drop the census because it no longer works
Picture this: It’s dusk and fine, and a man is settling down to sleep the night in his car in the far corner of an otherwise deserted Bell Block car park.
I’m out with another census collector looking for people who haven’t yet been counted. We park some distance away and I approach the lone vehicle cautiously to check if the occupant is an avoider.
He is, he cheerfully admits. His rego plates are self-made, he says. We won’t find him that way. But somehow he still wangles his unemployment benefit. And he’s quite happy, thank you. So, bugger off. Said nicely. We do.
More than 10% of the country’s population had a similar regard for the 2023 census, meaning its on-ground success amounted to about 89%, up about six percentage points on the so-called disaster of 2018 but still not good enough to please the experts.
The 2018 one cost $126 million and was a failed attempt to switch to a digital approach; far fewer collectors were employed. According to those who use stats, an 83% return is way too low to be reliable (in the past, like Australia and the UK, we’ve usually hit the mid-90s).
Much more money ($320 million) was spent on last year’s effort to greatly boost follow-up collection visits.
But it didn’t succeed and, for the second time, Stats NZ has to merge in data from big government ministries (like health and law-related) to try to get basic personal and household statistical information up to what it recently claimed is nearly 100%.
Four from five Kiwis play ball with the census, and another nearly 10% finally relent after being chased up by a small army of people like me and my colleagues.
That followup 10% can be hard going. We worked in pairs towards the end because we had people threatening to beat us up, setting dogs on us, abusing us, lying to us, treating us as handy personal reps of a government system they seemed to think was broken and dishonest.
One of my last revisits to a particularly outlaw street got me close to a beating. The young man who threatened to smash my face was also holding his new baby, so he didn’t have his fists free. I ran.
Stats NZ banned ultrasound animal repellers, so I returned the one I’d bought. Shortly after, I found myself walking slowly down a long driveway after a woman suddenly let her dog out and told it to get me off her property. It followed me 100 metres to the gate but didn’t attack. One did at another house and I just beat it to the gate.
A colleague ran for her life when a farmer’s wife set her dogs on her, laughing and egging them on. Another fellow gatherer was manhandled by some bully and was so badly shaken he couldn’t go out again for a day.
And so on. OK, the pay was good (hence the overall cost) but it’s a job I’d never do again, because after we’d paid anything up to half a dozen visits to a property and had no success, we knew it was all a waste of time and money… our money.
The New Plymouth-based census operation was well organised and one of the best performers in the country, but the national office was less efficient.
I realised we were in trouble when first logging into the ºperational website with a minor query only to find my message automatically went to thousands of site users. That was the default. I copped acerbic replies from one or two old hands.
In my view, the census should never be held in that form again.
It’s a waste of money and fails to achieve its aim - to provide basic, statistically acceptable information for those needing it.
Stats NZ can ask for all the information needed from other government departments, something it did to recover from failed census operations.
If it must continue to study our citizenship directly, it should confine itself to key household and personal data, forget about complex issues that should be handled by those who want the information, and drop the survey sought by real estate.
Other countries have followed that path already and achieved responses much closer to levels needed by scientists, epidemiologists, commercial enterprises and politicians.
Stats NZ will release a report on the census this week, and its first statistics on May 29.