Census failure

Newsroom reports on a number of problems with the 2018 census.

The bottom line is:

Yesterday’s media statement said Stats NZ was delaying its first release of data from October to March of next year because of lower-than-expected response. The department’s “interim calculations” showed at least 90 percent of people had “full or partial” information in the census, down from 94.5 percent five years ago.

That means about one in 10 people didn’t take part, which has been described by University of Auckland professor of statistics Thomas Lumley as a “very serious” drop, The Spinoff reported.

A 10% non completion rate is unacceptable. It would not be unfair to say this is a failure by Stats NZ which has real consequences.

The statement said data for “small populations, subgroups and small geographies” will be “improved” and the quality of census data would be supplemented with administrative data.

Not good enough. This is why we have a census.

The Minister of Statistics should call for an independent review of this failure, to ensure the next census has a much higher participation rate.

Also we should not be given spin for months about how great the census went and then find out only now, how bad the participation rate was.

The last Australian census had a 96% response rate. They regarded 93.3% as the minimum required.

The Canadian census had a 98.4% response rate.

A better way to look at it is the non response rate. In Canada is was 1.6% and in NZ it was 10% – six times higher.