Shaw JamesHon JAMES SHAW (Minister of Statistics): There are times as Gwendolen remarked in The Importance of Being Earnest when it becomes more than a [mere] duty to speak one's mind it becomes a pleasure". It's a great pleasure to follow on from Mr Jian Yang's speech then about the 2018 census which of course in the appropriation period was a very significant spend and a very significant event. Now I have actually read Mr Yang's report that he wrote criticising the effectiveness of the delivery of the census as well as criticising the Government's performance in the remaining months that it had before the census was carried out. One of the things in that report which I thought was brilliant was he was repeating something that Dr Nick Smith had said in the House once which was that it was a sign of failure that we'd only put out so-many press releases. I have to say that if Dr Smith thinks that the frequency of ministerial press releases is a mark of success in the world that might explain why there was a housing crisis on his watch. Now having said that the report that Mr Yang wrote was very interesting; so I have passed it on to the independent review that's being conducted into the 2018 census which is being conducted by management consultant Dr Murray Jack and Connie Graziadei who was the deputy chief statistician for Canada who of course ran a very successful online census in Canada. It'll be interesting to see what they make of Dr Yang's report. Now I just wanted to start by talking—because one of the myths that are going around of course is that people don't trust the use of administrative data as part of the census output. What's interesting is that if people don't trust that or if—what Mr Gerry Brownlee's been repeating in the House—people don't trust the use of admin data then Mr Brownlee and the National Party really should look at their own role in spreading misinformation and concern about that because it was their Government that set in path this strategy of using administrative data. Let me just talk you through the long-term census transformation strategy that they signed off in 2014 and 2018. So as Mr Yang said traditionally historically we've conducted censuses using paper forms going door to door collecting that information. That was the way that censuses were conducted up until well mostly—there's been a bit of a transition but really the big shift started with the 2013 census where there was a greater use of digital of online form-gathering. In that census roughly 70 percent of forms were gathered on paper and about 30 percent were online. That formula was switched for the 2018 census where the target was to get 70 percent online completion rate—and we got about 85 percent; so well above the target that was set by the previous Government on that—and the remainder forms on paper.Now the idea was that then from about 2023 the next census would be called you know "digital plus admin"—so online forms plus the use of admin data. For censuses after that the rough intention was that it would be primarily admin data supplemented by online forms and then the 2033 census might not even happen because we would have such good administrative data you wouldn't actually need to carry out a survey in the historical term. So that was the long-term intention that was set up.That raises the question: what is administrative data and why is it any good and what is it that Mr Brownlee is so worried about? Well administrative data is data that's gathered about real people; it's real data that is gathered by Government agencies like the Accident Compensation Corporation in education health records births and deaths and marriages immigration records—those kinds of things. What the previous Government did was to set in train a long-term project to be able to use anonymised data to gather much more accurate information than we have ever been able to do as a result of the census process. Now it turns out that was the right call because the result of this census is that we have got a more accurate population record than we have ever had before. We've got a population file with 4.7 million records about real people—the kind of information that can be used for the formation of district health board budgets of electorate boundaries—and I think Mr Yang should congratulate the Government that he supported that made that decision to use administrative data because it is working."