Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Mr Speaker. One of the problems with using as the basis for a speech in a debate like this talking notes that have been prepared by somebody else and that purport to be a review of an independent review report is that sometimes they're wrong. The previous speaker in this debate Tamati Coffey has just proved that case very aptly because much of what he was saying actually was not in the report and it wasn't actually a fair or accurate reflection of what the independent reviewers made in their report. I have taken the trouble as a former Minister of Statistics to read the report very thoroughly and I have to say that I'm very disappointed to find out how little work was done after the change of Government.It's appalling really that a Minister could take over at a crucial time in a census calendar programme and have so little focus on the job at hand in the crucial last six months before a census. When all the detail work had been done when all the prep work had allegedly been done I would have thought that a new Minister would have been very eager and very keen to get into the detail. What do we find? Actually that did not occur. The report is scathing in its indictment upon the lack of credible detail that was provided not only to me and my predecessors but also to the current Minister. I would've thought that even a Minister who was clearly more focused on other portfolio responsibilities at the time would have taken time and trouble to ask some very basic questions if only to seek for himself some personal reassurance that all was going well. It seems now from the evidence in the report and also corroborative evidence from diary matching and similar information that meetings simply didn't occur that questions simply were not asked. It's not that they weren't answered; it's just that they were not asked and that is a sign of a Minister who was literally asleep at the wheel.Much has been made of the fact that the Minister was not in the country didn't participate in the census on census night. Now yes there was a Labour Minister who said Well that made one difference to one census return." but actually it's far more important than that. It's a symbolic leadership function of a Minister of Statistics to participate surely in a census process. For that not to have occurred is absolutely a failure to deliver.I was concerned to read in the report and I want to quote from it "We find a level of optimism in the reporting to Ministers that was not always consistent with the level of issues being managed by the programme." Now that's really code for "Yes Minister." That's really what it's code for. Code is "Yes Minister." So when I was asking regular consistent persistent obvious questions about the progress of Census 2018 and getting positive gung-ho reassurances from officials from the chief executive about progress and about how the impact of the Kaikōura earthquake and the inability for Stats to service Statistics House and how they were operating from three different sites in Wellington and I was being told that no they had that under control it turns out now that some of those answers were as the report says provided in terms of a "level of optimism in the reporting to Ministers that was not always consistent with the level of issues being managed by the programme." That is a sad thing not only for those officials but it's a sad thing for New Zealand and for the information that we rely on.Just in summary in my own electorate of the Coromandel there were media reports in the days following the census that census personnel were instructed not to bother going up long driveways or to geographically challenged areas and that then leads me to think that as a member of Parliament I don't have confidence and I don't think we can as a Parliament rely on the information that is now being filled in—backfilled if you like—in terms of setting electoral boundaries for next year's general election. This is a sad indictment on a Minister who was asleep at the wheel."