Prasad Rajen: Duties of Statutory Officers (Census and Other Remedial Provisions) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Prasad Rajen: Duties of Statutory Officers (Census and Other Remedial Provisions) Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:675;Page:20820] 
Dr RAJEN PRASAD (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on Part 1 and to ask a few questions. Ordinarily we would have at this stage of a bill a lot more information. This bill would have gone to a select committee and a whole host of people with an interest in doing the census and in statistics as well as people who use the data would have given a lot of advice. We do not know what that advice would be so I wonder whether the Minister in the chair the Minister of Statistics could explain the implications of deferring the census until 2013 and now having a 7-year gap between censuses. What are statisticians and demographers saying about that change? What kind of adjustments will need to be made to the data so that there is some comparability down the line so that users of the data will have some way of knowing or working out what that is? 
The data sets we currently have go back to 1975 so there is a 35-year data set collected at the same time at regular intervals. But that will be changed for ever in a sense by our going to a 7-year gap and then resuming 5 years after that. I wonder what advice the Minister has received about those changes and what the implications might be. 
More fundamentally a select committee would have given us the opportunity to examine however briefly—and it could have been brought together quite quickly—the modern census so to speak. The Minister said that he has asked some questions about a modern census but he had no answers. What were the questions the Minister asked and what was his thinking about the kinds of parameters a modern census might have? Censuses have not always been the same for the hundreds of years that censuses have been done. But now the technology has changed in this field. The data that is regularly collected in all kinds of ways is also available from different sources now. So what was the Minister thinking about that data? 
Perhaps more fundamentally there is also a move now not to hold censuses but to conduct surveys. Those surveys are almost like a series of cross-sectional studies that tell us what is happening to our population and they are done more regularly. Why has the Minister not taken the opportunity—because it comes quite rarely—to have this kind of thinking done in relation to censuses and census change? There are new methodologies and new ways of using data. With the kind of consultation that we have in mind—and this is why members on this side are opposing this bill—even users of censuses would identify the different types of data that are now required. Here was an opportunity through a select committee to have that kind of discussion. 
My colleague Raymond Huo talked quite a bit about the need for data in the Maori community and appropriately so. New Zealand’s ethnic diversification is now quite advanced but we have only so much data about that. In the last 6 months or so I have been going through data and I can see the holes in that data. Here was an opportunity to reflect on the kinds of data required by our ethnic communities and those who provide services to and engage with them etc. Has the Minister not given any thought to that? What advice has the Minister received about the kinds of data that would help us understand that diversification in greater depth? Maybe the Minister has thought about that. Maybe he can give us some reading on what his thoughts are essentially on different types of methods different types of data and the views of key people out there—not only the experts like demographers and statisticians but also the users of that data. Could the Minister tell us what was their thinking? If there has been any conversation with them then what concerns of theirs have been identified at this stage? We would like to get some idea of that. Finally there is the question of the implications of the 7-year gap. Thank you. 
Part 1 agreed to.