McKelvie IanIAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you Mr Speaker. Oh hang on. Let's take this valuable piece of kit off. [Member removes face mask] I've got rid of that.Now data and statistics—I listened to the Minister the Hon Dr David Clark describing the reason this bill was changed from the Statistics Bill" to the "Data and Statistics Bill" but just before I get on to that for the benefit of the cricket tragics on the other side of the House of course we're playing in the semi-final of the Twenty20 World Cup in the morning. For those who haven't thought about statistics one of the most fascinating things about cricket is statistics. Actually it's one of the reasons that we watch cricket and that we follow the likes of Kane Williamson so closely because in fact his statistics are as good as any. And of course I just thought I would show you McAnulty this tie which I probably picked up in some nefarious place. But it's a very useful tie—it's a cricket tie. Of course there's the cricket tragic Kiri Allan; a tragic cricketer! But just to get back to the bill I do think that cricket really epitomises the use of statistics. If you look at the history of the sport now I've got on to it you can go right back to W.G. Grace. In fact his statistics were as good as any of the modern era. So it's really fascinating to go back and look at statistics.But I want to get on to this bill. I listened to the Minister discussing the difference between statistics and data. So I thought I would look it up and I found some very interesting things out. So statistics is the discipline that concerns the collection organisation analysis interpretation and presentation of data. So I'm not sure why we need to change the name of the bill because it effectively is the same. But the other interesting thing I found out was that data is information collected by a census or an organ that includes both useful and irrelevant or redundant information and must be proved to be meaningful. Now that's a very interesting description of what data is because I took that to mean effectively you can effectively use poor data and make it into something useful. I've watched this Government in the last few months using a lot of this data I've watched our health industry use a lot of this data and I've never really understood where it all comes from. But it just shows how you can collect data and you can get very different results with what you started off to get.Anyway back to the real issue or essence of this bill. It repeals the 1975 Act which was the Statistics Act and replaces it effectively with the Data and Statistics Bill. I've got to say that I'm fully in support of the collection of data and statistics but there's a few issues I want to raise with respect to that because I think there is a great deal of concern in New Zealand at the moment around the collection of data and the accuracy of that and the collection of statistics and the accuracy of that in many many ways. You see I think if you look at the way we collect statistics or data it's most important that we do that in a manner that those people providing the information can trust because if they don't trust it they won't fill the information in correctly. I think also we've got to be very careful when collecting and when deciding what to collect that we collect information that is not going to firstly put people off supplying the correct information that's not going to frighten people or—not frighten that's a bad word—but not going to I guess disincentivise people from participating in society in New Zealand that's not going to disincentivise people from investing in New Zealand.I think we've seen instances in recent times where we haven't done this particularly well. I'll refer to the last census and I don't want to get into criticising anyone as a result of the last census but if you think about collecting data on Lambton Quay and then collecting data in for example Hakiaha St in Taumarunui which is the Lambton Quay of Taumarunui if you think about collecting data in those two places it's a very different set of principles you need to use to collect it. Because the things that are available on Lambton Quay and the methods you can use on Lambton Quay to collect data are totally different than they are in the main street of Raetihi or as I said Taumarunui. That was the problem we struck and we strike with a whole lot of things in this Parliament. We think that what happens on Lambton Quay can happen everywhere else in New Zealand and it frankly can't. The reason it can't is because we don't have either the connectivity or the facilities or even in fact the education to make the same things happen in other parts of New Zealand that happen in the main street.One of the problems I think with—probably most countries in the world have the same problem. One of the problems we have with the organisation of our bureaucracy is that it's based in a town or a city that has access to everything and they think automatically that everyone has access to everything. That frankly is totally incorrect. I think one of the real problems we've got in New Zealand at the moment—and I'm sure in the world—is that the rapid increase and availability of technology and the take up of technology is just so different in parts of New Zealand than it is in other parts of New Zealand. Of course when you go to make a thing like for example collecting data purely electronically it's just not going to work.If I go back in my life and I think of the first kind of statistics forms I would have filled out—quite aside from what I was meant to fill out at school and probably didn't for the very same reason I was talking about earlier in that unless you trust the person you're going to supply the data to you're not going to supply the correct data to them or the correct statistics to them. But to go back the first statistics forms I really had to fill out were farming statistics forms and it's really quite interesting when you look at what you fill out and how you go about filling it out because if you don't actually draw on accurate information you get vast differences from year to year as to what you provide. It amazes me that that Statistics New Zealand have never investigated that. Well I suppose they have but they're probably not allowed to use it because the way the Act's formulated. But if you don't supply relatively consistent information then you get some very big distortions in what happens. So it's very easy for us to collect inaccurate basically information that you cannot any longer trust.I think the other issue that interests me in this bill is that we are dealing with the Crown-Māori relations stuff and the manner in which we deal with that and the manner in which we collect the information with respect to that has never been more apparent that it's flawed than in recent times with the vaccination situation we've got in New Zealand and the fact that we didn't use—well either we didn't have the information or we didn't use the information we had to plan that particularly well. We've only got to look at parts of my electorate right now the Rangitīkei electorate and see the vast difference in vaccination rates between some parts of it and other parts of it to see that we've clearly not used the information we knew and the challenges that we knew would come as a result of that information particularly well. That's how it is and I guess that hopefully this bill will help to patch some of that up. But it also points out some great difficulties. I think again if we look at what's going on in society in New Zealand right now unless we can trust and have implicit trust in what's going to happen to the information we provide and we actually value the result of providing that information then it's not going to be provided accurately. It's very difficult for the Government unless it can ensure it has the trust of the people. It's going to be very difficult for Governments to collect information that's useful to it.This bill is coming to—I can't say it's the best select committee in the House because I've always said the Primary Production Committee is the best committee in the House but it's very close to it Rachel isn't it? Very close to it. So it's coming to the Governance and Administration Committee and we'll look forward to the challenge of the submissions on it. I just hope that people realise how important actually the gathering of statistics and as the Minister said data is. I think data is automatically collected actually by something up there but statistics have certainly got to be supplied. So I'll look forward to it coming to the select committee. I hope we do get a lot of submissions and I think we probably will given the challenges that we've seen with the collection of statistics and data in New Zealand in the last year or two even given the recent publicity the Inland Revenue's had about how they're going to collect a bit of information they want. They don't know what information they want interestingly but nonetheless they're going to collect it anyway!So I think that's the point I make about having trust in the collection of information: unless we actually know what it's going to be used for and are confident in the end use of that it's very difficult to collect it accurately. I'd just go back to the population statistics and my time on a council where you see the projections going forward. Unless you can trust those projections it's very difficult to make good decisions going forward. So I look forward to this bill making its way through the House. I look forward to the submissions on it—I think they'll be very interesting—and I look forward to it going to a very good select committee and those people on it will utilise it very well. Thank you Mr Speaker."