Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Scrapping the census was long overdue

You know what I’m not going to miss? The census.

If there anything that showed how bad Governments can be at embracing technology, it was the census. At a time when Governments collect huge amounts of electronic data about us, it seemed ridiculous that they were also asking us to fill out a paper form and send it in.

They already know what we’re earning, the IRD has that. They already know how many babies are being born and how many of us are dying and how many of us getting hitched - Births, Deaths and Marriages has that.

They already know how many of us are leaving the country and coming into the country, that’s collected too. They know how many one, two or three bedroom houses there are, that’s all collected already. 

And yet - they were asking us to tell them that all again on the census form. Which made the exercise a giant waste of money. The last one cost $325 million and the next one was going to cost $400 million.
 
Now I accept that there is information we will lose. Because as far as I know, no Government department collects information on how many languages you speak or what your sexuality is or what your first language is or how many people live in your house.
 
So yes, by scrapping the census, we will end up with an incomplete set of data.

But we already have an incomplete set of data because of the huge numbers of us that didn’t fill it in. In 2018, we didn’t count one in six Kiwis. That's not complete at all.
 
So either way, we won't know anything. Except one way was going to cost us $400 million.

Scrapping the census was way overdue.

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