By Ben McKay
New Zealand is having a conversation about data.
And necessarily so, after the hashed 2018 census count, which produced the lowest response rate in 50 years.
But also because of the many and growing ways that census data is charting and making a difference in the lives of New Zealanders.
Last week, Stats NZ released the top line results from last year's poll, bringing to bear many interesting truths.
In raw numbers, the country is growing like never before.
New Zealand is becoming more multicultural and younger, with people targeting the regions around Auckland to live.
For the first time, there are more Kiwis that marked 'no religion' on their forms than Christian.
The report showed signs of life to embattled Christchurch; returning to population growth after the devastating 2011 earthquake.
Those fluent in te reo Maori, the indigenous language, continue to swell.
These data lines all carry implications for policy makers.
But for the country's chief statistician, Liz MacPherson, the central question is not what the data reveals but how to improve datasets into the future.
"There's a huge opportunity and potential here," she tells AAP.
The botched Kiwi count mimicked Australia's battle in 2016, when Bureau of Statistics servers failed on census night.
Whereas Australians were given an extra month to fill it out and still managed a 95 per cent return rate, one in six New Zealanders didn't report last year, with pronounced gaps in Maori and Pacific data.
The bungle cost Ms MacPherson her job; she announced her resignation last month after an independent review revealed the count's shortcomings, and she will leave at the end of the year.
She has spent the 18 months since, attempting to restore integrity to the dataset.
And that's meant drafting "administrative data" from available government-held datasets - tax, births and deaths, education, health - to plug the gaps.
What's now missing, according to Ms MacPherson, is "a social license" from taxpayers, a broader consent for the use of their information to increase "the comfort level the people in New Zealand have with us using data in a way in which helps us to understand issues".
"So for us it's about how do we have that conversation with New Zealand?" she says.
"People think about data as what they buy for their phones.
"It can help us understand national issues, local issues."
The time may be right: the goalposts seem to have shifted on how personal data is used by companies and governments.
Personally targeted advertising has been begrudgingly accepted.
Just over a decade ago, Google launched Street View around the world to a storm of privacy concerns.
For better or for worse, the outrage has been replaced by acceptance, and even delight at the convenience provided.
Census-takers are also eager to rely on administrative data for accuracy and cost reasons.
Statisticians would much rather input a person's income from a tax return than have them guess it on Census night.
Information on professions showed some glaring mistruths; for instance, there were more people claiming to be Members of Parliament than there are seats in the chamber.
Many unemployed people, like miners on the West Coast, report themselves to be in those jobs long after losing them.
And then there's the multi-million dollar cost of providing paper and online forms for citizens to fill out.
The 2016 Australian census cost around half a billion dollars.
Ms MacPherson feels it's up to the New Zealand government to "demonstrate value" of census data, nominating the police use of 2013 data as one example of a force for good.
"They said, 'do we actually look like the people that we're interacting with?'," she said.
"That was a really, really great example of real world change as a result of understanding more about what the population is looking like.
"We do know that public policy makers are now thinking, 'What does this mean for infrastructure?'
"What does the fact that we've got over 700,000 people over the age of 65, what does that mean for the health policies? Where should we put retirement homes?
"And that really strong message about the growing diversity of New Zealand, that's critically important and I see people starting to think about that."
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