Any attempt by any government to change our lives requires good information.
We need to know what the current picture actually is. And for that we rely on Stats NZ.
Stats NZ relies on information from the census questionnaires and fills in missing information from "government data about real people (such as births, tax, health and education records)" as it describes it.
Leaving aside how government data is about real people while census information appears to be about some others, there have been huge issues about the reliability of the most recent census.
But more concerning than any of the issues about how information is "backfilled" into the census is what Stats NZ does with the answers to the questions we obediently provide.
One of the questions we are asked in the census is about which ethnicity we identify with. This question involves self identification, and allows us to choose more than one if we identify with several different ethnicities. It is contrasted on the Stats NZ website with race, nationality, ancestry and citizenship.
In the past, Stats NZ then took the answers we provided and blatantly just changed them, according to a hierarchical model whereby if any of the options you chose were, say, Maori, then you would be described as Maori and your other options would effectively disappear. (How it categorised the 400,000 people who recently described themselves as "New Zealanders" when asked this question, I have not been able to get to the bottom of.)
Apparently, this has changed recently in the raw data.
But Stats NZ still takes our answers and twists them to eliminate any reference to more than one ethnicity.
On November 17, 2022, it issued a press release headed "Maori population estimates at 30 June 2022", saying that during the June 2022 year the Maori ethnic population grew by 17,200. It went on to say that at June 30, 2022, New Zealand’s estimated Maori ethnic population was 892,200 (17.4% of national population).
Starting with us answering questions about who we identify as, accepting multiple answers, Stats NZ turns our answers into a single answer.
Having chosen which of our answers it prefers, it then somehow turns ethnicity into race by headlining the press release as " Maori population estimates ..."
Based on these "statistics", we now have commentators saying the number of Maori seats in Parliament should change.
We have the government and others making comparisons between prison populations and school achievement based on what could be vastly different ideas of which singular race we have been assigned to — or which ethnicity, since the distinction has been fudged.
A major challenge for any government is to improve the outcomes, and in fact the chances of good outcomes, for those who are being held back. And it is indisputable that outcomes for New Zealanders are too often connected to our race and ethnicity.
And we aspire to having ethnic equality by having outcomes being the same across all ethnicities.
However, improving all poor outcomes is a different aim from the aspiration of achievements being available to us equitably across all races and ethnicities.
The racial aspiration will not be achieved while we fudge figures about ethnicity.
We need to understand how best to deal with the position that many New Zealanders are of mixed race, and how to see what part race and ethnicity play in outcomes when we acknowledge our mixed race and mixed ethnicity.
Then we need to understand whether we can compare the census answers with descriptions of the ethnicity or race of people who turn up at hospital or in education or in the prison population. Or how we conflate those who choose to be on the Maori roll with those who describe their ethnicity as including Maori when we decide how many Maori seats are fair in Parliament. Or who might be involved as self-appointing co-governance "partners".
The pretence that we are each of one ethnicity only will not serve us well. It is encouraging racism by the government always choosing to describe people as Maori whenever bad outcomes are being discussed.
We need good and accurate information if we want race and ethnicity to play a reduced role in determining the future of a child in New Zealand.
Or we could focus on improving outcomes for all who are being held back by others and by societal choices, knowing and appreciating that this will benefit disproportionately those who identify at least in part as Maori.
- Hilary Calvert is a former Otago regional councillor, MP and DCC councillor.
