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Joint collections
Reviews of Official Statistics
Confidentiality, privacy and security research
New Zealand's Official Statistical System
New Zealand's Official Statistical System encompasses all government departments, together with any agency of the Executive Government that has been declared by Order in Council to be a government agency for the purposes of the Statistics Act 1975.
Any government department may produce official statistics, but Statistics New Zealand produces the majority of them, particularly economic statistics. The principal official statistics not produced by Statistics New Zealand are those on education, health, crime, justice and welfare.
As well as being a key producer of official statistics, Statistics New Zealand takes a lead role in improving the overall effectiveness of New Zealand's statistical environment, and is responsible for coordinating all New Zealand official statistics.
Part I of the Statistics Act 1975 covers all official statistics, whether produced by Statistics New Zealand or by other departments. The Act implicitly requires the Government Statistician to manage and coordinate survey activities so as to minimise the time and effort required of respondents, consistent with the need to collect statistical information.
A set of Statistical Protocols has been promulgated to government departments to help ensure that they produce official statistics that meet the standards expected of official statistics.
What are official statistics?
Section 2 of the Statistics Act 1975 defines official statistics as "statistics derived by Government Departments from:
- Statistical surveys as defined in this section; and
- Administrative and registration records and other forms and papers the statistical analyses of which are published regularly, or are planned to be published regularly, or could reasonably be published regularly".
'Statistical survey' means "a survey of undertakings, or of the public of New Zealand, whereby information is collected from all persons in a field of inquiry or from a sample thereof, by a Government Department pursuant to the authority of this Act or any other Act, or without specific provision in any Act, wholly or primarily for the purpose of processing and summarising by appropriate statistical procedures and publishing the results of the survey in some statistical form".
Joint collections
Under section 9 of the Statistics Act 1975, Statistics New Zealand may jointly collect with another government department, local authority or statutory body information that they have the authority to collect, subject to two provisos:
- respondents must be notified in writing of the nature of the joint collection and the purposes to which the information will be put
- a respondent may object to the sharing of information by the parties to the joint collection by giving notice in writing to the Statistician, in which case the information from the respondent will be held by Statistics New Zealand and will not be released to the other parties to the joint collection.
All employees of the other parties to a joint collection who are engaged in the joint collection of information or the processing of that information must first make a declaration of secrecy as prescribed by section 21 of the Statistics Act 1975.
All statistics produced from such joint collections are official statistics, and hence are subject to the relevant provisions of the Statistics Act 1975.
Reviews of official statistics
As required by section 7(1) of the Statistics Act 1975, the Government Statistician from time to time reviews the collection, compilation, analysis, abstraction, and publication of Official Statistics prepared by Statistics New Zealand or by other government departments.
Section 10(1) of the Act requires the Government Statistician to hold a conference of users of Official Statistics at least five-yearly. The purpose of these conferences is to review user needs for Official Statistics. The latest Statistics Users Conference was held in November 2000.
Statistics New Zealand has been conducting research into public attitudes to filling in government survey forms. The research set out to explore attitudes to concepts like confidentiality, privacy and security as they relate to: official statistics, government surveying and technology change with specific reference to the population census.
The department has recognised a need to understand the effects of these perceptions on specific segments of the New Zealand population, especially on groups that tend to be under-represented in surveys, such as Māori, Pacific people, Asians and youth.
Statistics New Zealand is committed to maintaining trust in official statistics:
“The key strategic issues facing Statistics New Zealand arising from the Background Trends and Factors section and the Review of Statistics New Zealand and its Future Contribution to Official Statistics are:
- maintaining trust in official statistics, and
- maximising the use of New Zealand’s official statistics."
Source: "Strategic Issues", Statement of Intent 2004, Statistics New Zealand
One of the key influences on our operating environment is changing external attitudes towards confidentiality, privacy and security.
Issues that have been identified are:
- evidence of a decline in trust in the government (“Declining Government Performance? Why Citizens Don't Trust Government” by Barnes and Gill, State Services Commission)
- confusion about the meaning of privacy with relation to statistics
- growing cynicism and opposition towards people doing things for government and sharing private details with other agencies
- confidentiality is increasingly important to business and individuals who fill in survey forms.
To address these issues, the department commissioned a report by research consultancy UMR Research.
Links to Confidentiality Report
Summary
Report (pdf)
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