Geoff Bascand
Geoff Bascand became Government Statistician and Chief Executive of Statistics New Zealand on 22 May 2007.
Geoff was previously the Deputy Government Statistician responsible for Macro-economic, Environment, Regional and Geography Statistics.
Geoff is a career public servant with senior management experience at three departments.
He started his career in 1981 at the Treasury as an economic analyst and later became Director of Forecasting. From 1998 until 2004, Geoff was the General Manager of the Labour Market Policy Group at the Department of Labour.
As well as holding senior policy and management positions at the Treasury and the Department of Labour, Geoff has been a Research Fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies at Monash University in Australia, and from 1996 until 1997 he was a staff economist at the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC.
Geoff has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in geography from the University of Otago and a Master of Economics from the Australian National University. In 2005, Geoff was awarded a Leadership Development Centre Fellowship.
Duties of the Government Statistician
The duties of the Government Statistician are laid out in section 14 of the Statistics Act 1975.
Statutory Independence of the Government Statistician
Section 15 of the Statistics Act 1975 gives the Government Statistician sole responsibility for statistical processes.