'Error' means no-one who refused census will be prosecuted

Wednesday, 18 October 2023

People who ignored the census are off the hook.

No-one who refused to participate in this year’s census will be prosecuted, Stats NZ has announced.

The department said the decision had been made after “an error” was discovered in its application of the Data and Statistics Act.

Stats NZ said the legislation stated that a request for data needed to specify the section of the act the request was being made under, the date people must respond by and the consequence of non-compliance, for example, facing a fine or prosecution.

But Stats NZ said it had failed to meet those requirements in full.

“We accept that we needed to be more specific with respondents. We did not meet all the requirements of the act in detail, and as a result have decided not to proceed with prosecutions for the 2023 Census,” the department said in a statement on its website.

Stats NZ chief executive Mark Sowden believes the census will have to change (video first published in July 2023).

“We are undertaking an internal review to understand how we fell short of meeting all aspects of the legislative requirements of our new act, to learn from it and take action to ensure it does not happen again.”

Filling in the census is a legal requirement.

But Stats NZ typically only prosecutes a few dozen people for failing to complete the census, commonly concentrating on people who actively encourage others not to comply or are abusive, rather than those who kept quiet and simply didn’t bother to fill in the forms.

A spokesperson said it was “proceeding down a process” this time, before identifying it was “not as clear as we could have been in looking to interpret the act, so the decision was made on that basis”.

Stats NZ deputy director Simon Mason said it had got as far as identifying a “pool of candidates” for prosecution before discovering its error.

Government statistician Mark Sowden made the call to abandon the process based on legal advice, Mason said.

The 2023 Census, conducted at a record cost of about $320 million, may mark the second time in a row that Stats NZ has failed to achieve its target of getting at least 90% of people to participate in the census.

However, Sowden has forecast it won’t know that until next year as it would be a close-run thing.

The department planned in future to switch away from prosecuting people who broke the law by refusing to provide it with required information and would instead issue infringement notices that worked similarly to a parking ticket, Mason said.

The Data and Statistics Act, which was passed last year, allowed for either prosecutions or infringement notices, but it had originally decided on going down the route of prosecutions when the census was being planned, he said.

Sowden said in July that this year’s census could be the last that Stats NZ conducted in its current form and that it could instead follow the example mapped out in Britain by relying on information it can get from other sources.

However, the census is only one of the datasets that Stats NZ compiles and it is expected to still have a ongoing requirement for some people to supply it with information.