Census turnout low despite $37m blowout
Concerns are being expressed over low returns as the census budget potentially leaps to $300 million. David Williams reports
Raw census figures released to Newsroom are setting off alarm bells for one academic.
Officially, census day was March 7 but some early field collections were disrupted by Cyclone Gabrielle, the damage from which prompted the Government to declare a national emergency in six North Island regions.
On Friday last week, Stats NZ trumpeted in a press statement that four million people had returned their individual forms. “We didn’t hit this milestone until April 30 in the 2018 Census,” deputy government statistician Simon Mason said.
Still, one-in-five people haven’t completed their forms this year. For people of Māori and Pacific descent, that figure is two-in-five.
Census will be a flop.
It will be a flop because the cost cutting pricks who run Government saw a cheap means to run the Census by putting it all online.
That fucked up spectacularly because the only reason we fill the Census in (in the old days) was because a very passive aggressive Aunty would appear at your door, knocking on it for at least 3 weeks before you had to actually do it while putting the hard word on you to do it.
New Zealanders freak out at conflict because it demands an emotional articulateness most of us lack. We used to fill in the Census because we didn’t want a fight with that very passive aggressive Aunty from Census, however the millisecond no one is turning top and you just require us to do it, oh go fuck yourself.
The cost cutting pricks at Government who thought they could put everything online to save money misread our acquiescence as compliance when it was always forced.
Compounding that attempt to save money has been an explosion of anti-state sentiment alongside far more vicious political cultural polarisation.
The woke, fourth wave feminists, nationalist Māori and non binary activists HATE white men, white men hate everyone else, Māori despise Pakeha, Pakeha despise themselves (and māori), women believe all men will rape them, men believe they will all be accused of rape, the poor hate the rich, the rich hate tax, Wellington hates Auckland, everyone else hates Wellington, the Professional Managerial Class hate the Lumpenproletariat, the bosses hate the workers, the workers hate the bosses, young hate old, old hate young, antivaxxers hate everyone, everyone hates antivaxxers, the right lates the left, the left hates itself, the woke have cancelled everyone, Incels hate women, everyone hates Incels.
In such a toxic horror cauldron of intersectionist grief and pain there is no solidarity to fill in a bloody Census!
Being told you must fill in the Census so that the Government knows where to resource minorities in your community means very little if you hate everyone in your community.
What’s that you say, if I don’t fill in the Census my train station won’t get funding, well the fucking service it provides now is a fucking joke, so how much worse can it get?
If the infrastructure is s fucking joke, why will this Census make it better? The cynicism gets even more jaded when the whole woke gender issue is injected into it. I don’t understand why the State needs to know who I like to fuck.
How does knowing who I like to fuck getting me better public transport?
We have not even begun to process the impact of social media in generating schisms upon schisms upon schisms in our culture.
Identity Politics ultimately ends up in a billion splinterings competing for attention to their wound.
In such a multi fractured culture constantly offending each other for attention, the resentment that generates kills solidarity and people do not want to engage as their response to that.
Newsroom found a vast slump in trusting the institutions that run the Census…
Trust in census a big issue, survey suggests
Many Māori and Pacific men say they won’t participate in the census. David Williams reports
Public trust and confidence, especially among Māori and Pacific men, looms as a problem for the census, internal documents reveal.
…this Census will be a flop and people will struggle to explain it, and that’s the real problem because the polarisation of NZ culture is a deeply dangerous new cultural mutation post Covid that isn’t being appreciated or acknowledged.
We unforgivingly hateful towards eachother now and that will extend to the Census.
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Yep, unless the census person breathed down your neck, compliance was limited.
But what was learnt after the 2018 census flop? Nothing it appears. The relevant ministers didnt care, then went to sleep and never woke up. When the plan was again to put it online, again, not a soul in Wellington saw an issue and definitely not the minister or this government. In their world online is everything!
The shadowy Willie Jackson and Nanaia aside, there is not a single minister in this government, or member it appears, who have a clue what they’re doing or why they do it. They are dumb. How dumb? Think robot like Grant Robertson putting 30 cents per litre back on fuel mid cost of living crisis while crude oil prices are rising dumb. That’s idiot level dumb! Too many girl scout lawyers and career student politicians turning up to collect a pay cheque, not enough doers!
The good news for the government according to the 2023 census will be a lot less population for Middlemore Hospital to serve. The bad news is endless!
I admit I was wrong on this issue .I knew the small group of antivaxers would most likely not involve themselves in this government action but most people would just do it because they understood how important it was to the organization of us all.
It shows a lose of confidence and involvement by everyday NZ people and this seems particularly so in the Maori population which is surprising concidering how much Labour has given them under co governance.
I thought this years census was actually only for non pakeha, all the adds were for other ethnicities, one of them even promised Maori that filling in the census would lead to them fulfilling all their dreams!
Totally true about the disintegration of society under identity politics and guess who achieved it in just 5 short years.
I’m sorry Bomber but you’re spewing unfacts on this one. Yes, there was an option to fill in the census digitally, but we still got a series of letters in the mail and plenty of passive-aggressive door-knocking before and after. Paper forms were widely available; I used one to fill out my individual form on the night.
Given how little most people use paper these days, it was reasonable to think that an option to do it digitally would increase participation. Particularly among the younger millenials and zoomers. Indeed, we don’t know how low turnout might have been if it was only done on paper; lest we forget the dismally low turnout in paper-only local body elections.
Questions do need to be asked about why some of the giants of surveillance capitalism (eg Goggle) seem to be involved in the census website:
https://www.geoffpalmer.co.nz/census-spies-2023/
There is this gem too. https://jrbruning.substack.com/p/are-there-really-clear-checks-and
I worked for census over the past couple of months here in Chch and we tried our hardest to get maximum participation. Knocking on doors, encouraging, cajoling, assisting. Every effort has been made to get folks to do it. I found the poor and ethnic groups mostly happy to participate when engaged and directly assisted. I’m white and middle class (by nz standards) so I was disappointed to experience the highest levels of census avoidance from folks sharing my demographic. Shaka
That does not surprise me .
it would not surprise if the majority of those not filling it in are middle class Pakeha.
Middle class men and women who are sick of quietly swallowing increasing militant gender ideology in our workplaces, educational institutions and media and have been spurred into defiance by the documented video evidence of violent misogyny on show at Albert Park. My census collector admitted many refusing to fill out the census because of railroaded questions legitimizing gender ideology.
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