Census results are in.
On the ethnicity question, it was reported that:
The 2006 census results reveal 429,429 people – or 11 per cent of the population – called themselves “New Zealanders” or “Kiwis”. Their number increased five-fold since the last census in 2001 and they became the third-biggest ethnic group, behind European and Maori.
I mention this as a followup to two posts in March. I was concerned then about the fact that the campaign to get people to write in “Ethnicity: New Zealander” was going to lessen the utility of the census results. It has.
About one in ten Kiwis wrote in ‘New Zealander’; about one in eight of those ticked another box or two as well.
Take as a premise that some people of exact same background, within the same family even, can sincerely choose to indicate differing ethnicity – NZ European vs New Zealander. If we want an ethnicity question at all, we want to amalgamate these two responses.
It’s probably reasonable to stack those who ticked only ‘NZ European’ with the ‘New Zealander’ only results, giving us a total ‘NZ European’ category population. (Recall, in previous years ‘New Zealander’ was bundled with ‘New Zealand European’ by default.)
But what about someone who ticked ‘Maori’ and wrote in New Zealander as well? There were plenty of these, enough that they were mentioned by a Stats NZ spokesman in the print version of the Dom Post article linked above. Say two brothers exist – one sincerely ticks Maori and NZ European, the other sincerely ticks Maori and writes New Zealander. How on earth can we make the assumption to amalgamate this data? And if we can’t, how useful is the ethnicity question at all?
The ethnicity question was undermined by this campaign. In part, this was its purpose.
So why do I care? That, I’m no longer sure about. What do we get out of accurate ethnicity data? Arguments in March undermined my assumptions about the public health usefulness of this information – what other compelling reason might there be? Is simply knowing about ourselves enough?
Bah. I’m disappointed with the whole thing, because it means our ethnicity data becomes needlessly complex at best and misleading or opaque at worst; and because the whole affair emerged from some reactionary politics that were really quite silly.
I’m enjoying looking at the census results, anyway. Nice to see New Zealand get more diverse. We can handle it.