Interesting contribution from Simin Williams, who was seriously inconvenienced by a nice but apparently unwelcome lady from Stats NZ.
Seems Simin was caught up in a Post Enumeration Survey. I’ve never experienced the thrill of a PES — I actually hadn’t heard of it — even though, like Simin, I’m a grandparent.
I looked it up and found Stats NZ uses a PES to check whether they got an accurate picture of NZ’s population and dwellings when they did the Census — a kind of self-test. They checked about 16,000 dwellings and their occupants, out of about 2 million households; roughly one in 125, and randomly selected. Then they checked to see if the results matched up.
If they did, I guess Stats NZ can be confident they can tell the government which regions need more assistance than other regions. Like for hospital funding or social welfare. Better than waiting for a cyclone to hit and doing it then, I suppose.
I can recall news items last year commenting on the Far North getting less government funding because a whole lot of Simins didn’t respond to the previous Census, and the government thought the population of the Far North was smaller than it really is.
