A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
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’ma 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.
So, even though Simin’s chances of being selected ever again are the same as mine (better than Power Ball, worse than the Melbourne Cup), I missed out on all the fun and Simin didn’t. Ah well, that’s life.
I can’t help wondering if the questions asked of Simin during the PES were really any more personal than the questions asked in the Census. If they were, then they must have been important questions. If they were important, why weren’t we all asked in the Census?
My feeling is that Simin is some kind of a Census rebel. It seems she managed to carefully avoid the Census questionnaire, but accidentally won first prize when the check-up came round. Well, you win some, you lose some. Get over it; it really isn’t that bad.
