Opening address to the Official Statistics Forum

Good morning to you all; welcome.

In particular I'd like to welcome Gary Banks from the Australian Productivity Commission, Sir Peter Gluckman, Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister, Dr Alan Bollard, Governor of the Reserve Bank, and Felix Ritchie from the UK Office for National Statistics.

And thanks to Geoff Bascand for inviting me to open this event.

Being Minister of Statistics is a responsibility I enjoy - championing the power and importance of authoritative information about our nation, and shaping its future.

As anybody who knows me will tell you, I am an enthusiastic user of statistics myself.  As a Minister, you must be.  Confronted with a great array of policy proposals, I am continually asking how their results will be monitored or evaluated. How will this policy make the economy go faster, and how will we know?  How will it improve outcomes for vulnerable kids in South Auckland? How will we tell?

Much of the time we don't even know what questions to ask. What would a population policy say?  What use would it be?  I don't know.  But I do know that our demographic projections foretell massive economic and social change.  Changes that we simply have to think about and anticipate.  Who can imagine a world where Japan's, Italy's and Russia's working age populations actually decline by one third in the next 40 years?  What does it mean for New Zealand when in 50 years time, the number of people aged 85+ will have grown from 70,000 to 330,000?  Or in 20 years time when one third of our territorial authorities will have more deaths than births and 60 percent of New Zealand's population growth has occurred in Auckland?

One of the most important features of official statistics is that they help us to see what is changing.  They are a mirror on society and a lens on the economy that fuels the enormous power and potential of the most important capability in the world - thought.

Information is an enabler - the basis of government and business decision-making for greater productivity and growth.  The fastest growing businesses are powered by business intelligence and the data that underlies it.

Since the last User Forum in 2005, one of the most significant steps forward has been release of official measures of productivity.  One might say that previously we knew we were poor and now we know why!  Just last week, Statistics New Zealand released an update on our productivity performance, and a study that showed measuring productivity in education and health sectors on a comparable basis to the market economy is feasible.

This is important at a time when as a government we have challenged the public sector to improve their productivity. This theme of productivity will be explored over the next two days.  It applies to producers of official statistics as much as it does to other sectors of the economy.  Productivity is ultimately about maximising value relative to cost.  

Government and public demand for information, for statistics, appears to grow inexorably. We need it to manage the economy, determine infrastructure and social investments, and so forth, but resources cannot grow without bounds.  I urge you to identify where value will be highest and to help prioritise our statistical spend.

You must also minimise costs - avoid duplication, rationalise collections across agencies for the most efficient delivery, use existing administrative data where possible, and address statistics as a system rather than ad hoc or disconnected silos.

And a way must be found to achieve this without any sacrifice of quality. The high levels of reliability and trustworthiness of official statistics in New Zealand must be maintained, and where possible enhanced.

Let me touch on my other mantra:  data access and use.  Value comes from use, and use comes from access.  The tools and methods for expanding accessibility is another key theme, and I must say an area where great progress has been made in recent years.  Infoshare, datalab use and CURFs have grown tremendously, yet there is more that could be done.

Data needs to be presented in a way that makes it understandable to the audience - visualisation and integrations tools, such as Statistics NZ's Business Toolbox, need to be developed to assist people to not only get access to the information but also understand it. 

This is vital to grow the economy - as one prominent businessman put it "well informed people make powerful decisions".

These themes of access, integration and visualisation will also be explored, and the examples shared over the next two days can lead to further advances in these areas.

We have challenges to face. I know that we are all well engaged in this process already.  This event can help us take important steps further along that path.

I am happy to open this event, and look forward to hearing the outcomes from the discussions that will happen over the next two days.