Brian Rudman: New Zealanders, and that's all

We "New Zealanders" have really rattled the census takers.

At the 2006 Census, 429,429 (11.12 per cent) of us refused to play their ethnic game and called ourselves "New Zealander".

I wrote in "Aucklander", which was a variation on the same theme, but that's another story.

Anyway, the statisticians are worried that if this rebellious behaviour grows, we might stuff up all their carefully designed record keeping.

It's also upsetting the social scientists and back-room operatives who pore over the numbers while preparing new social policy initiatives.

It seems that the 78,000 (2.4 per cent) troublemakers who entered "Kiwi" or "New Zealander" in the 2001 Census were an irritant that could be tolerated.

But now things are starting to get out of control. In their just-released discussion paper, the people-counters growl that if the write-in New Zealander campaign is too successful, "the ethnicity results could have been rendered unusable".

No doubt it's an added worry to them that the then-deputy leader of the National Party and now number three in the Government, Gerry Brownlee, sided with the rebels at the time of the 2006 Census, saying it was ridiculous the form asked him to classify himself as a New Zealand European and not a New Zealander and that if he wanted to state he was a New Zealander, he had to tick the "other" box and write in his preferred ethnicity.

This week, Statistics New Zealand issued a discussion paper on the issue and called for public feedback. But the paper makes it plain that the "experts" consulted want no change in the system. Specifically, the paper is against adding a new ethnicity tick box, "New Zealander".

Until now, most self-identifying "New Zealanders" have been Pakeha who don't regard themselves as European and have said so by registering in the "other" category. The experts fear that if this is simplified by adding a tick box in the next census, the flood gates will be opened as people of all sort of ethnicities join the rebellion.

This "risks undermining the count of other ethnic populations such as Maori, Pacific peoples and Asian".

The report adds: "The need for robust official statistics on these populations for public policy purposes might outweigh the case for making the questions easier to answer for 'New Zealander' respondents."

Boiling it down to its basics, the experts want to be able to count Maori and Pacific peoples accurately so they can compare them with the rest of the population and then design policies in education and health and other social areas, which bring the under-performing Maori and Pacific groups up to New Zealand European mainstream.

"Maori and other ethnic community service providers rely on official ethnicity statistics for planning and engaging with government agencies."

I guess the quick response is that ethnic-based provision of services has hardly been a roaring success, so maybe it's time to try something else.

The report says the problem lies with our confusion between the meanings of race, nationality and ethnicity, but confesses that most dictionaries tend to use the three almost interchangeably. Even the statisticians fall into the same trap.

In summarising why the collection of ethnicity statistics is important, they single out that "our electoral system makes special provision for Maori representation".

Yet anyone following the debate over Maori representation on the planned Auckland Council will have heard vehement arguments by Maori that the seats are not ethnically based, they relate to tangata whenua status.

Significantly, while Maori seat boundaries are based on census information, whether or not you go on the Maori roll as opposed to the general roll is a matter of personal choice.

In 1946, the bureaucrats kept it simple, categorising people as European, Maori or "race alien". Until 1986, ethnicity was measured on "a race concept". Since then, the debunked concept of race has been replaced with a concept of ethnicity based on what the statisticians call "cultural affiliation".

But this seems equally flawed. The census merrily reports results under such meaningless categories as Asian and best of all, MELAA. This was a new category, introduced in 2006 for people from the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. I guess the one cultural trait they had in common was that there weren't many of them.

Then there are broad categories like Chinese or Indian. This includes people originating from the two most populous countries on earth and is equally meaningless. It doesn't differentiate between the third or fourth-generation descendant of an Otago gold miner, a migrant from Malaysia or a wealthy Hong Kong businessman recently given citizenship thanks to the money he brought with him.

New Zealand European is equally vague, except for creating a majority "race-based" category that everyone else can be compared to. It means nothing, lumping in the super-rich jet-setters of Remuera with - well, the rest of Pakeha New Zealand. It includes everyone descended from a Laplander on the Arctic Circle to a Sicilian born on the shores of the Mediterranean. Like the Chinese and Asian categories, it's meaningless.

Just because they've done it for 150 years doesn't mean the statisticians have to keep trying to poke us into racial pigeon holes. In 2006, 429,429 New Zealanders took the trouble to protest. What further consultation is needed?