Stats NZ’s head is stepping down over the agency’s failure to safeguard census data, and more officials may soon be in the firing line, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.

To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

An ‘absolutely unacceptable’ failure

Stats NZ chief executive and government statistician Mark Sowden has apologised and stepped down over data protection failures related to the 2023 census. On Tuesday a Public Service Commission report on the safeguarding of data at Manurewa Marae was released alongside one commissioned by Stats NZ itself. The PSC inquiry found that a number of agencies – chief among them Stats NZ, the Ministry of Health and Health NZ – had failed to adequately protect New Zealanders’ personal information. Lyric Waiwiri-Smith dives deeper into the two reports’ key findings over on The Spinoff this morning.

Along with a number of other agencies, Stats NZ has been told to pause all new contracts or renewals with the service providers at the centre of the controversy. It has also launched its own 33-point remediation plan in response. In a statement published on the Stats NZ website, Sowden said it was “unacceptable for people’s personal information to be misused in the way that’s been alleged, and absolutely unacceptable that we did not ensure that it could not happen”. He added: “To the people of Aotearoa New Zealand, I unreservedly apologise.”

How we got here

The data safeguarding inquiries were launched last year following allegations of improper use of personal census and Covid vaccination data collected or received by Manurewa Marae, Te Whānau o Waipareira (Waipareira) and Te Pou Matakana, formerly known as the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency (Woca).

The relationships between the three service providers are complicated, to put it mildly. They include “John Tamihere being the chief executive of Waipareira and the Woca (he’s also the president of Te Pāti Māori), Waipareira being a shareholder in the Woca, and the Manurewa Marae being contracted by the Woca to lift Māori and Pasifika rates of Census completion”, explains the Herald’s Jamie Ensor.

In Stats NZ’s case, it contracted the Woca to “assist with a ‘last-ditch’ attempt to collect census data from people Stats NZ had been unable to reach,” RNZ reports. A group of former workers at the marae alleged that data on census forms was photocopied and used to support Te Pāti Māori’s campaign in the Tāmaki Makaurau electorate. TPM’s candidate, Takutai Tarsh Kemp, the chief executive of Manurewa Marae at the time, won the seat by just 42 votes over Labour’s Peeni Henare. TPM denies any wrongdoing.

More inquiries underway

The data safeguarding inquiry is just one strand of a wide-ranging investigation into the allegations. A police team is investigating the allegations of census data misuse, following a request by Te Pāti Māori that “the New Zealand Police launch a thorough and efficient investigation in order to prove our innocence and clear the good names of those accused”. Both the Woca and Waipareira deny that census data was used for electoral purposes.

Meanwhile the Public Service Commission has referred some matters uncovered by its inquiry to other agencies for further investigation, Stuff reports. Separately, the Electoral Commission has acknowledged it made a mistake in opening a polling booth at the marae, given that the marae’s chief executive was standing for election. On Tuesday, Labour leader Chris Hipkins said that while he wouldn’t go as far as NZ First’s Winston Peters, who claimed Peeni Henare had his seat “stolen”, he did believe “the result in that seat was unfair”.

Almost 40% of those departing NZ long-term are aged 18 to 30. What sort of country will they leave behind, asks Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.

To receive The Bulletin in full each weekday, sign up here.

Young people leading the charge out the door

Last year saw the highest net loss of New Zealanders in a calendar year, according to provisional figures released by Stats NZ. The trend is especially pronounced among young people, reports the Herald’s Liam Dann (paywalled), with those aged 18 to 30 making up 38% of long-term departures. The age group with the highest loss was 25-year-olds, with nearly 2,900 citizens that age (out of a total 72,000) leaving the country long-term.

Overall, net migration fell sharply in 2024, with fewer arrivals and record-high departures. While better numbers in December suggest the dropoff may be stabilising, Westpac senior economist Michael Gordon cautions against reading too much into the recent change. “Many migrants return home to visit their families at this time of year, and it’s harder than usual to distinguish between short-term and permanent movements.”

Why the young brain drain is such a worry

In discussions about how the youth exodus will affect New Zealand’s future, the most common talking point is its impact on our tax base. The loss of so many people at the start of their working lives is only going to exacerbate the issues posed by our aging population, notes RNZ’s Susan Edmunds in an article from October last year. According to Dominick Stephens, chief economic adviser at Treasury, in the 1960s there were seven people aged 15 to 64 for every person aged 65 and over. Now, there are four and in 50 years there will be about two.

That’s a recipe for demographic and economic disaster, economist Shamubeel Eaqub tells Edmunds. “Because of the aging population, declining fertility, the current setup is a Ponzi scheme relying entirely on people aged 30 to 60 to pay tax to pay for all the promises made to everyone.”

The problem is so large that simply tinkering with the immigration settings – or encouraging young people to stay in New Zealand – won’t be enough to fix it. Still, we have to try, and not just for the sake of our tax take, Eaqub says. Having younger people around is what drives the energy of a place, in society as well as the economy. “You’ve got to have a decent portion of people who are young and active and doing things, living life.”

Fertility rates on the slide too

As concerning as falls in net migration is the long-term decline in fertility rates. New Zealand’s crude birth rate fell to a record low of 11 births per 1,000 population in the year to March 2024, writes Nick Brundson at Infometrics. For comparison, the rate per thousand was 27 at its peak in 1962 and 15 in 2009. The trend line is clear.

Brundson’s entire article exploring the trends in NZ fertility and what’s driving them is well worth a read, but this section sums up the problem pretty well: “A more nuanced measure is the total fertility rate – the average number of children that a woman of childbearing age (15-44 years) can expect to have through their reproductive years. A total fertility rate of 2.1 is regarded as the minimum replacement level for a developed country – 2.0 to replace the parents, and 0.1 to offset mortality before childbearing age.

“New Zealand’s total fertility rate was last above 2.1 in 2011, falling sharply since to a record low of just 1.52 in the year to March 2024. Putting this rate into perspective, it is well below Stats NZ’s median projection for total fertility of 1.65 for the 2024 to 2028 period. In other words, we expected fertility to ease, but it’s worse than expected.”

More reading

• ‘It felt like bad news after bad news’: why record numbers are leaving New Zealand (The Guardian)
• The cost of being: A young engineer who’s recently moved to Melbourne (The Spinoff)
• How low does the birth rate have to go before politicians stop saying ‘Kiwi mums and dads’? (The Spinoff)