Expert opinion from Victoria University Wellington - Te Herenga Waka
Opinion: In the space of two weeks, funding has ceased for two of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most up-to-date datasets with longitudinal designs.
Longitudinal data tells us how people are doing over time, which means checking in with the same individuals and households over time to understand, as an example, how their income or their wellbeing shifts and in response to policy, economic, and other societal changes.
At the end of March Stats NZ quietly cancelled the Living in Aotearoa Survey, its own longitudinal data collection effort, aimed at, among other things, measuring persistent income poverty and material hardship. These measurements were required by the Child Poverty Reduction Act, the seminal piece of poverty legislation passed almost universally (bar Act leader David Seymour) in 2018.
This cancellation means we’ll have to rely on a patchwork of point-in-time survey and administrative data to create a poor quality proxy measure of persistent income poverty. We know that income poverty matters, and that increases in the cost of living hurts families unequally, particularly for Māori and Pacific families. Erosion of this data makes it much harder to effectively improve these inequities.
Just two weeks later, there were reports the Government had not renewed the University of Auckland’s contract for the Growing Up in New Zealand study, despite a four-year commitment in last year’s Budget. This study provides our most up-to-date and diverse longitudinal data, involving 7000 families since 2009, including more than 1000 Māori, Pacific and Asian families.
The study collects information unavailable from any other data source, such as family intentions and aspirations for their children and the changing nature of the social, economic, housing, and family environment of young people. Because the study has been following these children since birth, we now have insights into how their economic, family, childcare and school experience has shaped how they’re doing today.
The end of funding, however, means we won’t know how these early life experiences support young people through to their teenage years and propel them into a successful and happy adulthood.
These two recent announcements come on the back of Stats NZ signalling itsintention for an “admin first” census in 2028 – using administrative data (collected from government agencies) first and foremost to build our population database, instead of the traditional survey-style census which had inequitable response rates in 2018 and 2023.
Importantly, these decisions will have an outsized impact on our Māori, Pacific, and Asian communities, preventing the collection of any more longitudinal data about their future lives and opportunities to support them and their families. They also limit our ability to understand inequities experienced in our country, such as in persistent poverty, and the trajectory of early life experiences that create ethnic differences in young people’s outcomes and their transitions into adulthood.
These types of high-quality, robust data are even more important if we are transitioning to an administrative data-based system. It is well documented that Māori and Pacific peoples are more likely to be missing in our administrative sources, and that administrative data sources are poorer quality for Māori and Pacific communities, highlighting deficit.
Consultation to date on these massive changes and the decimation of our statistical infrastructure has been lacking or non-existent.
These changes were made in the name of cost savings and efficiency gains. However, when you stop investing in infrastructure, such as our data capabilities, any cost savings end up being more costly to fix in the long run. The absence of these data will have consequences for making high-quality policy decisions that improve population outcomes. In turn, this adds up to more fiscal cost.
These decisions also risk exacerbating inequities in population outcomes which are themselves very costly for public services such as the delivery of healthcare, education, housing, and social supports. It will mean Māori and Pacific families will bear the unequal burden of poorer policy decision making. They also strip communities of the data capabilities required to do the research to better meet their communities’ needs.
With such potential long-lasting impact, it is important that these decisions receive more attention, debate and governance before the fiscal and community costs cannot be reversed.
Right now, it is not too late to reverse these decisions. Rolling back our data infrastructure is a political choice.
Effectively, these cuts hide the facts about the poverty being experienced by NZ families and children, in particular Māori and Pasifika. That’s really convenient for a government which is not interested in these facts, nor in how its policies worsen poverty, preferring its own mantras about paid work solving everything.