Staff Shortage In Statistics Dept

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32031, 4 July 1969, Page 18

Staff Shortage In Statistics Dept

f.Vew Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, July 3.

The Statistics Department urgently needed suitable qualified staff and the most modern data-processing facilities, the Government Statistician (Mr J. V. T. Baker), said in his annual report, tabled in Parliament today.

In the last few decades, the department had spearheaded nearly all the major advances in economic analyses in New Zealand, by providing the new economic statistics on which these advances had been based. “Now, however, extreme shortages of qualified staff in the department, coupled with the fact that its computer is out of date, make it very difficult to achieve further advances or even to maintain the position already reached,” the report said. Because of these difficulties In the department, great care must be taken, in the rush to

get more economic statistics, to be sure that statistical standards were not dropped. “It is all too easy to have statistics prepared in administrative or policy-forming departments, which are much better staffed but which may not have the same statistical standards of objectivity as exist in the Department of Statistics.”