Census planning in full swing

Press, 14 July 1980, Page 27

Census planning in full swing

Next' year will be census year and already the Department of Statistics is preparing for an influx of information from throughout New Zealand.

The executive officer of the Statistics Department, Mr M. A. Moore, says that the census questionnaire topics are almost finalised but that there is much work still to be done, including arrangements for data processing. The census will be a count of the population and the number of dwellings. It will be useful in determining electorate boundaries for the 1981 General Election. To make the population count easier, New Zealand has been divided into 276 census districts. The South

Island will have four census area officers, based at Christchurch, Nelson, Dunedin, and Invercargill, who will act as liaison officers between their census districts and the census headquarters at Lower Hutt. Mr Moore said most of the area officers would probably be retired people with administrative ability because the job was only fdr eight months. In February, the area officers would select census enumerators who would collect the information from households on March 24. The last, census was in March, 1976. At that time the population of New Zealand was counted as 3,124,500.