TE AWAMUTU COURIER Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays MONDAY, 17th SEPTEMBER, 1945 NATIONAL STOCKTAKING

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 71, Issue 6137, 17 September 1945, Page 2

TE AWAMUTU COURIER Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays MONDAY, 17th SEPTEMBER, 1945 NATIONAL STOCKTAKING

NOW that the sub-enumerptors arc putting out the forms preparatory to the taking of the census next week it becomes evident that a not inconsiderable minority of persons resent some of the questions they are called on to answer in the census, regard them as an “ inquisitorial ” encroachment on liberty and privacy, and suspect the motives with which these questions are asked. This suspicion is allied to another, that replies will not be kept wholly confidential. All this indignation ,and ; suspicion is unwarranted. The only new question* asked are such as nobody need hesitate to answer. A citizen may reasonably ask why the Government wants to know how long it takes him to go to work; but the answer is equally reasonable. This isinformation that has a direct bearing on problems of town planning, the location of industrial and residential, areajfc and local transport. Other questions, against which protests have been expressed, concern personal income and the like. These questions are not new, and it is not to the point to say that the answers are already supplied to the Land and Income Tax Department. It is not to the point, first, because the Tax Commissioner’s files do not cover the whole population, and, second, because he would have no right to open them to the Government Satistician, even if they were complete; and the Government Statistician, in the same way, is bound to use the information he receives wholly and solely for his statistical purposes, disclosing it only in the form of statistical returns, in which personal confidence is impenetrable. As for the usefulness of those statistical purposes, if that is questioned, then the whole apparatus of statistical information, as an instrument of social and economic research and as a guide to public questioned; and only one answer is possible. The instrument ought to be perfected, not discarded; the guide, to be more faithfully trusted, not deserted. The census, in fact, is an indispensable public questionary. It should be accepted and answered as such. There is nothing abnormal, nothing dubious, about the present census, as a census. This is quite apart from the point, still a fair one, that the Government might well have deferred it till next year.