RNZ Pacific

Papua New Guinea’s population has passed the 10 million mark, according to the final figures from the 2024 Population Census released by the country’s statistics office.

The PNG census began on 16 June 2024 and concluded in late October, more than three months after its original deadline. The process was marred by a host of administrative and logistical issues.

A PNG academic said in October 2024 that the 2024 Census, which included only six questions, failed to meet the United Nations benchmark standards for reliable census data.

“Without timely and accurate census data, it will be impossible to create a reliable common roll or implement the planned biometric voting system by 2027 for the national election, which will require even greater coordination and efficiency,” wrote Michael Kabuni, a PhD student at the Australian National University and a former lecturer at the University of PNG.

The PNG National Statistical Office reported that there were 10,185,363 people in the country on census night.

According to the 2024 National Population Census Final Figures booklet, this represents a 40 percent increase compared with the previous population count in 2011, when the population was 7,275,324.

The report stated the average population annual growth rate since the 2011 Census was 2.6 percent.

“Annual growth rate since the 2011 Census is higher (3.1 percent) but is likely to be artificially inflated because of non-demographic factors such as higher undercounting in 2000 and improvements to the 2011 and 2024 Census coverage methods.”

The census figures also reveal that there are more males (5,336,546) than females (4,848,546), representing approximately 110 males for every 100 females.

The average household in PNG was five people.

“Since the first official census in 1980, five years after independence, there have been an additional 7.2 million people added from 3.0 million in the last 44 years.”

The census found that, of the 22 provinces that make up PNG, Morobe recorded the highest population with almost a million people, followed by the Eastern Highlands province with 800,072 people.

Of PNG’s four regions, Highlands account for 35.7 percent of the total population, followed by Momase (27 percent), then the Southern and Islands regions.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The following tables represent an update of mortality by sex in relation to Table 2 from Decennial Increases in Deaths by Birth Cohort, in Aotearoa New Zealand.

By looking at deaths registered in February to May only, it is possible to extend trends into 2025, avoiding fluctuations arising from winter illnesses.

The numbers look at people born over a ten-year period and the percentage increase in deaths in a given recent year compared to ten-years earlier. I am most interested in the ‘generations’ born between 1935 and 1990. The oldest generation/cohort shown will not have many more deaths than ten years earlier, because more than half have already died before the age of ninety. For younger generations, only a small minority have already died, meaning that a population can be readily compared with its younger self.

Results are unreliable for people under 25, because too few of them die to reveal any patterns.

Typically, at least for working-age adults – defining working age here to mean about 25 to about 75 – a birth cohort will normally have about 100% more deaths in a given year (eg 2020) compared to ten years previously. We can see that in the Male table below, by looking at the 2010-2020 column, and by looking at the 1935-45+ row.

If we look at the first highlighted figure of 98.3%, it means that 98.3% more men born from 1945 to 1954 died in 2020 than in 2010. The next figure in that row says that 100.2% more men born from 1946 to 1955 died in 2021 than in 2011. The last figure for that row says that 119.4% more men born from 1950 to 1959 died in 2025 than in 2015. (Noting again, that these data are for February to May only.)

This decade we have observed some problematic increases in deaths for men born between 1955 and 1980. (I would rate any number over 120% as ‘problematic’.)

For Females, these increases in death numbers over ten years for a generation/cohort are even more concerning; though it remains true that fewer working-age females are dying than working-age males. It’s more that women are catching up to men. As with men, it is those women born between 1955 and 1980 where the greatest concern lies.

While I’ll leave these data for others to interpret further, the numbers tend to bely the mantra we hear from the finance industry and many politicians that “we are all living longer”. The aging process seems to be coming earlier for people born after 1955 than for people born before that year. (It’s too early to say whether this conclusion about ‘Gen-X’ will also apply to ‘Gen-Y’. While Gen-Y men, born after 1975, seem to be doing OK so far, data for Gen-Y females is not looking too good.)

A final point to note is that Aotearoa’s working-age population is particularly affected by immigration and emigration. The numbers given here will be distorted if, for any cohort within that ten-year period of comparison, there was a marked difference in emigration compared to immigration. We should note, however, that both immigrants and emigrants (to and from Aotearoa New Zealand) tend to be healthier than average for their birth cohorts. Thus, data of this type – which does not rely on population denominators – can reveal subtle truths which may otherwise remain hidden.

Ultimately, societal problems – such as inequality, insecure housing, over- and under-work – all do have an impact on average lifespan at least as much (if not more) than the state of a country’s healthcare services. Actuarial methods of measuring lifespan are lagging indicators of the health of a national population. And they can be problematic in this country, because so many people who will die in New Zealand were not born here; and vice versa.

My tables are forward-looking rather than backward-looking. They warn of trouble ahead, especially in relation to those people born in the 1970s and 1980s. We may note the following: What researchers suspect may be fuelling cancer among millennials (Washington Post article, published in NZ Herald on 30 September 2025).

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Data is from Statistics New Zealand, Births and deaths: Year ended June 2025. That data series only begins in 2010.

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

New Caledonia’s population has shrunk to 264,596 over the past six years, the latest census, conducted in April and May 2025, has revealed.

This compares to the previous census, conducted in 2019, which recorded a population of 271,400 in the French Pacific territory.

To explain the population drop of almost seven thousand (6811), Jean Philippe Grouthier, Census Chef de Mission at the French national statistical institute INSEE, said that even though the population natural balance (the difference between births and deaths during the period) was more than 11,000, the net migration balance showed a deficit of 18,000.

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In terms of permanent departures and arrivals, earlier informal studies (based on the international Nouméa-La Tontouta airport traffic figures) already hinted at a sharp increase in residents leaving New Caledonia for good, after the destructive and deadly riots that erupted in May 2014, causing 14 dead and over 2 billion euros (NZ$3.8 billion) in damages.

The census was originally scheduled to take place in 2024, but had to be postponed due to the civil unrest.

“New Caledonia is probably less attractive than it could have been in the 2000s and 2010s years,” Grouthier told local media yesterday.

However, he stressed that the downward trend was already there at the previous 2019 census.

‘Not entirely due to riots’
During the 2014-2019 period, a net balance of around then 1000 residents had already left New Caledonia.

“It’s not as if it was something that would be entirely due to the May 2024 riots,” he said.

At the provincial level, New Caledonia’s most populated region (194,978), the Southern Province, which makes up three quarters of the population, has registered the sharpest drop (about four percent).

Meanwhile, the other two provinces (North, Loyalty Islands) have slightly gained in population over the same period, respectively +2.1 (50,947) and +1.7 percent (18,671).

The preliminary figures released yesterday are now to be processed and analysed in detail, before public release, ISEE said.

The latest population statistics are regarded as essential in order to serve as the basis for further calculation for the three provinces’ share in public aid as well as planning for upgrades or building of public infrastructure.

The latest count will also be used to organise upcoming elections, starting with municipal elections (March 2026) and provincial elections later that year.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The three components to the crisis are churn, aging, and the increasing predominance of births into disadvantaged households.

Churn

Yesterday the main release from Statistics New Zealand was Record net migration loss of New Zealand citizens. ” There was a record net migration loss of 44,700 New Zealand citizens in the September 2023 year. This net migration loss was made up of 26,400 migrant arrivals and 71,200 migrant departures.”

Today the main release was the National population estimates at 30 September 2023. Radio NZ reported at 1pm today that “New Zealand’s population has grown by almost three percent in the last year. Stats NZ has released its most recent population figures showing there are now 5.27 million people living in Aotearoa. For the year ending September 2023 the population grew by 138,100 people. Of that, the natural increase, the number of births minus deaths was 19,300 people, with the rest being made up of net migration.”

That gain of net migration was 118,800. A quick calculation tells us that the gain of non- New Zealand citizens was 163,500, in one 12-month period. 163,500 is 3.1% of Aotearoa New Zealand’s entire population. (If that continues, New Zealand will have 10 million people before 2050, with Māori plus New Zealand born Pakeha – tangata whenua and tangata tiriti – being as few as one-third of the total.)

New Zealand is perhaps the world’s most significant churn economy/nation, experiencing simultaneous record net emigration and record net immigration!! Multiculturalism will matter most. Though we have spent too much effort in recent years navel-gazing about biculturalism.

Aging

Here I will emphasise the role of historical births. In 2022 the age with the greatest number of deaths was 89. That’s people born in 1933, when births were close to a low for the last 100 years. The lowest three years were 1933 to 1935, with a total of 81,574 people born. From 1943 to 1945 there were 114,255 births From 1952 to 1954 there were 157,789 births. From 1961 to 1963 there were 194,931 births, a 139% increase compared to 1933‑1935. From 1970 to 1972 there were 189,725 births.

The number of people aged 87 to 89, will in fact be closer to three times higher in 2050 than it is in 2023, even if there is no further emigration or immigration. That’s because, in addition to the abovementioned 139% increase in births, New Zealand’s population grew substantially since the 1960s, with a significant amount of that net immigration being people born in that 1961 to 1963 period. (It’s also because of much higher infant mortality in the Depression years of the 1930s.) This coming population peak are people now in their early sixties; people who are already boosting New Zealand’s mortality statistics.

A significant number of the people reaching their late eighties in the 2030s and 2040s will be retired (ie no longer practicing) healthcare doctors, nurses, paramedics, and pharmacists.

It is most likely that there will not in fact be as many people in their late eighties in 2050 as my projections suggest. Many of the “late-boomers” will most likely died prematurely; I confidently predict that there will be a substantial fall in life expectancy over the next 25 years.

Births in disadvantaged households

It is not fashionable today to keep data about socio-economic disadvantage. Instead, we rely on two fashionable proxies for such disadvantage: Māori and Pasifika. A third useful proxy for disadvantage is ex-nuptial births.

Neither being Māori or Pasifika, nor giving birth ex-nuptially, are direct indicators of disadvantage; after all our Prime Minister last year gave birth ex-nuptially in 2018. Yet, all three of these birth measures correlate with disadvantage. And Aotearoa today has pockets of substantial disadvantage, much of it barely acknowledged.

I will note these statistics about 2022 births:

• 30,009 ex-nuptial births; highest since 2010 (31,236) and up by 1,461 since 2021
•  28,875 nuptial births; lowest since the 1930s, and down by 1,236 since 2021
• 12,948 births of Asian ethnicity; down from a peak of 13,188 in 2019
• 9,609 births of Pasifika ethnicity, highest since 2012 (9,897) and up by 645 since 2021
• 17,712 births of Māori ethnicity, highest since 2010 (18,459) and up by 570 since 2021

We should note that 2022 is the first year ever in Aotearoa New Zealand that ex-nuptial births exceeded nuptial births.

In 2050, those born in 2022 will be turning 28. Will they have the skills, education and training, and motivation to be providing high quality services to that huge cohort of people who will then be in their late eighties? Will it be acceptable if only the elite-elderly are able to afford an acceptable level of life-sustaining and life-enhancing services?

Maybe we will have 10 million people in 2050, mostly people themselves or with parents or grandparents born in Asia? And maybe those people will continue to provide the high-quality services to which our older people have become accustomed.

Or maybe not? Those young people from Asia, Africa and Latin America – too many of whom are dying these years as boat people or in Mexico, or stuck in immigration-visa-limbo – will be a precious international ‘commodity’ in 2050.

We can address these problems. But not with mainstream policies of dour fiscal probity.

One final matter to note. Thanks to New Zealand’s universal pension system (New Zealand Superannuation), an exceptionally large number of people of ‘retirement age’ are still in employment or running businesses. Universal benefits enable employment. The worst thing any government could do in the next decade would be to create disincentives for older people to work, by moving towards means-tested retirement-income options.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Last week the world population reached eight billion people, at least according to some sources. See these world population clocks, which do not agree: refer Worldometer and the US Census Bureau.

The growth rate of the world population is slowing. Indeed, there is a possibility that it will never reach nine billion; there are demographic ‘headwinds’ affecting both fertility and mortality.

What we do know is that the population age structures are very different in different continents, and different countries. This at a time when extreme ‘territorial fundamentalism’ has made the 2020s the most difficult decade in modern times for most people to get permission to travel to another country, let alone migrate to it. Before the nineteenth century, the main barriers were physical geography and other factors (dangers) which made long-distance travel slow, expensive and risky. The ‘other factors’ include cultural barriers which would have made it difficult for strangers – ‘strange people’ – to settle in places away from their birth localities. And, before modern times, in feudal times people were bonded to their birthlands; they were serfs bonded to their lords’ lands.

Today, as in the past, we live in times when many people of ‘working age’ live in places in which they are not economically productive; yet the barriers to resettlement – from countries with labour surpluses to countries with labour deficits – are huge. Perceived ‘land abundance’, such as territories populated ‘only’ by a few ‘natives’, is a thing of the past; but there are many places of opportunity in today’s world, with labour shortages which can be resolved by a mix of migration and skills education.

Colonisation and Decolonisation: past, future and present

In the European context, the Mediterranean Sea long represented a space around which colonisation could take place; in the context where powerful and growing mini-states could gain economies of scale and living spaces for their growing populations. Important early colonisers were the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans. In early times, migration meant a mix of conquest and colonisation. Settler colonies of these regional superpowers would form, and later would be trashed as power balances changed.

One important later example of classical-era colonisation reached beyond the Mediterranean Sea, namely the Roman colonisation and settlement of the island of Britannia. In the time of Julius Caesar (the ‘discoverer’ of Britannia) – 2,070 years ago – the ‘tangata whenua’ of Britannia, the British, were essentially the P-Celtic people we know today as ‘Welsh’. (There were also the Picts in much of today’s Scotland.)

Military and economic opportunities, and then demographic pressures, led to the creation of a romanised European world. Romans settled in Britannia from the forties (the 0040s that is) and native Britons were substantially romanised. The process was not unlike the nineteenth century britanisation of New Zealand. Roman Britain lasted for over 300 years as a prosperous and relatively stable example of colonisation. Further, the ’empire struck back’, meaning that increasingly the population of Rome itself were romanised non-ethnic-Romans; not unlike the anglicised South Asians prominent in British politics today. Late-Roman emperors were not always ethnic Romans; other Roman leaders were even more likely to be romanised non-Romans.

With the eventual collapse of Rome, in the fifth century, that Empire imploded. This implosion would be equivalent to a coming ‘collapse of the West’ in, say, the twenty-second century. In Britannia it was the romanised Britons who inherited the greater part of the island. Indeed, the legends of ‘King Arthur’ reflect this short and mythologised phase of British history. Times were tough in the sixth century, and not only because of empire collapse. The year CE 536 has been described as the worst ever in recorded history: refer Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’, Science, 15 Nov 2018; and Volcanic winter of 536, and Battle of Camlann, both Wikipedia.

Nevertheless, a combination of the inevitable fall of the Roman Empire and the ‘acts of God’ in the sixth century created demographic spaces. In the larger part of Britannia, the part that became England, the spaces were filled by Germanic people from places across the North Sea: Lower Saxony, Anglia, and Jutland. Most traces of Romans and Roman culture were erased. Latin was erased, and British (‘Welsh’) was marginalised to the western periphery. A new language and new culture filled the void; English (Anglaise).

Looking forward, beyond the present, to the end of the modern era – say the quarter millennium (the year 2250) – this transformation of Britannia signals a possible fate for Aotearoa New Zealand and other far-flung neo-European settlements. In this scenario, the present European hegemony (aka ‘the west’) diminishes (maybe eventually collapses). Anglo New Zealanders continue to leave throughout this late-modern period, leaving anglicised Māori and Polynesian and Asian New Zealanders to maintain an ongoing sense of Britishness. This unravelling southern outpost of the Commonwealth would then represent a demographic opportunity to new groups of colonisers. The ‘south seas’ equivalent of Lower Saxony and Anglia will most likely be places in South Asia or East Asia.

The conquest of Great Britain 2,000 years ago came from relatively afar, Italy. The conquest of New Zealand in the nineteenth century, then a land of opportunity for British people facing demographic pressure, came from as far as it possibly could have come. The next conquest of Zealandia will be from further than Rarotonga, though from closer than Britannia. Human settlement never was and never will be a simple process of one ‘tribe’ arriving in an unsettled land, staying, and fending off newcomers.

In the present era, Britannia and Zealandia represent lands of demographic opportunity, places working people want to go to as economic migrants. Historically, the two main demographic magnets have been lands and cities. In the nineteenth century, people migrated to new lands, and, there, multiplied in huge numbers. And they went to cities – new cities like Chicago and Melbourne (refer James Belich, Replenishing the Earth 2009) – and established cities like London and Paris. Unlike the new hinterlands, which facilitated human fertility, the big cities served as demographic sinks. That, however, did not mean that cities were unattractive places. Cities gave opportunities for people to express themselves through cultural interaction and creativity, rather than through monocultural pastures of human and animal reproduction.

It is urbanisation which puts an end to Malthusian (ie exponential) expansion of humanity. First, cities – especially the bigger cities – tended to be mainly characterised by their high mortality. Today, they are characterised by low fertility. The world’s population may never reach nine million, if our cities are allowed to fulfil their role as demographic magnets, given that they will continue to be demographic sinks. (That said, it only takes a pandemic to create temporary forces favouring urban depopulation and rural repopulation.)

European Centre and Periphery

The ‘Third Reich’ project, which developed in Germany in the 1930s, had two central themes. First was the inspiration from the Roman Empire, with Berlin posited as the new Rome. The second theme was ‘Lebensraum’ (living room) which meant the conquest and settlement of the lands in Eastern Europe by German people, to create a large German hinterland which would favour the multiplication of the German people at the expense of the other (mainly but not only Slavic) peoples of East Europe.

While that project failed, thankfully, it can be argued that the present European Union project is a kind of ‘Fourth Reich’, in which Berlin plays a less overt role as the centre of power. In this occurrent project the demographic forces in play are a centripetal pull towards the economic centre, and a depletion – a de-peopling instead of a re-peopling – of the European periphery. This may be called ‘reverse Lebensraum’. In the Fourth Reich, the ‘King’ (or ‘chancellor’) is a committee – or a nexus of committees – rather than a monarch or republican autocrat. The Fourth Reich is a bureaucracy rather than an autocracy. (Refer Europe’s Forbidden Colony, Al Jazeera27 Feb 2017, for an analysis of the European Union as an ‘ultra-neoliberal’ and ‘imperial’ project. ‘Colonisation’ here refers to the imperial “logic of extraction”, through which we may understand there is a process of people-mining as well as land-mining.)

The European periphery is multi-faceted. (And we note that London has broken away from this Fourth Reich, creating an independent power centre in the region.) The inner peripheries of Europe are the rural hinterlands of each EU partner nation; these are subject to significant depopulation, especially in the member countries which use the Euro currency (ie the Eurozone). As long ago as the 1970s, I recall cycling through French villages not on public transport routes, and hearing about these communities’ losses of services and young people.

Next is the periphery of the European Union itself, which includes the East, the South, and Ireland. Ireland is a kind of boom-bust special case, which is able to trade on its location, corporate tax policies, English language, and high education standards, to become a European front for American-centred multinational businesses. Ireland is a country with a long history of diaspora, and this was a key feature of its experience in the Eurozone crisis which was at its worst in 2012. The other countries which suffered substantial losses of young people and services in the early 2010s were of course the southern countries of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

Now, the depopulation crisis is concentrated in the east of the European Union. All of the eastern European Union countries have lost substantial portions of their youth to the central economic hubs of Berlin and northwest Europe. (Indeed if you watch German movies on Netflix you will see many Eastern European names in the credits.) Those hubs themselves are demographic sinks, growing through ongoing human replenishment from the periphery of the Union. The eastern nations have the least financial capacity to retain their young people.

Depopulation in East Europe has been happening for a while. Shifts from rural to urban East Europe implied reduced fertility; this continues to be the main dynamic of population contraction in Russia. Now the main cities of East Europe are increasingly by-passed in favour of the privileged urban zones in the north and west. The United Kingdom was one of the most favoured destinations for East Europeans prior to Brexit. It still is, though the balance is changing with relatively more people from non-EU (Balkan, southeast European) countries risking the increasingly tortuous journey across the Strait of Dover. About twenty percent of those crossing to England in small boats this year have been from Albania, a Balkan country with fewer than three million people.

What also happened around 2015 and 2016, with the mass influx into the European Union of Syrian refugees, was that these new EU immigrants displaced immigrants from the non-EU Balkan nations. Indeed one of the ironies of non-EU east Europe is that, while both the push and the pull the demographic forces they face are the same if not stronger than those within the European Union, the presence of the EU in much of the east has made the competitive disadvantage ever harder for the youth of Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Montenegro.

The kind of economy that is emerging in East Europe is of a mix of traffickers and other service providers (many from eastern EU countries) ‘assisting’ the trafficked, meaning would-be immigrants from disadvantaged non-EU countries. The most populous of these non-EU countries feeling the push and the pull are from what might once have been called ‘Asia Minor’ or the ‘Near East’ (in addition to the ‘Middle East’, part of which is the Levant). As well as Ukraine, these include former Soviet Union countries such as Moldova, Armenia and Georgia; and, increasingly, Russia itself (noting the many anti-war refugees who have fled to places like Georgia).

Finally, the European political and economic periphery includes Africa; pretty much all of Africa, although people from southern Africa will naturally gravitate directly to the United Kingdom rather than the European Union.

Many of us of European ethnicity continue to make condescending assumptions about Africa, and Africans. (I feel privileged to have travelled in Africa, albeit a long time ago, and feel that my brief time there gives me a less unbalanced perspective on that part of the world.) At worst, too many ethnic Europeans simply assume that African nations are ‘basket cases’. Some of us continue to see Africa as the “white man’s burden”. While many realise that African countries now have the fastest growing populations in the world, few outside of that continent realise that Africa has been experiencing the world’s fastest economic growth.

Yet we see so many Africans, young Africans, risking all to ‘escape’ to Europe. We don’t bother wondering about why they are leaving Africa; we simply assume that Africa, as a continent, is chronically subject to the three checks emphasised by Malthus in 1798 – warfare, famine, disease. (Refer to this entry in Encyclopedia Britannica, and Are Malthus’s Predicted 1798 Food Shortages Coming True? 1 Sep 2008, by economist Jeffrey Sachs.)

Yes, all three do happen in Africa. But not everywhere there, all the time. What is actually driving people out of Africa this century is the same as what was driving people out of Europe in the nineteenth century; capitalist economic structural change, and the presence of people magnets outside of Africa.

The underlying circumstances of certain groups in history is known to economists as the ‘zero marginal product of labour’. What this means is, if one worker leaves an industry or a farm, the economic output of that enterprise is unaffected. Historically, this principle has been most applied to agricultural workers, especially in a ‘peasant’ context.

When industrialisation takes place in some part of the world, it is typically ‘powered’ by new industries (typically but not only urban) with a high marginal product of labour drawing people from the countryside. From a worker’s point of view, the attractant is higher wages in the new industry. Then, as the city starts to demand more from the country, farms come to be organised more as capitalist production enterprises than as rural welfare communities. Thus, push factors come into play as capitalist farmers divest themselves of unnecessary labour. Once pushed, young workers then survey the scene; if they find that the best opportunities in their own countries’ cities are already taken, they look to better opportunities in other countries.

In the nineteenth century, such people in Europe looked to far-away lands in the ‘new world’ as better bets for themselves. Better opportunities also meant better opportunities to have large families, because the economic security of rural older people lay in their own adult children. In the twenty-first century, it is no longer the availability of foreign rural lands that is the incentive. Rather it’s the opportunities of large foreign cities to provide a personal income with enough left over to remit to families in the workers’ countries of origin. First generation immigrants do have larger families, even in urban settings, than people already in those cities. Nevertheless, on balance, those bigger cities continue to be demographic sinks.

The following is an example of a Zambian radiation oncologist now working in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Stuck in a neocolonialist past: Is the migration brain drain an outdated concept? 21 Sep 2022, which featured on Deutsche Welle. Not only does she – the Zambian doctor – understand that her productivity is higher in New Zealand than in Zambia, she also actively contributes to her community in Zambia through remittances, and through an understanding that her current work in New Zealand represents an investment which, eventually, can be paid forward to her country of origin.

Globalisation versus Deglobalisation

‘Globalisation’ can be a problematic word, because many use it to mean an ideologyof global neoliberalism. That’s unfortunate, because the correct meaning of globalisation is the emergence of a world economy with diminished territorial barriers to the flows of money and especially labour. (I say especially to labour, because, even in the years before 2020, labour barriers were entrenching just as economic forces of demand and supply were creating increased demands for a globally mobile labour force.)

In today’s (sort-of) post-covid world economy, deglobalist nationalist ideologies conflict directly with economic sustainability and the requirements of the nations’ labour markets. We are now starting to understand that, in a high productivity high population world, the urban metropolises – with their economies of scale – are the most sustainable and stimulating environments for most people to live in. And we are about to start understanding that a sustainable city-dominated modern global economy will depend on reverse flows of money – for present purposes, we may call these ‘remittances’ – into the hinterland communities (such as, in the New Zealand context, Tairāwhiti and Samoa). Such remittances are not mere gifts; the hinterlands where people are raised and educated are places of investment; meaning that these ‘remittances’ are really returns on investment. Through their remittances supporting the Philippines’ economy, nurses trained in Philippines enable Philippines to continue to be a ‘nursing factory’ for the world.

The big demographic story today is not the size of the world population; but the huge geographical imbalances between labour supply and labour demand, and the barriers which prevent labour markets from clearing. Powerful global market forces will work to mitigate these; though these market corrections are to a large extent illegal and misunderstood. An activity (economic migration) which for the most of history has been legal – though in some cases has been accompanied by conquest – is now illegal for many (because of the bureaucratisation and excess of national border controls), creating needless cost and tragedy for those who are responding rationally to market forces. The barriers and the bureaucrats create ‘rent-seeking’ opportunities for smugglers.

The European Union has its own tragedy, as we saw with the Greek economic depression after the global financial crisis. This Union needs to be a fiscal union – more like the United States of America – whereby the hinterlands, international hinterlands within the European Union as well as those within each nation, need to be supported by more than private remittances. People resident in Transylvania should have comparable economic rights as residents of Thuringia.

The global economy needs to develop (preferably universal, non-bureaucratic) systems of ‘public remittances’; within its nations, within its Unions, and eventually with a fully global component. People will grow up, gain skills, work in places – commonly in cities away from their places of nurture – where they can maximise their marginal productivities; and a mix of their earnings and taxes can be ‘remitted’ to maintain the health of their source communities.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Last month I noted that Māori voter growth in Auckland (Tāmaki Makaurau) was slower than in all the other Māori electoral districts, and that this almost certainly reflected very low Māori population growth in Auckland. I also argued that Pakeha as well as Māori were leaving (or not arriving in) Auckland in larger numbers than in the past. And I said that the census data would show that Auckland’s population (excluding the former Rodney and Franklin Districts) would be less than 30 percent of the national total.

This month’s chart comes the day after the census data was released. Because the infill process – filling in for census non‑participation – was more comprehensive than for past censuses, the population growth data overall may be slightly inflated. But, on the whole, these growth data are probably as reliable as in the past.

The chart shows that, in Auckland’s inner isthmus suburbs (from Mt Albert and Point Chevalier through to St Heliers, and including the central business district), population growth in 2013‑18 was comparable to Palmerston North and Dunedin. This is in contrast with 2006‑13 when central Auckland grew by ten percent. We may note that residential property prices in these years grew much faster in central Auckland than Dunedin, suggesting that population pressure was not the driving force behind these rising prices. Rather, people responded to inflated property prices by leaving inner Auckland (or not coming).

The rest of the isthmus grew faster in 2013‑18, compared to inner Auckland and compared to 2006‑13. But the growth was not remarkable; it was comparable with Napier and Nelson. Likewise the ‘outer core’ – which includes much of North Shore and Manukau had population growth after 2013 that was well below the New Zealand average of 10.8 percent.

Auckland’s ‘less unaffordable’ outer suburbs grew faster. The ‘outer’ axis includes areas like Henderson and Massey in the northwest, and Manurewa, Otara and Howick in the southeast. In those areas, population growth was comparable with Hamilton.

In the super‑’city’, the fastest growing areas were the fringe – Papakura, Upper Harbour, Hibiscus and East Coast Bays, and Waitakere Ranges – and Rodney and Franklin. Growth there was comparable with Northland (which includs Whangarei) and Bay of Plenty (which includes Tauranga).

The census data confirms the election data, showing a substantial demographic shift from core Auckland to (and beyond) Auckland’s fringe. Although Auckland City is growing relatively slowly, the historic Auckland Province now holds 54.6 percent of New Zealand’s population, up from 53.8 percent.

Auckland excluding rural Rodney and Franklin had 30.4 percent of New Zealand’s resident population. This includes the ‘Hibiscus’ area of Orewa which was in Rodney District before the super‑city was formed in 2010. So it looks like I am correct, the combined population of the former Auckland, North Shore, Waitakere, Manukau and Papakura – what most people have thought of as Auckland – is below 30 percent of the national total. The rest of the country continues to have much life and soul.

Auckland’s 2012‑16 real estate bubble was just that, a bubble. It had the substantial consequence of revitalising much of the rest of the country, though creating many of the same social problems as Auckland (especially relating to unaffordable rental housing) in many other cities.

As a final note, Auckland’s unoccupied dwelling count increased by over 6,000 to 39,393. 97 percent of the national increase in empty dwellings was in Auckland. And Auckland province registered a 9,363 increase in empty properties, 151 percent of the New Zealand net increase of 6,201 unoccupied homes.

by Dr Bryce Edwards

New Zealanders should have less faith in many of the vital decisions of government agencies, due to serious problems with the way last year’s census was carried out. It’s a multi-billion-dollar problem. And the Government and officials appear to be doing little to assuage concerns. In fact, the recent decisions of the Minister of Statistics and Statistics New Zealand are giving the public more reason to be suspicious.

I covered this a month ago, on the anniversary of the 2018 census, pointing out the many problems – see: The absolute debacle of the 2018 Census. The “digital first” experiment had gone horribly wrong, leading to a suspicion at the time that about one-in-ten citizens hadn’t completed the census – something that would lead to all sorts of problems for government decision-making. Since then, the full extent of the debacle has become clearer, but accountability has not.

Most significantly, despite Statistics NZ’s reluctance to let the public know, it’s now clear that there was also a problem with those who did fill out the census forms – about 240,000 never finished filling in the forms. This is on top of the 480,000 who didn’t even start filling them in.

Yesterday’s Otago Daily Times editorial quite rightly labels the most recent census a “a failure of epic proportions”, saying that “Long delays in the release of information rang alarm bells, but that one in seven New Zealanders have not had their information recorded is truly disheartening” – see: When it all goes horribly wrong.

The editorial explains why it’s such a problem: “This matters because it means the census is going to deliver skewed and incomplete results. The census, held every five years, provides vital information – a snapshot of the nation – that is used primarily for allocating funding for core services, for future planning, for the drawing of electoral boundaries, for so many things. It must be done, and it must be done right.”

There are billions of dollars at stake, because so much of what the government spends is affected by the detailed knowledge of New Zealand society that the census produces. Financial journalist David Hargreaves explains this in his column, Maybe we should scrap the 2018 census and start again.

Here are his examples: “In the case of migration, obviously if thousands less people have come into particularly Auckland this has big ramifications for housing and infrastructure. Having pristine statistics is not some ‘nice to have’ fanciful thing. It’s actually absolutely vital and therefore should not be subjected to Government penny-pinching”.

Although Statistics NZ is currently attempting to “backfill” the gaps in the census data with a “patching” process that uses other government agency statistics, there doesn’t seem to be much confidence amongst commentators that this will be adequate.

Hargreaves discusses this: “however well they do in patching this up, there will, always be a suspicion over the information and whether it is of the quality on which big spending Government decisions on things like infrastructure can be confidently committed. Where we want information as gold, we might end up with copper. Which ain’t good enough. Anything where information has to be extrapolated, say from a sample size, is always subject to some question marks.”

Similarly, Massey University’s pro vice-chancellor Paul Spoonley is unconvinced that the patching process will work, saying “I’m still very, very sceptical” – see 1News’ Massey University official calls on Stats NZ head to ‘front’ on ‘failed’ 2018 Census.

According to this report, Spoonley believes it still “leaves the serious question of whether New Zealand can have confidence that the replacement data will be correct”. Spoonley says, in terms of government decision-making, “a whole lot of systems are actually breaking down because we don’t have Census data available”.

For the best discussion of the quality of the data, see David Williams’ Census ‘disastrous’, but not useless. Of particular interest in this article, is the evaluation of Richard Arnold, a former Statistics NZ analyst and now a statistics lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. He says the latest census is “absolutely not up to spec”.

Arnold explains the importance of a full national census over simple sample surveys, saying a census “gets in everywhere” in terms of the smaller demographic groups. And because only about six out of seven citizens have been properly recorded in the census, all sorts of minority groups will have a reduced profile in the snapshot of the nation.

He says: “It’s interesting to see how they are growing and changing over time. There’ll be people from minority religions who want to see how many they are and how they’re changing. There are little groups everywhere. Even regional areas, where people want to know how the rural population is changing.”

There will now be significant errors and bias in the information the government is relying upon. Whereas very small amounts of missing information can be patched up, in this case Arnold suspects “when it gets out to this kind of level, it’s a really big problem” and “You just don’t know because you haven’t measured”.

Similarly, economist Brian Easton lacks confidence in the ability of Statistics NZ to patch up the problems, especially given what he’s learnt about the process: “We have been told that the patching will not all cover all questions which researchers use, while the patching is likely to invalidate many of the issues which researchers want to explore” – see Thomas Manch’s One in seven failed to complete Census 2018, a back down from Govt Statistician reveals.

According to this article, “Easton said the gap in census response was now so large the data may be useless for research.” National’s state services spokesman Nick Smith says the problems with the census data “will create problems for years in allocating tens of billions of dollars in funding”. While New Zealand’s chief statistician Liz MacPherson is reported complaining that “misunderstandings have resulted in unfounded comments regarding the integrity of the official statistics system and Stats NZ.”

MacPherson has been in the firing line for her role overseeing the whole post-census debacle. And she’s come under even more scrutiny recently due to her extreme attempts to withhold information from the public and politicians about the unusually high number of people who only partially completed their census forms. This is best covered in Thomas Manch’s article, Chief Statistician ordered by MPs to produce information on Census 2018.

As head of Stats NZ, MacPherson has had to appear twice this year at a select committee, where both times she has declined to provide details on the census completion rates, stating last week “Without the appropriate context, these individual numbers would be open to misinterpretation”. Commenting on this, constitutional expert Andrew Geddis says “I can’t remember a time a public servant has refused after being told they must answer”.

MacPherson eventually yielded, after the select committee MPs unanimously decided to threaten her with contempt of Parliament. But the episode was enough for blogger No Right Turn to call for her to be sacked, saying her disobedience was an alarming defiance of the public’s democratic rights and of accountability – see: This is not how our public service should work.

According to Friday’s Press editorial, the whole episode needs more investigation: “Statistics Minister James Shaw’s claims that the gaps in the data are not a concern, and a chief statistician who was almost dragged kicking and screaming by politicians to present a fuller picture of a shambolic process and a poor result, are both worthy of greater scrutiny” – see: NZ census: A black hole of big data.

The editorial joins a host of commentators and experts who are calling on the Government to fix the problems of last year’s census debacle by bringing forward a new census for 2021 – something that James Shaw will not countenance.

And the blame game will continue – with arguments about whether the census debacle was due to initial decisions made by the last National Government, or mismanagement under the Labour-led administration. But regardless, Oscar Kightley wrote on Sunday, it’s Shaw’s “job to fix it, and he could start by admitting that this is an embarrassing disaster that could have serious consequences for the country” – see: Why the census debacle is so serious.

There will also be consequences for some of the 700,000+ who failed to start or finish completing the census last year. Jono Galuszka reports that, so far, “60 court cases were being lodged in relation to people not completing the census” – see: Stats NZ starts taking people to court over non-completed census forms. But not everyone is being prosecuted: “Criteria for prosecution included actively refusing to do the census, being strongly negative, or being abusive towards census staff”.

Finally, although many are calling for a return to a paper-based census process, is it actually time to further embrace digital data? In the age of “big data” there are a huge number of other possibilities for innovation in terms of measuring and understanding what’s going on in New Zealand. With the use of greater technology, government policy making could actually become much more reliable and effective according to Pattrick Smellie, who asks: In a world full of big data, is it time to rethink the Census altogether?

Exactly a year ago, on 6 March 2018, the government census was carried out. It was a “digital-first” census, with citizens expected to primarily use the internet to answer the compulsory questions about their lives. And it was soon apparent that huge numbers of New Zealanders had been missed out by the exercise – likely to be at least one in ten. 

But we are only now finding out how much of a debacle that event was, along with increasing knowledge of the seriously negative implications for our society and democracy. And to make matters worse, there’s a distinct lack of political or bureaucratic accountability for what has happened.

A number of newspaper stories have been published today about the anniversary of the 2018 census debacle. The most important is Thomas Manch’s 365 days and still counting: Census 2018 results nowhere to be seen. In this, he explains that “The 2018 census data release has been delayed three times due to low response rate” and “Statistics New Zealand remains tight-lipped about when the long-delayed results will be available”.

The article explains that the census operation resourcing was inadequate, especially in terms of the number of field staff hired to help people get their census filled out: “Newly released information shows Stats NZ employed 1800 enumerators, or field staff, to knock on doors and uncover those who failed to complete Census 2018. This was a substantial drop from the 7000 boots on the ground during Census 2013”.

A number of economists and statisticians explain the growing awareness of the severity of the “shambolic” census operations. For example, University of Auckland statistician Andrew Sporle is quoted saying: “It’s a bit of a disaster, we don’t know how bad, but we know it’s a disaster.”

Sporle explains that the data, once it’s eventually released, “will provide increased uncertainty in matters from the Government’s wellbeing targets to the number of Māori electorates.”

Manch looks at the Māori electorates in another article today, Māori electorate seat at risk due to Census 2018 debacle, and says that, due to the way Statistics NZ have run the census, there are likely to be much fewer respondents reporting that they are of have Māori descent, which could lead to one of the Māori seats disappearing.

One specialist is cited as saying that although the 2018 census participation rate is estimated to be about 90 percent for the general population, “the response rate of Māori may be as low as 80 or 70 per cent in some corners of New Zealand”. In addition, “more than 20 new iwi won’t be properly counted” in the census, and this is a problem because “census data was particularly important for smaller iwi trying to do good with fewer resources”.

Societal consequences of the census debacle

There are plenty of other serious implications if the census 2018 data is unreliable, as is increasingly expected. For example, planning and funding for health and education is highly reliant on this population data, and some hospitals and schools might receive inadequate resourcing as a result. Much of this is explained in Cate Broughton’s article today, Health boards, schools may lose funding as Ministries forced to use 2013 census data.

In this, University of Otago’s health systems expert Robin Gauld explains how hospitals might be negatively impacted: “It could have fairly profound implications for a DHB off a $1 billion dollar budget – if you’re a per cent or two off, that’s $10 or $20 million dollars, the difference between surplus and deficit.”

The article points out that this is likely to have a particularly adverse impact on poorer communities, with Child Poverty Action Group’s Alan Johnson quoted: “What you will get in places like South Auckland is there might be 10,000 – 15,000 people missing from the count – well the DHB won’t be getting funded for them so them and everyone else in that area will struggle with less funding.”

Currently the problems with the census data means that government departments are having to rely on 2013 census data. In terms of schools, the president of NZEI, Lynda Stuart, says: “If they are looking at using 2013 census data then yes potentially schools’ [funding levels] could stay the same and yet communities do change so it’s obviously highly problematic”.

So will the census debacle have a negative impact on social wellbeing? Certainly, the Government is making much of putting “wellbeing” at the centre of Grant Robertson’s upcoming Budget, but there must be questions as to the credibility of an approach that emphasises the need to measure social indicators when measures are so inadequate.

Furthermore, the Government has admitted that Robertson’s Budget won’t make use of the latest data: “Crucial funding decisions in Budget 2019 will be made without data from Census 2018” – see Thomas Manch’s Census data won’t make Budget 2019. National’s finance spokesperson, Amy Adams, says that this is “highly unusual”, but the Government has claimed that they never intended to use the new census data in the Budget.

Adams has also asked whether hospitals and schools which receive inadequate funding based on old data will eventually have their correct funding restored and backdated once the new data arrives.

Electoral consequences of the census debacle

The other major census headache is the upcoming general election, which is constitutionally-mandated to be run on the basis of electorate boundaries being redrawn in light of the census. The exercise of the boundary re-drawing is carried out by the Representation Commission (which effectively involves the Electoral Commission and representatives of the Labour and National parties). But if they don’t have access to the latest census data, or if the census data is deemed unreliable, then the whole exercise could collapse or lead to messy court proceedings.

This is best covered by Henry Cooke in his article, Statistics New Zealand confident census data will be ready for 2020 election boundaries. In this, National’s Electoral Reform spokesman Nick Smith challenges the robustness of the likely census data for the election, and says: “It is totally unsatisfactory to be determining electorate boundaries that can effectively determine who will be the next Government on the basis of guesswork”.

If National doesn’t have confidence in the census data being used to re-draw the electorates then the party could take legal action or simply pull out of involvement in the Representation Commission, which would collapse the whole process. This article says that National want the 2013 census data to be used instead, and “National was not ruling out ‘alternative action’ if this did not happen”.

A big issue is the matter of when Statistics NZ manages to get the data to the Electoral Commission, which is currently unknown. National’s David Farrar explains the problems with the timetable: “This would normally have been September 2018, so we’d have new boundaries by March 2019 – well before the election. If Stats NZ can’t release census data before say December 2019, then we’d have final boundaries in June 2020. That would be a disaster. Selections would have occurred by then. You can’t change boundaries just three months before an election. Parliament would probably have to legislate to delay the new boundaries until after the 2020 election. Ideally new boundaries should be finalised before election year. That means Stats NZ really needs to get the data out by June 2019. Any later than that and it will create a real headache for the boundaries review” – see: The census disaster gets worse.

Blame game and unaccountability

Given the anniversary of the 2018 census debacle, there is now a renewed interest in working out exactly what went so wrong a year ago and who is to blame. Journalists have had great trouble getting answers on any of this, because both the Government and Statistics New Zealand have been uncooperative and uncommunicative about what has happened.

But with the help of the Official Information Act, Newsroom’s David Williams has accessed 189 pages of information from Statistics New Zealand, which help illustrate the process during which the disaster unfolded – see his must-read account of “a digital-first experiment gone wrong”: Bungled, costly census to produce less ().

Williams has also been seeking comment from officials and politicians. He says “Stats NZ said no one was available for an interview.” And the Minister of Statistics James Shaw is asked “about his confidence in the integrity of the census data”, to which he rather weasily replies: “I am confident Stats NZ is making every effort and applying as many options as possible to deliver robust Census data.”

And a Statistics New Zealand official is interviewed, who says: “There is no accountability or responsibility being taken internally for what is turning out to be the worst census in over 50 years.”

For a very in-depth and interesting account of the census debacle, see the Otago Daily Times feature story, And then there were nine, by Bruce Munro, which was published in the weekend. This is, so far, the ultimate exploration of what went wrong.

Kathy Connolly, Stats NZ’s census general manager, answers questions put to her about whether the debacle was a result of the previous National Government running down the public service and replies “no comment”. Was the debacle due to Stats NZ being asked to “Go do a cheap census”? Again: “No further comment”.

There is also great debate in the article between Labour and National politicians about underfunding and oversight. They both blame each other, of course.

Munro also reports: “What exactly happened is hotly debated, but not loudly. Most of those close to the action will not talk on the record. At an operational level, when it came to rolling out New Zealand’s first largely online census, several wheels fell off, they say. There wasn’t enough publicity. Statistics New Zealand relied on the diminished postal system to get initial information to people. There were not enough forms. Fewer people were employed to follow up on those who had not filled out their form.”

In the end, the results of the census debacle are likely to impact negatively on the marginalised of society. In this regard, the views of the University of Otago’s professor of public health, Peter Crampton, are reported: “those for whom good social policy is of the highest priority” will be undercounted. The result will be a worsening of their position: “If these groups become invisible in the census then policy-making becomes doubly difficult and some of the least advantaged communities are at risk of becoming further marginalised.”

The decision by Statistics New Zealand to slash the number of census field workers is “beyond comprehension” according to economist Brian Easton – see his opinion piece today: Census mess can be resolved with a new one in 2021. But Easton argues that it’s quite feasible for the Government to get a robust new census up and running for the early date of 2021.

Finally, have Statistics NZ staff been spending too long “checking their privilege” instead of checking the pulse of the nation? Just before Christmas it was discovered that the government agency had their staff carry out a game to determine who was ‘white’, ‘Christian’, ‘able-bodied’, ‘male’, ‘heterosexual’ and had ‘no speech impediment’ – see Dan Satherley’s Stats NZ defends hosting ‘Check Your Privilege Bingo’ game.

Regional population estimates are unreliable. The government should know (and publish) reliable quarterly population data for the country as a whole, and accurate breakdowns by age and sex. All that is required is birth and death registration, accurate immigration and emigration data (age and sex are determinable from passports), whether a person passing through the border is a visitor or a resident, and when a visitor’s status changes to resident status.

In March 2014, Statistics New Zealand was still publishing population data (eg for March 2013) uninformed by the 2013 Population Census. By March 2015, these estimates had been corrected.

My analysis uses the Working-Age Population (population over 15), published as part of the Household Labour Force Survey. The 2014 estimate of the March 2013 aged-over-15 population was 3,508,000. After the census results came through, this was revised down by 39,000 to 3,469,000. New Zealand’s working‑age population had been overstated in 2014, by over one percent. The discrepancy should have been much smaller, and may be due in large part to poorly-collected immigration statistics, based on travellers’ stated intentions rather than their actual movements.

Some of the regional discrepancies were much bigger than the one percent nationwide discrepancy. (The regions given in this chart approximate closely to the six provincial cricket associations in New Zealand.)

The population increase in the Northern Districts (Northland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty) was much bigger than anticipated by Statistics New Zealand in their pre-2013-census population estimates. My analysis of 2017 election statistics suggests that this relative growth of the Northern Districts has continued apace.

Between 2006 and 2013, Auckland grew slightly faster than projected by Statistics New Zealand. My 2017 analysis suggests that since 2013 – that is, considering March 2018 – the Auckland population will be significantly less than Statistics New Zealand’s current projections for Auckland.

From the central North Island to Southland, the 2013 censuses showed a much greater loss of population than expected. While the population loss in Canterbury was no surprise, the surprise is that Statistics New Zealand were doggedly publishing Canterbury population estimates in March 2014 as if the earthquake had never happened.

I’m guessing that the 2018 census will be close with respect to New Zealand’s overall population. With respect to the regions, however, I suspect that all regions except Auckland will show higher census‑informed populations for March 2018; higher than the March 2018 estimates for March 2018 will show. My analysis in 2017 suggests that the 2018 Census will show that there has been a population redistribution since 2013, in favour of the regions and against Auckland.