Geoff Bascand, Government Statistician
Geoff Bascand became Government Statistician and Chief Executive of Statistics New Zealand on 22 May 2007.
Mr Bascand was previously the Deputy Government Statistician responsible for Macro-Economic, Environment, Regional and Geography Statistics.
Mr Bascand is a career public servant with senior management experience at three departments.
He started his career in 1981 at the Treasury as an economic analyst and later became Director of Forecasting. From 1998 until 2004, Mr Bascand was the General Manager of the Labour Market Policy Group at the Department of Labour.
As well as holding senior policy and management positions at the Treasury and the Department of Labour, Mr Bascand has been a Research Fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies at Monash University in Australia, and from 1996 until 1997 he was a staff economist at the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC.
Mr Bascand has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in geography from the University of Otago and a Master of Economics from the Australian National University. In 2005 Mr Bascand was awarded a Leadership Development Centre Fellowship. top
Duties of the Government Statistician
The duties of the Government Statistician are laid out in section 14 of the Statistics Act 1975 as follows:
"14. Duties of Government Statistician—The duties of the Statistician shall be:
- To make such reports to the Minister as are required by this Act, which reports shall have regard to the needs of user Departments; and, where consultations have been held, shall include the results of such consultations:
- To advise the Minister on statistical policy matters, and where appropriate to confer with appropriate officers of other Government Departments to that end:
- To keep the Minister informed of the statistical projects of all Government Departments, and to provide, where appropriate after consultation with an appropriate officer of any other Government department concerned, any explanation required of the Statistician by the Minister of the purpose, scheme, methodology, and usefulness of any existing or proposed official statistical project:
- To collect, with the written approval of the Minister, information concerning any or all of the matters specified in section 4 of this Act:
- To compile, analyse, abstract, and publish, with or without comments, official statistics:
- To advise other Government Departments on the conception of statistical projects initiated or carried on by them, and to promote the observance of approved statistical standards by those Government Departments:
- To consult with appropriate officers of other Government Departments on the need for, and the scope, procedure, and form of any existing or proposed statistical survey being or to be carried out by the Departments; and to make a report to the Minister on the necessity for and the scope of any such survey and the Government Department or Departments to be responsible for the survey:
- To make, after consultation with an appropriate officer of any other Government Department concerned, a report to the Minister on the need for the continuance or discontinuance or the variation of any current collections of official statistics:
- To define, lay down, and promote standard concepts, procedures, definitions, and classifications for use in official statistics:
- To make or construct such estimates, forecasts, projections, and statistical models as the Statistician may from time to time consider necessary:
- To take the census of population and dwellings of New Zealand as provided for in Part III of this Act:
- To examine and comment, where the Statistician considers necessary, on the interpretation and validity of any published unofficial statistics; and to publish any such statistics and comment thereon as the Statistician considers necessary:
- To carry out such investigations, do all such things, and provide such certificates, as may be required of him by any other Act:
- To supply, where the Statistician considers appropriate, specifications of the methods, procedures, and definitions used in the collection and preparation of the official statistics he produces, subject to section 37 of this Act." top
Statutory Independence of the Government Statistician
Section 15 of the Statistics Act 1975 gives the Government Statistician the sole responsibility for statistical processes. It states:
"(1) The Statistician shall have the sole responsibility for deciding the procedures and methods employed in the provision of any statistics produced or to be produced by the Statistician, and shall also have the sole responsibility for deciding the extent, form, and timing of publication of those statistics.
(2) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (1) of this section, where at the direction of the Minister the Statistician is required to collect or cease collection of statistics of any kind provided for by this Act and the Statistician would not without such a requisition produce or cease production of those statistics, he shall carry out the direction of the Minister, but the Statistician in such circumstances may make public without comment the fact that the statistics have been collected and published, or that collection and publication has ceased, at the direction of the Minister."