//I think it's a mistake to say we're all the same, and I think racial identity shapes - and is shaped by - a lot of the things that make us different.

I think that the sooner we acknowledge that we are all one people (from Africa, all those years ago,) then the sooner we can just get on with things and evolve as a human race.

yay. I also also hate ticking the NZ European box, cause its not exactly the truth for me.

can you tick multiple boxes on the census?
I'd still like to be identified as Latin American, but I'd also like to be identified as a New Zealander

//can you tick multiple boxes on the census?

Yes. If you tick more than SIX, I think they have some strategy for reducing it...

//'Discordian'

oh, puh-lease! The latest of a zillion designer religions for BE students and borderline aspergers..

//Discordianism is much deeper than you expect
The FBI infiltrated their ranks and spied on them for years, for example.

Well.. at very least, these things are indicitive of new ways of thinking... which is never a bad idea, I reckons.

//sorry, I'm just being precious.
Heh, and I'm sorry, but I'm just talking about stuff which I have very little understanding of... yet.

Crowley.

Crowley crowley crowley.

Timothy Leary.

[oops posted in the wrong thread of the conversation - SORRY]

Hi Heather!

Just so you know the discordian jibe was a wee poke at the fact that I feel the ethnicity question is a hell of a lot more important than the religion question - hence my defence that ethnicity data is really important to society yet I was quite happy to put something in the religion question which is frivolous and demeaning because I don't think religion is nearly as important.

I do like some of the ideas within discordianism but really beyond that it's just a curiosity! I'm not religious, or if I am it's certainly not any belief that matches with any set religion.

Much better than pakeha, or palangi. I even have tshirt ideas.

100% NZ HONKY

Aha, I just finished reading Tze Ming's latest blog saying exactly the same thing.

[ external link ]

I have had this discussion before with a friend of mine who worked for public health. One question I asked her was: How many years will it take for New Zealander to become a genuine ethnicity?

For example, some of my ancestors were Irish people who came to NZ when gold was found in central otago. I'm sure there are tousands of people who share a common ancestry with me. It's the ethnicity with which we most closely identify. So we tick the NZ European box in the last census.

But what happens in 200 years time when some of my decendants are filling in the census. Will New Zealander count by then? Is 350 years of living in NZ enough time to form an ethnicity? What about in 50 years time?

It's a pretty pointless debate though isn't it? Tick what you like!

//"nz european" and "new zealander" is utterly bereft of any informational value.

when you have 4million odd responses, it's also pretty easy to test for that. If there is no 'informational' value they'll collapse over it. If your sample size is 30, it's slightly more difficult...

Stats NZ seem to be mincing things up ...don't you think adding 'New Zealander' or 'Kiwi' seems to be more about how important you think the question is, as opposed to your actual ethnicity/ancestry? I mean, isn't anyone with a NZ passport automatically a Kiwi/New Zealander? If stats want to collect data on the politics of ethnicity, why not give it it's own question rather than let it skew a different set of data?

//ummm, sorry, can you rephrase? I don't quite follow. Collapse?

heh. That's very non-obvious jargon! (from an editing point of view). If you imagine group 'boundaries' as walls, then by 'collapse', it means to destroy the 'wall'. So, like if NZer = 1 and NZ European = 2, to 'collapse' them, you'd reassign them to the same value in your analysis.

//At least when people were deliberately writing in "other/kiwi" you could get a pretty accurate "pakeha" percentage by adding "nz european" to "other/kiwi".

They had 80,000+ "New Zealander", "Kiwi", and "Pakeha" write-ins last census, all of which were mapped on to NZ European.

//given the combination of the two changes to the census, any correspondence between recorded "nz european / white kiwi" statistics and reality would be purely coincidental.

There have been changes to the ethnicity question for the last FIVE censuses (before that it was a 'race' question anyway), so I think they're more worried about getting the question really right before they start worrying about asking it in the same way...

//I bet that "new zealander" percentage will end up running to about 85%.

a) I assume they've tested it (they've been ruminating over this change with a dedicated team for the last 5 years!). b) because you are allowed to have multiple ethnicities, it is likely that the information will still be meaningful. That is, if a person ticks "Chinese" and "New Zealander", then they're likely to have a different sense of identity to someone who only ticks "Chinese" or only ticks "New Zealander".

Foetus
Stats NZ aren't really interested in collecting ancestry data per se. They're interested in collecting data on people's perceptions of themselves (and to a limited extent, others' perceptions). Ancestry is only one of the criteria which they list as a contributor to ethnicity, and it's by no means primary. They're quite interested in it as a dynamic and personal process (so you could interpret that as 'political').
Further, I think they don't ask it as an open-ended question for logistical reasons (space on the form, and data processing).

//but the link between ancestry and your succeptibility to certain illnesses is pretty well established- is stats uninterested in monitoring it?

In a lot of those cases I think it's unclear whether it's your cultural identity or your ancestry per se that lead to the relation with illnesses. There are a few clearly linked genetic ones, but there's at least a reasonable amount of the variance in them that is cultural (e.g., I don't assume more maori smoke because there's something in the genes). Another tangential point is that it's relatively unusual for a large population to have a genetic susceptibility (although the Asian grouping and the going red with drinking alcohol [a dehydrogenase change?] and some stuff to do with Ashkenazim and various diseases are obvious unexamples of this). However, there are plenty of circumstances where these genetic things tend to run in relatively small familyish lines.
I'd also assume when they're collecting health-oriented data, they may take more interest in ancestry.

Would we have cheap smokes?