New Zealand has solved one of the great puzzles of modern government. A Bill currently before Parliament abolishes the census and declares its replacement to also be a census, only annual and therefore better.
 
Since the 1850s, this exercise required statisticians to ask every person in the country where they live, how many people they live with, what languages they speak, what faiths, if any, they observe, and much more. The results were invaluable but increasingly expensive.
 
The 2023 census cost $326 million, roughly $63 per person counted, assuming they were counted, which not all of them were.
 
Naturally, the solution is not to improve the census. Rather, it is to stop asking people things and instead look up what government agencies already know about them. Then publish the results every year. Then call it a census.
 
Previously New Zealand had one census every five years. From 2030, it will have one every year. The mathematics speak for themselves, though whether the mathematics reflect the actual population is a separate question, which the legislation addresses by not addressing it.
 
What the new annual census will not do is count households. Administrative records track individuals, and individuals, when they go home at night, become administratively invisible. The government knows a great deal about you. It knows rather less about who you are having dinner with.
 
This gap is flagged as unresolved by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in the regulatory documents supporting the Bill. It is resolved in the Bill itself through the mechanism of not appearing in the Bill.
 
People who interact less frequently with government systems will now be estimated rather than counted. These tend to be precisely the people most in need of accurate counting. The government suggests this is an opportunity for tailored solutions, to be developed in due course.
 
The traditional census addressed such problems through door-knocking backed by legal compulsion. That, too, is being repealed.
 
Former Government Statistician Len Cook has compared administrative data to driving by the rear-vision mirror. The government's elegant refinement is to remove the mirror entirely, confirm that the view was always adequate and classify the result as an improvement in visibility.
 
The 2023 census, imperfect, under-resourced, the last of its kind, will anchor the new system until 2031.
 
Every year, without fail, New Zealand will know approximately where it stands.