The Indicators Aotearoa public consultation

Statistics New Zealand is asking for public consultation on Indicators Aotearoa New Zealand, a consultation motivated here.

Now given my own writing on the usefulness of GDP and my concern about injustice rhetoric being used for consumption instead of facing issues that matter I would be expected to have an opinion.

Sure I do, it makes sense to ask people what outcomes they care about in order to determine what we measure and what prominence it has.  So this is very cool to see – and I’d be keen for everyone to get involved in saying what matters to them.  Let’s see what they say:

“These indicators will be designed to be independent and to paint an enduring picture of how New Zealand is tracking, and will help underpin robust decision-making for years to come,” says Ms MacPherson.

“But to shape the measures which will be included in Indicators Aotearoa New Zealand, we need your help.

“That’s why Stats NZ wants to hear from you about what you’d like to see represented in the set of indicators. You might want to see measures about the state of our health, our environment, our infrastructure, or our social connections.”

Where we have a picture we can model trade-offs, when we can discuss trade-offs between competing factors that people care about we can discuss policy.  This is useful as long as we don’t get lazy on the modelling trade-offs part of course 😉

They state that you can give a submission at the link above or email indicators@stats.govt.nz.  So why not give that a go.  I’ll be sure to think about the broad social issues that matter to me and send in my own submission at some point myself.  Neither of the links say how long we have to do this so we better be quick – quick but thoughtful of course 😉