Census.

Just finished filling it out, and its made me really angry for lots of reasons. Lets go through it by question and pick out some of the problems, shall we?

Question 3. Are you male or female? – This has had a huge campaign around it so don’t need to go into detail. But in brief – gender binary doesn’t exist, so lets stop pretending it does.

Solution: tick both boxes, as promoted by the two ticks campaign. Demand more options for next year – at the very minimum, an “other” box with a space to write in.

Question 11: Which ethnic group do you belong to? – The first option is NZ European, followed by Māori, Samoan, Chinese, Indian, etc.

This really astounded me. It is incredibly racist that NZ European is a category, while NZ Māori, NZ Chinese, etc are not. As if people of European descent somehow have a greater claim to NZer-ness. What about the Chinese people whose ancestors have been here since the 1860s? And of course the Māori people, tangata whenua of this land, who were here several hundred years before anyone else?!

I also think it would be helpful to distinguish between ethnicity and nationality, as these are completely different. My ethnicity is Pākehā (some would say European); my nationality is NZer. Many people of other ethnicities are also NZers. Others aren’t. This census does not distinguish between a person of Chinse descent whose family arrived in 1860 (and identifies as a NZer); and a Chinese person who came to live in NZ last year (and does not) – yet it does distinguish between a Pākeha who arrived in 1860 and a Dutch person who came last year.

I can’t see any explanation for this other than very deeply entrenched institutionalised racism.

Solution: I crossed out NZ European and wrote Pākehā. It’s the least I could do – doubt it will help much. It would be cool to get a campaign happening around this for next time, as it is a very serious issue that strikes at the heart of racism and colonisation in NZ.

Question 18: What is your religion? No option for atheist, which is not the same thing as “no religion”.

Solution: Not sure whether its better to pick “no religion” or “other” and write atheist. I suspect that the latter will be recorded as being a religion, adding to the total number of religious people, so unlikely to be helpful.

Question 19: Who do you live with? – More gender binary.

Question 23: Marital/civil union status. They only care about marriages and civil unions, not any other type of relationship, whether you have a girlfriend/boyfriend/lover/partner/etc/or several. Also don’t care how many times you have been married.

Question 25: If you are female, how many babies have you given birth to? Gender binary and stereotyping again. What if you are male but you used to be female, and have given birth? Why does it assume females have a stronger connection to babies than males do?

Questions 32-41: work.

So many problems here. Partly because I just started uni, and it asks me about the work I did last week, and the work I do “usually”, assuming it’s the same (question 40). It also assumes that my paid employment is the most important thing in my life – not my studies, or my unpaid internship.

By asking about the job I worked most hours in, it is ignoring the fact that I did 10 hours in one caregiving job, and about 12 hours collectively in 3 separate cleaning jobs. In fact lots of low-paid workers are have 2 or 3 jobs, doing the same or different things, and by only asking about one, lots of work people do will be completely invisible.

Question 41 only cares about how I got to my paid employment. Not to my unpaid internship, or to uni, or to the bank, or home again. I ticked “did not go to work” and “bicycle” – but really, if they wanted to know about transport, they could have phrased this heaps better.

Question 45: If unemployed, if a paid job had been available, would you have started last week? – Well, maybe it would depend on what the job was. Why the assumption that all unemployed people will either leap at the chance of whatever shitty job WINZ throws at them, or be lazy dole bludgers?

Ok, rant over. I know lots of people are feeling the same, so probably preaching to the converted anyway. Bring on the next census with a new government, and see if it asks us slightly more useful questions, which allow people to express who they actually are.