Vision
The departments vision is "an informed society using official statistics", hoping to be "your first source of information for making key decisions" and says on its website that it "leads the collection and publicising of key information on nearly everything."
In its statement of intent, it lists statistical excellence, integrity, confidentiality and data security, leading, connecting, and communicating as its values. It says on its website: "Our highest priority is to produce relevant, accurate, and timely data with useful in-depth analysis. We aim to continually improve our technical and quality standards to foster a professional organisation and provide leadership for the Official Statistics System."
Confidentiality isn't only a policy chosen by the department, but required by law. A section of the Statistics Act 1975 reads "No information from an individual schedule is to be separately published or disclosed, except as authorised by the Statistics Act (the Act permits others to see information from an individual schedule, but only when it is in a form that prevents identification of the respondent concerned, and then only under strict security conditions). This means government can't abuse personal information from a census by revealing (or threatening to reveal it) for dubious purposes. A particular person's income responses can't be handed over to a tax collection agency, for example.
The agency maintains an open copyright policy stating that "information obtained from Statistics New Zealand may be freely used, reproduced, or quoted unless otherwise specified" with the caveat that "in all cases Statistics New Zealand must be acknowledged as the source."
A training program was established to encourage college graduates to consider a career at the agency. This program is called the Graduate Leadership Development Programme (gLDP, sometimes gDLP). It features social and technical support networks, monthly workshops, peer-mentoring, action learning groups, team corporate projects, and rotations through different departments. It seeks graduates skilled at communicating and analyzing and working with people, and hires approximately ten to fifteen graduates each year.
Read more about this topic: Statistics New Zealand
Famous quotes containing the word vision:
“I’ve been cursed for delving into the mysteries of life. Perhaps death is sacred, and I’ve profaned it. Oh, what a wonderful vision it was. I dreamed of being the first to give to the world the secret that God is so jealous of, the formula for life. Think of the power, to create a man. And I did, I did it, I created a man. And who knows, in time I could have trained him to do my will. I could have bred a race, I might even have found the secret of eternal life.”
—William Hurlbut (1883–?)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)