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 wish I could take back some of the things I said and some of the things I did. But in the bigger picture, I don’t feel that it was violent and terrible. I feel like it was primarily—obviously not completely—moral, based on a vision that the government should be better, and that people could be better, and that democracy should be real.”
—Bernardine Dohrn (b. 1942)
“At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)