Yay! The census is upon us!

I'm always torn... hide out in the bush or row to the 12 mile limit & miss the whole thing, or diligently fill in the forms with nonsense to make my mark on this year's census.

Religion: Bacchanalian Reveller? None of this Jedi shit.

Ethnicity is the big one this year, a whole lot of people want to be recorded as New Zealanders... personally, I think Pakeha would be preferable to that, NZer is just a nationality, but the word pakeha does to me, evoke pretty much the same thing as NZ Euro.

In the interests of collecting useful information for the Dept of Statistics, I think we owe it to our nation to put something sensible & relatively accurate down. If we all put New Zealander, we might as well not ask about ethnicity at all. Then I think, we can get on to arguing about other questions, like gender.

There is a little nagging suspicion in (not just) my mind, that the people advocating New Zealander don't think that say 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation Chinese say, are eligible. But maybe I'm wrong.

Technically, for me, ethnicity would be European (and don't anyone give me "but the UK isn't part of Europe!" shit.) Although I'll make a nod towards my adopted nationality & tick NZ European. Close enough.

Now, I hope no-one's jumped the gun & filled in their forms already! The whole point is to make this an accurate snapshot of tonight. What happens (as someone, perhaps at the end of the link below even, has mentioned) fills in the form & then dies before tonight? The whole census will be out by 1! You don't want to be responsible for that sort of fiasco do you?

Not that the census is necessarily that accurate anyway, go browse the last one at the Stats website, there are all sorts of anomalies, which can probably be put down to people not knowing which end their arse is at.

For instance, do you think everyone knows whether they own or rent their home? Who their landlord is? Get this, there are some 64,000 households residing in State Houses at present. The figure in the census, when it is published, will tell us that there are only about 55,000 or so. No-one knows why this is. There are bound to be other similar discrepancies.

And remember, when they come to pick up your completed forms, even if you live down a long winding zig zag path, at the end of a cul de sac, that no-one ever comes down, they will. So make sure you're wearing trousers & not smoking say, anything illegal when they can't find the front door & come around the back & surprise you. Not that that has happened to me of course.

Opinion: views on the news on Stuff.co.nz: Imagine a home where the Jedi can roam...