Even the official information on ethnicity is suspect, writes Dunedin City Councillor Hilary Calvert.
There has been outrage over the linking of real estate company names and Chinese house purchases.
But our official statistics are not much better. Statistics NZ collects its most comprehensive information from the five-yearly census, the latest information being from 2013.
The question about ethnicity asks what ethnic group you belong to, and allows you to choose more than one.
What is not clear from the information generally put out for public consumption is that your answer is then moderated using a hierarchy of ethnicity.
Buried in the Statistics NZ website are little snippets which refer to the priority system.
For example: ''Note: The Maori ethnic group population comprises those people who specified `Maori' as either their sole ethnic group, or as one of several ethnic groups, in the 2013 Census''.
If you chose Maori as any of your groups, then you are coded as Maori.
The list is hierarchical in that you will be coded into whichever you choose which is nearest the top of the list.
Not only therefore does the government take it upon itself to decide the order of the list, but it puts you into only one category, deciding for itself which of your ethnic groups is the most important.
This has the effect of choosing one of your chosen groups, one of your family ethnicities, ahead of others.
Statistics NZ has produced a QuickStats sheet on Dunedin which describes how we compare statistically with national averages. It divides our major ethnic groups into five, starting at the top with European.
It also describes the percentage born overseas, but without any ethnicity attached to that.
There are warnings at the bottom of the sheet about excluding unidentifiable responses and says figures have been rounded to protect confidentiality but nowhere does it tell you it has made any choice about the answers we gave to the basic question.
For health purposes the hierarchical list has 21 ethnic groups, starting at the top with Maori, Tokelauan, Fijian, Niuean, and finishing with Other, Other European, European (not further defined) and at the bottom NZ European.
For other purposes, information about whether people belong to an indigenous people category may be used, bringing in another set of possible confusions.
The so-called ethnic groups are also suspect. While the question used to be about race, we have now evolved to the point where we call the question ethnicity, which is defined as having a shared name, common cultural elements, a community of interest, a shared sense of ancestry or origins and a common place of geographic origin.
This has allowed us to have European as a category, as well as Other followed by Other European.
This question is still a subjective one chosen by the person who fills in a census form. When statistics are quoted, they are often described as the proportion of people in New Zealand who are part of a group, for example Maori, Pacific Island or Chinese. None of these, except possibly European New Zealand, suggest whether the person is an immigrant or not.
The information we are getting shows none of the richness of our society and the multicultural mix we love to be a part of. What it encourages is xenophobia about races.
This can exhibit itself in suspicion of immigrants or a belief that of the people in the least attractive statistics, some ethnicities are overrepresented.
Recently, the Dunedin City Council took an opportunity to make a submission on what questions should be asked in the next census.
We could have asked for openness and transparency about the ''moderations'' made to the raw data.
My proposal in this regard failed for want of a seconder, probably because councillors were unaware of what Statistics NZ actually does with the data.
This was a missed opportunity. If we are going to have discussions about which people are genetically susceptible to diseases, or which people are charged with offences more than others, or which people are buying houses in Auckland, then surely it is time we sorted out who is in the categories which are of interest or concern.
We need to actually know whether people are immigrants, of mixed ethnicity, and whether any particular mixtures are giving rise to more government interventions.
Guessing country of origin and whether someone is a New Zealander based on their surname highlights the unhelpfulness of jumping to conclusions.
Good information with straightforward use of the answers to questions would be useful to all of us.
