12.00 pm – 1.30 pm
Wednesday 19 November 2025
Via Zoom: https://massey.zoom.us/j/87871336956
Zoom passcode: PHONZ
The Panellists
Professor Richard Arnold
Richard Arnold is a Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests are in applied statistics, and include public health, statistical seismology, reliability theory, and the clustering of respondents in survey data with applications in aquaculture. He has worked on a variety of state sector projects, including working with a research consortium modelling COVID19 border risk assessment. In earlier times he was a mathematical statistician at Statistics New Zealand, and teaches courses in survey design and Official Statistics.
Len Cook
Len Cook was the Government Statistician of New Zealand from 1992 to 2000. From 2000 to 2005, he was National Statistician of the United Kingdom and Registrar-General of England and Wales. Len was a secretariat member of the Ministerial Task Force on Tax Reform (1981) and a member of the NZ Royal Commission on Social Policy (1987-88). Between 2015 and 2018, he was Families Commissioner and Chair of the board of the Superu evaluation agency. Some recent professional roles include Vice-President, International Statistics Institute (2005-2009),
President, Institute of Public Administration NZ (2009-13), and Elected Companion of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Len’s long-standing interests are in the areas of population change and public policy, public administration, retirement provision, imprisonment patterns, official statistics, and the place of science in policy.
Professor Peter Crampton
Professor Crampton is a Professor of Public Health at the Kōtahu Centre for Hauora Māori, University of Otago. He has qualifications in medicine and public health and is a Fellow of the New Zealand College of Public Health Medicine. He has an extensive career history of work in Māori and Pacific health, is a past member of the Health and Disability Review Panel, and a past Harkness Fellow.
Alistair Gray
Alistair Gray is currently a Director of Statistics Research Associates Limited (SRA), a private statistical research and consulting company. He spent 15 years at StatsNZ, interspersed with 6 years at the Institute of Statistics and Operations Research (ISOR) at VUW. He joined SRA in 2000 after it was founded by colleagues from ISOR and the Applied Mathematics Division at DSIR. One of his principal interests is statistical methodology underpinning Official Statistics especially probability based sampling, imputation, and matching. He was on the Australian Bureau of Statistics Methodology Advisory Committee for 15 years from 2000. During COVID-19 he was on the Statistical Advisory Group set up by Ministry of Health and later on 2020 joined the COVID-19 Expert Advisory Network. In the last couple of years, he has been working with Len Cook on
retaining the Census in its 2013 and earlier forms, among other quality issues with Government data collection and analysis.
Emeritus Professor Stephen Haslett
Stephen Haslett is an Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Massey University New Zealand. He was formerly Professor / Director of the Statistical Research and consulting Centre at Massey University, Professorial Fellow in the National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA) at the University of Wollongong, and Professor / Director of the Statistical Consulting Centre at the Australian National University. He began his professional career during the late 1970s, designing sample surveys in the Sample Design section at the Department of Statistics, since renamed Statistics New Zealand. In 2001 he was a National Science Foundation / American Statistical Association Senior Fellow at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washinton DC where he researched small area estimation techniques for employment. This led to his involvement in small area estimation and survey design projects for the UN World Food Programme on poverty, food security, and child nutrition and health at local level. The results are important for example in resource allocation in emergency situations. The projects model survey data at unit level and link it to census data for prediction and estimation of non-census variables collected in the surveys. Connected principally with these projects, he has worked in or for central government statistical agencies in more than two dozen countries – mainly in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, but also in
the USA, UK, and the Netherlands.
Kylie Mason
Kylie Mason is a Principal Analyst in the Environmental Health Intelligence NZ (EHINZ) team at Massey University (Wellington). She has been involved in a variety of projects, including leading the development of New Zealand’s first social vulnerability indicators for natural hazards using census data, and a number of environmental burden of disease studies. Kylie has a Master’s degree in Applied Statistics and a postgraduate certificate in public health (environmental health), and has previously worked at the Ministry of Health.
Professor Barry Milne
Barry Milne is Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences (COMPASS) in the Faculty of Arts and Education at the University of Auckland. His research focusses on analyzing quantitative data to understand health and wellbeing across the human life-course. His areas of expertise include administrative data, longitudinal studies, mental
health, inequalities, microsimulation, and child development. Barry served on the Census External Data Quality panels for the 2018 and 2023 New Zealand Censuses.
Andew Sporle
Andrew Sporle is the Managing Director of iNZight Analytics, a Māori-owned research and data analytics company. He has over three decades experience with Census data, from being a Census enumerator in 1991, leading or designing large scale projects using Census data and serving on numerous StatsNZ advisory panels including the Census 2023 External Data Quality Review Panel and the Data Ethics Advisory Group. He is also an Honorary Associate-Professor in the Statistics Department at the University of Auckland as well as having national and international roles in data and AI governance and ethics. www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-sporle/
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