Thank you.
I have the policy paper by the OECD council on good statistical practices, which I'm referring to. One of the parts of this is a commitment to the quality of statistical outputs and processes, dealing with timeliness, punctuality, relevance, accuracy, credibility, coherence, and comparability. It's analyzing data over time and trends, while of course making sure that people can then relate to it. I think the critical part, as we look to the future, of all data analysis is to make sure that it's in a machine-readable form and it's open data, so that people can take a look at it.
It becomes a way for individuals to be able to mine the data and use it in ways that we haven't even imagined yet. I think that's the critical part. Sometimes we just think that what we have is an obtrusive kind of form. As a farmer and a teacher, I know that when the form comes out on May 10 and someone is right in the middle of working 30 days of 20-hours each, it's difficult to have the time to complete that mandatory long-form ag census to grab all of that data. But it's more a case of once you have it, what can we do with it? Who has the ability to go in and purchase the data if they need to and disseminate reports from it?
I'm just wondering. The report talks about ensuring that there's “user-friendly data access and dissemination”, and that's a critical component of it. The final part says, “this also entails a commitment to respond to major misinterpretations of data by users.” I refer back to when, during the recent elections, we had something called “vote compass”, and our national broadcaster decided this would be a good thing to help people decide what their thoughts were or where they would be. I still have people in therapy from when they found out they were Liberals.
Anybody can use statistics for their own purposes, and I think it's critical that we look at it.
I'm just wondering if you could, in the short time that is remaining—or the zero time that is remaining—