Statistical Services Act needs to be revised

Caption: Roko Koloma

By MATTHEW VARI

Wednesday, October 23, 2013 (Midweek Chronicle, PNG)

ACTING National Statistician Roko Koloma, made the call during the National Strategy for the Development of Statistics consultation meeting held yesterday, held at the Hideaway Hotel in Port Moresby.

He said Statistics was a fundamental tool, and that developing nations struggle to develop because of a lack of good statistics.

The National Statistics Office (NSO) was established in 1981 through the Statistical Services Act, and since then has never gone through a review.

“We need to review it, as other acts have been reviewed except the National Statistical Act.”

“We are out of the picture when most of the reviews take place, without realising that the statistical act plays a very important role for all other acts in terms of policy implementation.”

“They will eventually say that we want to monitor, we want to evaluate- but you cannot go about that without the data to do it,” he said.

He said that there was no cohesion between government agencies in terms of the statistics they had, which he said the office had a hard time obtaining, even though they were the mandated organisation for obtaining statistic.

The statistician highlighted the country’s reliance on its development partners to provide up to date statistics for them despite the existence of the National Statistics office.

“We need to access information openly, we need to start knowing which government agencies, SOEs (State owned Enterprises), provinces, and districts are responsible for statistics within their sectors.”

“There is a poor quality of analysis in the country.”

Koloma referred to the assumption the NSO was just a Census office, however, he said there were two types of statistics the office was to conduct- one being conducting the national survey once every ten years, and surveys in business areas like the Consumer Price Index (CPI), Gross 

Domestic Product (GDP) and other areas.

“A lot of our recurrent activities have been inactive, with 2001 the last time we measured the GDP of the country.”

“We have not been receiving the sufficient support we need to do our work, even the coordination between agencies is not conducive- we cannot access statistical information from government departments or agencies, without following stringent processes to obtain them.”

Calls that were supported by the Acting Secretary for National Planning, Juliana Kubak, who also called for other state agencies to support NSO, carry out its mandated function.

She said that there had been a lot of complaints about NSO, and that there was a need to review the Statistical Act, and also overhaul the office structure.