NZ Engine

Source: Radio New Zealand

A unique trove of information for measuring the impact of government services on millions of New Zealanders is sitting on “old and increasingly unstable” technology. It is hard to use and badly in need of an upgrade – but the Integrated Data Infrastructure system – run by Stats NZ – is also crucial to the government’s overarching social investment approach because it gives answers that cannot be found anywhere else – as long as you can coax them out of it.

The message read like the sort of warning that is sent when e-mail storage runs low: “We currently have 1% capacity, and this is impacting all users.”

The e-mail – sent by Stats NZ last Wednesday – was talking about its main “sandpit” – or testbed for researchers – inside a system so valuable anybody who wants to use it has to sign up to a lifetime secrecy pledge.

Stats NZ told the researchers to dump their old data tables in the Integrated Data Infrastructure system (IDI), adding it was going on a “clean-up” of old accounts because its budget stretched to 550 researchers, not the 1000 who have signed on.

Statistics Minister Shane Reti has called the national system “dated and constrained”, and the situation is especially fraught when the government is relying on evidence-driven changes to social programmes.

“The IDI was developed in 2011 and is still in prototype form,” Stats NZ told Treasury late last year.

“Its capacity has been exceeded and it is not future-proofed to handle the increase in demand for person-level data and analytics.”

Another briefing to Reti in July 2025, newly released to RNZ, said: “While the IDI is a critical tool to help accelerate social investment, its ageing infrastructure and complex user experience need to be upgraded before it is ready to support the Social Investment Fund.”

It was “clunky and slow”, with high technical barriers, the minister was told.

‘Incredibly difficult for them to actually find useful information’

Stats NZ has also told ministers it had made some effort to improve the vital system over the years.

But this was clearly not enough and a lot more was needed, according to the Reti briefings.

He has told his officials to move “at pace” on an overhaul, he told RNZ.

The officials had got as far as a preliminary business case going before Cabinet a few weeks ago.

Meantime, immediate work was continuing to make sure the system was usable and secure, Reti said.

The task is daunting – while Stats NZ is already working on a new tech platform for the IDI, there are 15 billion rows of data, which can not be found anywhere else.

Finding it at all within the datasets could be inordinately difficult, according to Gisborne researcher Malcolm Mersham.

“It is pretty clunky and very challenging to find the data,” Mersham said.

Mersham is research and insights leader at Trust Tairāwhiti in Gisborne, which wanted to mine loads of data – including health, economic and household stats – to set a baseline measure of the happiness of the locals.

“The reason we went to the IDI is because publicly that information wasn’t available for us in Tai Rāwhiti,” with data typically lumped in with Hawke’s Bay.

However, they struggled to get into the IDI at all.

“There’s only really a few that can sort of navigate the research project piece.”

They needed expert help to apply, then more expertise from someone familiar with the labyrinth – and who knew some coding to unlock its secrets.

“For any person from the streets or average Joe, it would be incredibly difficult for them to actually find useful information about their communities,” Mersham said.

Ultimately they did not find what they wanted.

“We’re poor, we’re Māori, we’ve got a lot of deficit kind of data … So, this is like if you get a traffic fine, it’ll pop up.

“The [government administrative] admin data is really sort of output of activity that government does to you, if that makes sense.”

They instead needed measures of whether people were happy and connected.

While their IDI project did not get there, it pointed them in the right direction – creating their own regional well-being survey, which is now in its fourth year, Mersham said.

They have found high levels of happiness and great connectedness, even where incomes are low.

“We would love to be able to publish that into the IDI.

“I think the future of the IDI, particularly with these upgrades, is what I’d like to see is the ability… to absorb datasets outside of just the admin data from government.”

Capacity pressure outside sandpits

At Auckland University, social sciences professor Barry Milne received the Stats NZ ‘1 percent capacity’ email while he was using the IDI on a project that looked at the impact of acquired brain injury on mental health.

“Once you get used to it, I think it’s easy to use,” Milne told RNZ.

But he said it was “creaky … I get the sense it’s kind of just being patched up a little bit to keep up with the demand for it”.

Parts of the IDI got a $1.4m patch-up in the eight months to June 2025, somewhat improving access.

“My sense is it needs a kind of complete restructure,” Milne said.

Government agencies have used the IDI in simulations to research policy change and monitor outcomes, such as Treasury’s tax and welfare model; MSD’s social outcomes modelling; and Oranga Tamariki’s children’s well-being model. Other projects have assessed how women’s pay is impacted by taking time off to raise children and men’s pay if a prostate cancer diagnosis comes late.

“It’s still really, really good,” Milne said.

It was the envy of research colleagues overseas, who could not believe he paid just $500 for access, and who often had even clunkier data systems to deal with, he added.

Stats NZ said the $1.4m built a sandpit just for Social Investment Agency researchers, taking the pressure off other shared space.

In June it also set up two additional sandpits for high demand users.

The real capacity pressure was on the infrastructure and data processing, despite “significant improvements and efficiency gains” in recent years, it said.

“We are limited to updating the IDI three times a year, and we have a limited number of new datasets that can be added,” Stats NZ said.

“This is one of the many challenges we would seek to address with investment in infrastructure upgrades.”

Risks in the fix

But Stats NZ has a long way to go to fix what it called a “world-leading system” and the country’s “only source of high-quality, de-identified, integrated data”.

The briefings showed the data being put into it from other agencies was “poor quality, not in a standardised format and missing in critical areas”.

But Professor Tahu Kukutai of Te Ngira Institute for Population Research said fixing that could be hard, because these other agencies might not help enough.

She said another question was around how much public trust existed in the government’s recent move to rely more on ‘administrative data’ – which has put an end to Censuses as we know them – and records its interactions with individual citizens, for everything from school and GP enrolment to speeding tickets.

“Māori trust in Stats NZ isn’t great,” she said, after a “failure” to implement Māori data governance and other measures.

‘The IDI will remain secure’

Treasury told ministers in late 2024 the IDI was an example of “inflexible and difficult to use infrastructure which cause inefficiencies and security risk within their system”.

At the public face, the assessments can be rosier.

The Social Investment Agency (SIA) – set up last year with former police commissioner Andrew Coster at its head – said: “The IDI is a world-leading resource with a great breadth and depth of data. Researchers can use it to analyse populations and investigate the impact of services and programmes on people’s lives.”

More than most agencies, the SIS needs the IDI to exhibit reliability.

But Reti told RNZ the data system was old so its “processes for data integration and analysis are slow and require manual support”.

“Stats NZ have assured me that with the immediate work underway using time-limited funding, researchers and decision-makers will continue to access the data they need and the IDI will remain secure.

“However, significant work is required to deliver the infrastructure upgrades needed to ensure our data infrastructure can scale-up in the long term.

“This is a complex undertaking, but I have made my expectation clear to officials that this project is to continue at pace and a long-term solution must be in place to support the government’s programme of work,” Reti said.

Mersham was hoping the officials will ask him what the revamped system should look like.

For those based in Gisborne, one physical barrier was that researchers could only use the IDI in a Stats NZ-run data lab.

The barriers needed to drop, Mersham said, and official papers also mentioned this.

“But I also appreciate it is a big machine,” he said. “I can totally appreciate where they find themselves right now.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

An advocacy organisation says it receives calls from people covertly asking for help to avoid offending – but despite evidence that programmes work, resources to help are thin.

When The Detail ran a podcast episode about how Customs tries to stop child sexual exploitation material at our borders, our listeners wanted to know what happens to the perpetrators.

In today’s episode, The Detail talks to two experts about the next steps, after the material is found, and what needs to change in New Zealand’s approach to handling the crisis.

Tim Houston is manager of the digital child exploitation team at the Department of Internal Affairs. He says that when he and his team are searching through evidence of child sexual exploitation, they aren’t just looking to support the prosecution of an offender – they’re also looking for material featuring unknown victims.

“It’s not safe to assume that offenders are only looking at material – we go into all of our investigations with the front-of-mind thought that there is also a chance that they are physically offending against a child,” he says.

Houston says people charged with possessing child sexual abuse material face up to a decade behind bars, while those found guilty of creating or distributing the material face up to fourteen years.

There’s no minimum sentence for either charge and many feel the terms of imprisonment don’t reflect the severity of the crime, or the lasting harm they cause.

Eleanor Parkes is the national director for ECPAT NZ, an organisation that works to end child sexual exploitation. She says that while she agrees sentences should reflect the severity of the crime, we need a broader approach to fixing the problem – not just prison time.

“If we’re going to look at what the evidence says around this problem we really need to rewind and we need to be looking much earlier than just at convictions,” she says.

Parkes can understand why people feel that sentencing is too light.

“The harm that these crimes cause is profound, and it is lasting, but we also have to be honest about what keeps children safe, we can’t just be looking to sentencing to make ourselves feel better or feel we’re keeping the community safe.”

In today’s episode, The Detail speaks to Parkes about what needs to change in the way we approach perpetrators of child exploitation, as well as to Tim Houston, who explains what happens once his team has been alerted to an offence.

“As an example, we conduct a search warrant, we seize a phone as part of that search warrant, that phone goes back to our forensic lab where it is analysed using specialised digital forensic tools,” he says.

When asked whether offenders have a chance of full rehabilitation, Houston says it’s a sliding scale.

“We have encountered people where when they’ve been interviewed it evokes that kind of ‘hairs on the back of the neck stand up’ and we’ve also encountered people that have been incredibly remorseful, [they] genuinely want to understand the reasons why they’ve offended and genuinely get help.

“We need to approach every investigation with an open mind about who we’re dealing with.”

But Parkes says a lack of resources means accessing help is difficult, especially for people who haven’t offended (or haven’t been caught offending) as support programs are often filled by court-mandated participants.

She says ECPAT is frequently contacted by people concerned about the direction their sexual preferences are headed.

“They call and they say they’ve ‘accidentally’ stumbled across some content online … and that they’re just wanting to report it and in fact they’re trying to establish to what extent what they’re experiencing is normal or really abnormal, they want to know how much trouble they might get in if they try and seek help for it, they might be trying to figure out where they can safely seek help for it,” she says.

Parks says the programs are effective and people who seek help before they’ve offended have a much higher rehabilitation rate, and there should be more investment into preventing offending in the first place.

“That means creating accessible specialist services where people who are at risk of offending can safely seek help before further harm occurs.

“It means properly funding treatment programs in prisons and in the community that are proven to reduce reoffending, and ensuring that when people are released that they are supported and monitored to integrate safely.”

Where to get help

[www.stop.org.nz Stop]: South Island – Email info@stop.org.nz or call 03 353 0257

[www.wellstop.org.nz WellStop]: Lower North Island – Email info@wellstop.org.nz or call 04 566 4745

[www.safenetwork.org.nz Safe Network]: Northern North Island – Email info@safenetwork.org.nz or call 09 377 9898

Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here.

You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Kaitāia is reeling from the violent death of a man described as “an absolute legend” in business circles and as a generous, “relentlessly optimistic” advocate for his hometown by his friends.

Monty Knight, who turned 80 earlier this year, died at his home just outside Kaitāia on Sunday afternoon.

Police said they found him critically injured after responding to reports of an assault, and arrested a 57-year-old woman a short time later.

She had since been charged with murder.

Among those shocked by his death is Colin Kitchen, a Kaitāia community stalwart, former fire chief and newly elected regional councillor.

Kitchen said he had known Knight for more than 60 years.

“He was a go-to person, a real people’s person. He was a generous guy whose door was always open. A clever bugger too,” he said.

“He’s going to be sadly missed. I feel so stunned, shocked, sad and devastated, hearing that news. It’s very, very sad.”

Former Far North mayor John Carter, who lived just north of the town, was also struggling to come to terms with Knight’s death.

“He was a very community-minded person who’s done a tremendous amount for the community. A very successful businessman of course, which has enabled him to do so. But he’s been very generous with his time and support.”

Northland Chamber of Commerce deputy chairman Tim Robinson described Knight as a tireless entrepreneur and “a larger-than-life character who lit up any room he walked into”.

“He was an absolute legend from a business perspective. He loved Kaitāia. He was so immensely proud of it as a town, and as a part of the Far North where he lived,” he said.

“The thing that always struck me about him was that he was an incredibly positive optimist and a serial entrepreneur. He was always looking for new opportunities and he always believed that Kaitāia was a town that could punch above its weight.”

Robinson said that was borne out by Knight’s stellar business career, which started with a tiny record shop on Commerce Street he called Monty’s Disc Inn.

He then expanded into electronics, appliances and beds, took over his parents’ Kaitāia jewellery store, and opened another in Kerikeri.

He also started a winery, Okahu Estate, which won awards within New Zealand and overseas.

“And all of them were very, very successful businesses. So it speaks volumes in terms of being a very smart, astute businessman, but also his relentlessly positive and optimistic attitude to everything.”

Robinson said they also bonded over things other than business.

“I knew the man for 30-plus years and I shared his great love of wine. So when he started Okahu Estate, it was kind of music to my ears.”

Knight somehow found time to be elected to the Far North District and Northland Regional councils, and had a couple of tilts at the Far North mayoralty.

He also contested last month’s district council election but did not win a seat.

Ian Walker, another prominent Kaitāia businessman, described him as an “iconic personality” of the Far North.

He said their paths had crossed often since he moved to Kaitāia more than 30 years ago, but he knew of Knight long before that.

Walker recalled watching Knight on national TV when he represented the Far North in the Telethon fundraising broadcasts of the 1970s and 80s.

Knight’s quirky humour plus his fondness for clowning around and funny hats made him a standout during the marathon TV shows.

A natural entertainer, Knight was also frequently on the radio around the Far North.

“It’s a real shame for somebody who’s contributed to the colour of Kaitāia for such a long time to pass the way he did. It is unfair and disappointing and saddening,” he said.

In 2012, during one of Knight’s short-lived attempts at semi-retirement, Walker purchased the appliance store 100 percent Monty Knight and the local Beds R Us franchise from him.

During last month’s election campaign, Knight said he had tried retiring but found it “too boring”.

Colin Kitchen praised the emergency service personnel who tried to save Knight on Sunday.

He said every police officer, medic and volunteer firefighter called to his home would have known him personally, making a tough job even harder.

“And the scene, it wasn’t good. So I just want to shout out to them and say thank you. You guys are there doing the mahi in people’s time of need, and unfortunately, they couldn’t help Monty this time.”

Kitchen said a date had yet to be chosen for Knight’s funeral, but it was likely to be this coming weekend and certain to be huge.

Meanwhile, the woman accused of his murder was remanded in custody when she appeared before a Justice of the Peace in the Kaitāia District Court on Monday afternoon.

She appeared calm and was dressed in a causal jumper during the brief appearance.

Her name and all identifying details were suppressed until her next appearance, which would be in the High Court at Whangārei on 5 December.

The judge issued a non-contact order for a number of witnesses who had yet to be spoken to by police.

She did not seek bail.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand