With the September labour force figures due to be released later on today, the former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Bill McLennan, claims that recent bungled changes to the survey means “the results of the last six months aren’t worth the paper they’re written on”. From The AFR:
After working for the organisation for over 40 years, Bill McLennan said changes early last year to the way the data is gathered suggest the bureau has abandoned “strict methodological and operational practices” established over half a century ago.
Mr McLennan, who retired as Australian Statistician after five years in 2000, criticised the bureau for effectively papering over problems with its data. As a junior officer, he helped establish the labour force survey in the early 1960s.
“The results of the last six months aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, so why are we wasting millions of taxpayers’ money on the survey?”…
Mr McLennan… slammed the ABS’s decision to change its questionnaire without doing the due diligence of a parallel survey using the old methodology to gauge the impact of the adjustments…
“The impact of the various seasonal breaks needs to be measured separately, but there don’t seem to be any plans to do so,” Mr McLennan said. “The implication from this is that the ABS will continue to have difficulties producing believable seasonally adjusted estimates of the labour force data…
“It will take at least three years before new seasonal factors can be properly determined, but more like five years before they are stable.”
In other words, the survey’s numberwang:
