CEWH submission: Proposed data collection approach and content for the census

At the end of 2025, the Coalition to End Women’s Homelessness made a submission to Stats NZ on the proposed data collection approach and content for the census.

CEWH is clear that housing policy and investment must be guided by robust, comprehensive, Tiriti informed gender disaggregated data.

Without a Tiriti informed gendered lens, women’s homelessness, and more specifically wāhine Māori, will remain largely invisible in general housing policy.

In the absence of other publicly available gender-disaggregated data on housing, Census data has proven critical.

Moving away from the traditional Census approach and relying on incomplete administrative datasets as the primary source of information risks producing misleading statistics that obscure the true scale and nature of homelessness in Aotearoa and further diminish the visibility of wāhine Māori within the data system.