Launch of The New Zealand Official Yearbook 2006

Greetings everyone and in the languages of the realm of New Zealand - New Zealand the Cook Islands Niue and Tokelau - Kia Ora, Kia Orana, Fakalofa lahi atu Taloha Ni.

In particular may I greet you Hon Clayton Cosgrove, Minister of Statistics, Brian Pink, Government Statistician, Hon David Caygill, Chair of Advisory Committee Official Statistics, Paul Bateman (of publishers David Bateman), Paul Cavanagh (Editor of the Yearbook), distinguished guests otherwise, ladies and gentlemen.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to Government House Wellington. 

Some of you here this evening are reasonably regular visitors to Government House ( I instance Brian Easton and Martin Matthews) but for others, it may be your first visit.  I hope you all will enjoy this event tonight in these historic surroundings. 

History is something that this House and the book that is about to be launched have in common.  By the time that this Government House was built in 1910, the Yearbook had been around for quite some time.  In fact, the Yearbook traces its origins to a book the full title of which was something of a mouthful: "The Official Handbook of New Zealand - a collection of papers by experienced colonists on the colony as a whole and in the several provinces."  This book was edited by Julius Vogel, later Sir Julius Vogel, the Premier of New Zealand.  It was printed in England in 1875 and largely circulated there.  The book had well-written articles and was generously illustrated with woodcuts and photographs.  And that, I propose, is what makes the yearbook such an engaging read, through its many editions since and right up to the present day. 

While statistics form the backbone of the book's content, the New Zealand Official Yearbook is a lot more than just a collection of facts and figures.  I think of it as some kind of mirror, a mirror with special properties, reflecting not only an accurate picture of ourselves as we are today but one which shows us where we have come from and how we have changed over the years.

And change there has been.  Take communications - a hot topic today with the internet revolutionising the way we obtain and provide information.  We take effortless communications for granted these days and we tend to forget that this was not always so.  In the time of my predecessor Lord Galway, for example, communication with London was a costly business. On the eve of World War II in 1938, the cost of sending 300 words from Wellington to London by telegraph, in 1999 dollar terms, was $1,315.00. Today, one can email the same number of words for less than two cents. 

The New Zealand yearbook 2006 has a number of suchlike vignettes.  Like the story of one Miss Mary Bumby, a New Zealand resident even before the arrival of Lieutenant-Governor Hobson.  She was the sister of an English missionary and in 1839, she became the first person to successfully ship honey bees to New Zealand when she brought two basket hives of bees to Northland. More than 100 years later, in 1950, beekeeper numbers in New Zealand peaked at 7,000.  In fact, the profession managed to attract some big names - Sir Edmund Hillary, Member of the Order of New Zealand, springs to mind in that regard.

The New Zealand Yearbook also gives us glimpses into the future.  It reports that NIWA, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, predicts that by 2099 Wellington's annual mean temperature will have risen by up to 3.8 degrees Celsius - and that the region's annual mean rainfall will be up to 32 percent higher than it is now.

It is this variety that makes the New Zealand Yearbook such a fascinating proposition.  Flicking through its more than 500 pages, one simply can't help becoming engrossed in reading about our nation, our people, our industry, our flora and fauna or our international relations.  In this regard I cannot overcome giving honourable mention to an old judicial colleague who was a great character and who used to delight in writing in pencil in other peoples' books.  I can remember coming into my room at the Henderson District Court to find my friend Judge Dick Kearney having written in the Year Book into which he had been engrossed whilst waiting for me and in which he had written in pencil on a page of statistics "Faulty arithmetic was quite common in New Zealand in the 1960s"

Perhaps there should also be an entry about the book itself which has changed so much over the years.  It has always been an attractive publication.  Now, in its 105th edition, the publishers have done a beautiful job with lots of wonderful photos and colourful charts which are a feast for the eyes as well as the mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, the publication of a new and updated New Zealand Official Yearbook is an essential and much anticipated item in the publishing calendar of our country. 

I want to pay tribute to all the people who have worked so hard to bring this latest edition to fruition.  And I want to thank Statistics New Zealand for providing such a valuable service to our nation.

I now invite The Hon Clayton Cosgrove, Minister of Statistics, to speak but before I do so I will discharge my duty and declare the New Zealand Official Yearbook 2006 officially launched.

Tena koutou katoa.