ECSSN and NZSA webinar: Are Statisticians Sufficiently Engaged with Public Policy?

ECSSN and NZSA present: Are Statisticians Sufficiently Engaged with Public Policy by Dennis Trewin AO FASSA.

The presentation describes six examples of poor statistical practice in public policy. The first example is the lack of a COVID Information Plan for Australia resulting in deficient information being used to understand the progress of the pandemic and the best public policy responses.

The second example is inappropriate criteria being used for determining when to ease COVID restrictions as vaccination rates increased because they ignored the impact of uncertainty in the modelling assumptions.

The third example is the machine learning algorithms used in Robodebt which were flawed, used inappropriate data and did not incorporate measures of uncertainty.

The fourth example is the opinion polls used in the 2019 Australian election which got the result wrong because they relied on unrepresentative samples with inadequate weighting adjustments for this deficiency.

The fifth example is from USA where the salaries of teachers (and even their continued employment) was based on the performance of their students using regression models that were invalid for the purpose.

The sixth and more positive example is the use of purchasing power parities to influence two different global debates on poverty reduction and climate change.

The presentation will conclude with suggestions on what the Australian statistical profession should do to address the lack of statistical thinking in many policy areas.

Bio: Dennis Trewin AO FASSA

Dennis was trained as a mathematical statistician but had 40 years of executive
management experience in official statistics in Australia and New Zealand. He was the
Australian Statistician from 2000 to 2007. He has also been an Electoral Commissioner and an Associate Commissioner at the Productivity Commission. He has chaired and been a member of Boards/Councils in the superannuation and university sectors and the Policy and Advocacy Committee of the Academy of Social Sciences. Until recently, he was also the Chair of the Australian Mathematics Trust. He is a Past President of the International Statistical Institute, the International Association of Survey Statisticians, and the Statistical Society of Australia. He has been an Editor of the International Statistical Review. He has been awarded the Order of Australia and Centenary Medal for his contribution to statistics. He won the Smart Australian (Society category) award by the Bulletin in 2004.