NZ Census capitulates - Jedi Stats for New Zealand 2006 Census

After a long debate with NZ Census over several years, and even after expressing a desire to pay for the information, it has been several months, here it is..

There are exactly 20,262 of the Jedi faith in NZ, and more than 75% of those are males. (16635 males)

Half of all Jedi are aged 15-29 years old, and 54 Jedi are over the age of 65. 1980 are children or padewan as the Jedi church prefers to call them.

Distribution around NZ regions compares fairly to their populations.

Please click the link below to view the stats in raw format as provided by the department of statistics NZ.

Please note the base information is a bit boring and we have yet to formally correlate this information with baseline stats of how many people actually live within each region defined and age cohort, before we will be able to make the more interesting conclusions about which areas of NZ have the highest concentration. However, as you can see in the data at a quick glance, there are indeed many Jedis living in all parts of the country and in all age groups and of both sexes, although males are more likely to be a Jedi than females, and typically from an age group who were children at the first release of the Star Wars movies appear to be the largest group.

It was a significant battle to get this information from the NZ statistics department. Even after a quote request was logged into the system, we were quickly dismissed. It required alot of arguing to get to the management level who eventually realised that it was an abuse of our rights to freedom of religion that this information should be denied to us. They had earlier argued that the information was not readily accessible, but considering they had already released information that "about 20000" people were of the Jedi faith persuasion, it was clear that the data had been correctly "coded" and that they merely need to query their database to obtain the data we required.

Just to reasert our position, we do not believe the NZ Statistics department should make any decision over censureship of information obtained in a census, where that information is requested by orgnisations such as ourselves, and where the data conforms to any privacy rules applied to any mainstream religion. 20000 responses is enough to provide meaningful data.

The Jedi Church is an non profit international organisation. The Jedi Church were charged $452.38 for this information by Statistics NZ. We hope this information will be proved free of charge at the next census along with all other religions in NZ.

Click Here to Read the Full Data From Statistic NZ

scroll to the last page to see the actual tabular data.

This information is published on the www.jedichurch.org website (and I sourced the data originally from NZ Census only last week)

Percentage/Region/NZ Total/Jedi
6.97%/Nelson Region/42888/2,991
3.23%/Marlborough Region/42558/1,374
0.95%/West Coast Region/31326/297
0.64%/Wellington Region/448956/2,862
0.53%/Manawatu-Wanganui Region/222423/1,185
0.48%/Auckland Region/1303068/6,270
0.44%/Waikato Region/382716/1,665
0.44%/Taranaki Region/104127/453
0.42%/Hawke's Bay Region/147783/618
0.39%/Bay of Plenty Region/257379/996
0.34%/Northland Region/148470/507
0.30%/Tasman Region/44625/135
0.23%/Gisborne Region/44499/102
0.20%/Southland Region/90873/186
0.18%/Otago Region/193800/357
0.05%/Canterbury Region/521832/270
/Area Outside Region/621/..C
0.50%/Total NZ by Territorial Authority/Area Unit/4027947/20,262

ENDS