13/08/2026
What do you think? In the past I enjoyed working as a census enumerator, and so find the new approach of information gathering by coercion to be alarming and unethical.
If something is compulsory, it should be made easy to do. Those who don’t complete the census are those most likely to need government assistance. They are the homeless, old, mentally ill, illiterate, non-English speakers, and rural residents who already have limited telephone and internet access. I know that because they are precisely the people whom I helped in the past.
Census officials interviewed on the radio this week have explained punitive fines ($364 a day) for those who don’t complete their forms; presumably those with no money to pay will end up destitute.
That rural letters are sent ‘To the Resident’, rather than an address, strongly indicates that the last census was an abject failure and the ABS has absolutely no idea of where people live (or make camp) outside of major towns.
This census includes curious questions about sexual proclivities with a let out answer of ‘rather not say’. Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of statistics will know the integrity of a sample is instantly compromised when any part of the subject group doesn’t answer a question.
Alan Koehler has already pointed out a significant anomaly from the last census which somehow put adults still living in their parents’ home into the category of home owner.
The mayor of the shire where I live this week went out in her own time, to a village where the ABS had ‘forgotten’ to send letters to half the town, in order to help residents complete their forms!
In other rural shires where the mayor has not thought to do this, services will suffer as a consequence.
I have read a lot of old British census material, and found only one instance of an occupied house being missed in the days of proper enumerators; at the end of a terraced row on the boundary of two districts.
Perhaps AI should be called upon to do some sort of virtual census instead. It might be more accurate than this debacle.
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