Census 2016: we don’t need it, so why persist?
Thought this was a good article - Time to give the census the flick.
Serious consideration was given by the Coalition government to ditching this year’s census. It costs an enormous amount of money (between $300 million and $400m) and yields only
high-level data with a very long time lag.
There is virtually no information that the census provides that is not available from other sources more accurately and in a more timely fashion.
We don’t need the census to tell us the size of the population. We don’t need it to tell us about the age, birthplace, marital status, educational attainment, occupation or income of the population. There are better data sources for all these variables.
I’m not sure there is a strong public-interest case for including the optional question about religious affiliation. And what about those questions on the time you spend doing housework and volunteering?
The one area of strength of the census is providing spatial data, down to the collection district level. But, even here, there are alternatives.
Mind you, it would not have been a straightforward exercise to do away with the census (as Canada has) or conduct it every 10 years (as Britain has). It is written into legislation that the census must be undertaken every five years and many pieces of legislation also refer to census figures.
Were a decision taken to do away with the 2021 census, the government should start work immediately to prepare the ground.
Having decided to go ahead with this year’s census, the central planning tendencies of politicians and bureaucrats sadly came to the fore. We could link census data with other government information. We could create big data sets, much admired by Malcolm Turnbull, and sell them to the private sector to encourage IT start-ups.
No one seems to have considered the blowback from these breaches of trust and privacy of using census figures in this way (including the retention of names and addresses for four years).
And, let’s face it, the rationales given by the public officials have been pretty lame. We need to keep names and addresses for four years to estimate indigenous life expectancy.
And it will help with estimating the extent of homelessness. Maybe I’m just a dumb blonde, but do homeless people have addresses?
Even leaving aside the disabling of the census website on Tuesday night — we’re not allowed to call it a hack — the whole point of the census was being seriously oversold by politicians.
Having very easily filled in his census form online, the Prime Minister tweeted that “it is so important for planning better government services and investment for the future”.
Oh please, no one believes this. After all, the census has been going on for more than 100 years and it doesn’t seem to have done much for planning better government services or investment for the future.
This is just another example of Turnbull’s poor instincts — good on the vision thing but very bad on ensuring effective implementation.
