A Liberal politician calling on the federal government to block proposed changes removing the inherent bias from the Census religion question says it is vital that data can be comparable over a long time period.

In the South Australian Parliament last month, upper house member Jing Lee (pictured) also warned that those wanting to “highlight growing secularism in Australian society” may “skew” the results of the revised question.

Despite the pleas of faith groups and Liberal figures for a government intervention, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has confirmed it is going ahead with testing of the proposed new religion question for the 2026 Census.

In a letter to the ‘Census21 – Not Religious?’ coalition, the ABS said a mixture of testing methods would now be adopted, along with stakeholder consultation, before finalising the text of the religion question.

Instead of asking  “What is the person’s religion?”, the ABS is proposing to remove the bias and ask “Does the person have a religion?”.

In a speech to a motion in the South Australian Legislative Council, Ms Lee called on the federal government to reject changes to the religion question, arguing that faith groups relied on having a “consistent measure and comparable data”.

“The proposed changes threaten to weaken the accuracy of the data collected in the 2026 census and may be skewed by those seeking to highlight growing secularism in Australian society,” she said.

“Accurate data that can be compared with past years is essential for integrity, accuracy and consistency for multicultural and religious groups to plan the support services and activities they provide to their communities.

“…the proposed changes will weaken the accuracy of the data and affect how the data can be compared across the years. I have highlighted earlier that data on religion has been in the census data since 1911. This historical data provides substantial evidence over a long period of time and cannot be underestimated.”

Ms Lee also argued that the new question would “disengage religion from culture and identity” – an argument also pushed by the Catholic Church.

“There is concern that asking ‘Do you have a religion?’ changes the question to one about whether a person holds religious beliefs and will erode the sense of religious heritage,” she said.

In a statement this week, Michael Dove, the spokesperson for the ‘Census21 – Not Religious?’ coalition, said Australians expected that the Census would deliver accurate and detailed data on religion to provide a stronger evidence base to inform policy and decision-making.

“Given that the purpose of the Census is to take a demographic snapshot of the country and its evolving culture, we believe current and accurate data is more important than continuing to compare flawed data with flawed data,” he said.

The proposed question being tested also removes the pick list of a select number of faiths and requires respondents to tick ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and then provides a box for religious people to write in their religious affiliation.

Ms Lee said the previous pick list was for “more convenient” and warned that the write-in box would cause problems for culturally and linguistically diverse communities that speak languages other than English as their first language.

At Senate estimates in June, however, the ABS revealed that it had been faith groups that complained about listing some affiliations but not others in the pick list.

The Rationalist Society of Australia is among the pro-secular groups behind the ‘Census21 – Not Religious?’ coalition.

If you want to support our work, please make a donation or become a member.

Si Gladman is Executive Director of the Rationalist Society of Australia. He also hosts ‘The Secular Agenda’ podcast.

Image: Jing Lee (Facebook)