The Australian Bureau of Statistics has blamed a “system error” in the software that it uses to redact documents for having blocked damning information about the religion question being used at this year’s Census.
Last month, the ABS provided an explanation after the Rationalist Society of Australia (RSA) complained that the statistics agency had wrongly redacted from documents obtained under freedom of information (FOI) laws an ABS statement that the Census religion question “may lead respondents to a particular response”.
In documents provided to the RSA in 2025, the ABS blacked out the information from the slide presentation that ABS executives considered at a meeting in October 2024 when they decided to revert to the 2021 question wording — ‘What is the person’s religion? — for the 2026 Census.
As reported earlier this year, the RSA was able to view the redacted text simply by copying the blacked out section from the PDF provided and then pasting it into a word-processing document.
In making a complaint to the ABS in March, the RSA said the information had been directly relevant to the FOI request and should have remained in the original documents.
Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) allows agencies to redact irrelevant information.
In a letter to the RSA last month, the ABS said:
A system error created faux redactions and obscured additional information (the black boxes not linked to a particular section of the FOI Act) which was meant to be released as per the decision on 02 May 2025.
The intended redactions and the relevant exemption provision under the FOI Act (s22) were applied based on the FOI team and the Decision-Maker’s examination of the documents and their contents. The system errors meant additional faux redactions were also applied.
The slide presentation given to the meeting of ABS executives provides further evidence that the ABS is aware of the leading nature of the Census religion question and that it produces inaccurate data.
After a two-year public consultation process raised concerns that the existing question “assumes you have a religion”, the ABS, in 2023, proposed changing the question wording — to ‘Does the person have a religion?’ — in order to “support more accurate data collection”.
In early October 2024, after the Albanese government missed multiple deadlines and the ABS cancelled a major household test planned for September 2024, ABS executives decided to revert to the 2021 question wording. Internal correspondence showed that they made the decision because they did not have enough data to assess the performance of the proposed new religion question and because they thought returning to the 2021 question would “maximise comparability” with past Censuses.
The FOI documents showed that the meeting had also considered the “public support for the change” and data accuracy versus comparability.
The decision to revert to the leading question also followed the Catholic Church’s lobbying of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to intervene and “reverse” the proposed changes to the question.
According to the Census – Not Religious? campaign – which is a campaign supported by a number of non-religious and pro-secular organisations, including the Rationalist Society of Australia – the presumptuous wording of the question significantly inflates the data in favour of religion.
Recent robust surveys show that the undercount of the non-religious could be by as much as 11 percentage points.
Read our three-part ‘The Census Files’ series.
The RSA is supporting the ‘Census – Not Religious?’ campaign, which is encouraging Australians to mark ‘No religion’ if they are not religious at the 2026 Census.
See all of the RSA’s reporting about the Census question here.
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Si Gladman is Executive Director of the Rationalist Society of Australia. He also hosts ‘The Secular Agenda’ podcast.