Executives of the Australian Bureau of Statistics were aware that the biased Census question about religious affiliation “may lead respondents to a particular response” when they opted to re-use it for the 2026 Census, it has been revealed.
A document obtained under freedom of information (FOI) laws by the Rationalist Society of Australia had redacted this information, but the hidden text was able to be viewed by simply pasting the content into a word-processing document.
The document details a slide presentation delivered at the 3 October 2024 meeting at which ABS executives decided to revert to the biased 2021 Census question for the 2026 Census.
As revealed in the latest instalment of the three-part The Census Files series on our Rationale magazine, the FOI documents also show that the meeting also considered the “public support for the change” and weighed up data accuracy versus comparability.
The meeting was held weeks after the Albanese government’s delays triggered the cancellation of the major September test that had been viewed as critical to providing the ABS with the data it needed to assess the performance of the new religion question.
The slide presentation – titled ‘Religious affiliation question design: Considerations and options’ – included a slide that presented the options for the question wording, with options 1 and 3 considered as ‘potential options’.
Option 1 was the 2021 Census question: ‘What is the person’s religion?’ Option 3 was the question that the ABS had proposed to adopt for the 2026 Census: ‘Does the person have a religion?’
The bottom half of the slide was redacted, citing section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act (1982) (Cth) – which allows for “irrelevant” matter to be deleted.
However, by copying the blacked out section in the PDF provided by the ABS and pasting it into a word-processing document, the RSA discovered that the hidden text included a comment that option 1 “may lead respondents to a particular response”. Meanwhile, the blacked out comment for option 3 said: “may impact comparability significantly”.
The RSA – along with a coalition of non-religious and pro-secular organisations – had called for the ABS to change the question to remove the inherent bias so as to ensure the Census delivered accurate data on the religious and non-religious affiliation of Australians. A number of recent robust surveys suggest that the biased wording may inflate the religion result by as much as 11 percentage points.
From its two-year consultation phase, the ABS received overwhelming public feedback calling for it to remove the bias from the religion question. Following that consultation process, the ABS acknowledged the public’s concern that the question “assumes you have a religion” and then, in late 2023, proposed to change the question so as to “support more accurate data collection”.
However, in early 2024 Catholic Church leaders attacked the proposal and called for the Albanese government to intervene in the matter, wanting the existing question to remain so as to allow for comparability with past censuses. A number of religious lobbyists also voiced concerns about the removal of the picklist of top religious affiliations and the adoption of a free-text box for respondents to write their affiliation.
As reported by the RSA in December, FOI documents show that the ABS comprehensively rejected the concerns of religious lobbyists and pushed ahead with its plan to test the new religion question at a major test, reaching thousands of households, in September.
The ABS had told the government that updates to the question were “required” for a number of reasons, including “better reflect the diversity of the Australian community and address concerns regarding quality of data with the existing question”, and to make the structure of the religion question consistent with other questions in the Census.
As reported by the RSA earlier this month, the Albanese government’s failure to meet the ABS’ deadlines and respond to an “urgent” request for a government decision on the topics it wanted in the Census preceded the ABS’ cancellation, on 26 August, of the major test that had been viewed as critical to delivering the information the ABS needed to assess the performance of the proposed religion question.
In the internal memo in which Dr Gruen approved the cancellation of the Census Test on 25 August 2024, a discussion of the ‘Risks and sensitivities’ noted the importance of the Census Test to the religion question:
The ABS has communicated the value of this Test in relation to the testing of potential changes to the question on Religious affiliation.
In the weeks following the cancellation of the test, documents show ABS executives lamented not having sufficient quantitative from the major test, and raised concerns about the increased risk of continuing with the proposed question.
On 4 October, the day following the presentation of the slides, an ABS executive circulated, via email, the outcomes from the meeting, including that the decision was made to retain the 2021 questioning wording “as this maximises comparability and we could not quantify the impact of question wording change without extensive testing”.
Read ‘The Census Files’ feature series on Rationale.
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.
Image: Australian Bureau of Statistics