The Rationalist Society of Australia has asked the Prime Minister to confirm what his response was to the Catholic bishops’ request in 2024 for him to “reverse” the proposed changes to the Census religion question.

In a letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last month, the RSA asked what his response had been to the letter that was sent by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference on 19 March 2024.

However, the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet has since referred the inquiry to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

As reported by the RSA in June, documents obtained under freedom of information laws show that the bishops wrote to Mr Albanese to “raise … serious concerns about the … changes to the religious identification question for the 2026 Census” and to ask him to “reverse” the ABS proposed changes to the question design.

In a letter to Mr Albanese and assistant minister Andrew Leigh, the RSA also asked for an explanation of the reasons for the government’s failure to meet the ABS’ deadlines in July-August 2024 regarding the ABS’ request for the government to confirm the topics it wanted included in the 2026 Census.

In highly unusual circumstances, the government’s failure to meet multiple deadlines effectively forced the ABS into cancelling the “critical” major test that was scheduled in September 2024 in order to assess the performance of the new question, among other proposed changes. 

The ABS had proposed changing the religion question to ‘Does the person have a religion?’ in order to “support more accurate data collection”.

Within weeks of the cancellation of the major test, the ABS decided to revert to the previously used question – ‘What is the person’s religion?’ – even though the ABS itself recognised that the question “assumes you have a religion” and “may lead respondents to a particular response”.

A recent robust Essential Research survey, commissioned by the Census – Not Religious? campaign, found that the leading question produces a significant under-count of the non-religious population – by more than 10 percentage points.

In the letter to Mr Albanese and Dr Leigh, the RSA asked what benefit it was to taxpayers, the broader public and all users of Census data, to have a religion question that fails to accurately reflect religious and non-religious affiliation.

The RSA told them that Australians must have confidence in the integrity of the Census and the work of the ABS in developing questions that will serve all data users, not just some interest groups.

The RSA has publicly raised concerns that there may have been political interference in the ABS’ process of developing and testing the religion question, and has directly urged members of the federal parliament to safeguard the process for future Censuses.

Despite the bishops’ call for Mr Albanese to reverse the changes, there was no scope for the government to influence the design of the religion question. As the ABS has confirmed on many occasions, the ABS is responsible for determining how questions are asked in the Census, while the government can only decide the broad topics – i.e. ‘religious affiliation’ – to be included.

The bishops also told Mr Albanese that the “substantial change being imposed” would impact the comparability of the data with past Censuses:

Accurate and comparable data is vital as the Catholic Church and other religious groups rely heavily on it to assist parishes, schools, health services, welfare and other organisations to understand the religious demographic of the communities they serve.

Catholic leaders also waged a public campaign, particularly through the pages of The Australian, where they called for the government to intervene in the ABS’ proposal to change the question.

Internal documents show that, in response to the Catholic Church’s public campaign, the ABS itself comprehensively rejected the bishops’ concerns and argued that the desire for maintaining comparability with past Censuses needed to be “balanced against changes to improve accuracy, relevance and inclusivity.”

Read our three-part ‘The Census Files’ series.

The RSA is support 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.

Image: Number 10 (Flickr CC).