The Rationalist Society of Australia has urged independent members of parliament and minor parties to help safeguard the integrity of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ process of developing questions for future censuses.
In a letter to several MPs and senators last month, the RSA raised concerns about the “highly unusual circumstances” surrounding the ABS’ cancellation of a large-scale 2024 test that it had viewed as “critical” to determining whether it would adopt a new religion question.
RSA Executive Director Si Gladman wrote that circumstances leading up to the cancellation of the test had the potential to raise among the public the perception of political interference in the ABS’ question-development and testing processes.
“For future censuses, the integrity of the ABS’ process in determining the questions and topics to be used must be safeguarded. Taxpayers and the wider public 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,” he wrote.
As revealed by the RSA – and detailed in The Census Files series on the Rationale magazine website – the ABS cancelled the large-scale test following a public pressure campaign by religious interest groups, and then the government’s failure to meet ABS deadlines and its late response to an “urgent” request from the ABS for a decision on Census topics in August 2024.
Having authority to determine how questions would be asked for topics, the ABS was to use the large-scale September test to gather data about the performance of the newly designed religion question – ‘Does the person have a religion?’ – that it proposed for the 2026 Census in order to “support more accurate data collection”.
After discovering, in early 2024, that the ABS was proposing to change the existing biased question – ‘What is the person’s religion?’ – Catholic Church leaders called on the Albanese government to intervene and block any changes, even writing directly to the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the issue.
Documents obtained under freedom of information (FOI) laws show that the ABS, in correspondence with government ministers, comprehensively rejected the concerns of religious lobbyists about the proposed changes. It argued that the desire for maintaining ‘comparability’ with past censuses – which the Catholic Church wanted – needed to be “balanced against changes to improve accuracy, relevance and inclusivity”.
The Albanese government finally confirmed the Census topics two days after the ABS’ deadline that it had set to allow enough time to communicate with tens of thousands of households about the September test.
The RSA has also submitted a complaint with the ABS about its decision to redact relevant information from FOI documents.
As revealed by the RSA earlier this year, the ABS had redacted information from a slide presentation that showed ABS executives, when meeting in October 2024 to decide which version of the question to adopt, were aware that the 2021 version of the religion question “may lead respondents to a particular response”.
The RSA was able to view the text simply by copying the blacked out section of the PDF and pasting it into a word-processing document.
In his letter to MPs and senators, Mr Gladman said the ABS’ decision to knowingly use a flawed question that would not produce accurate data raised doubt about whether such data would serve the wider public benefit.
“…all kinds of data users – including governments, members of parliament, researchers, public broadcasters, and members of the public – will remain unable to use Census data to accurately inform their decision-making, policy-making or other important work.”
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