2026 Census topic consultation - Phase two

I was interested to see if the claim that there were more than a million people of Chinese ancestry living in Australia had a factual basis.

I believe that the requirement to list only two ancestry origins meant that participants like me with three known countries of origin were obliged to leave one out. This means there may be more than a million people of Chinese ancestry living in Australia. The same limitation of choice means that any ancestry origin may be under represented.

1. Increasing the options to four ancestries means that my two sets of grandchildren will be able to list their Chinese, Irish, English and Vietnamese origins, or their German, Irish, Chinese and English origins - hence recognising all their ancestors and excluding none.
2. I felt when I had to choose to exclude one side of my family because of the two origin only option that not only was I disrespecting their contribution but that they were in one sense being excluded from the history of Australia.
3. We are a multicultural society that has failed to count all its components, we are more diverse than what has been reported from census data. Furthermore the increased use of DNA by individuals exploring ancestry will increase the incidence of multiple origins.
4. I have tried to think of a negative impact but I cannot come up with one.

Ancestry to me means what country my ancestor came from. It does not capture ethnicity. I am myself not clear about what the word "ethnicity" means. There are Indian and Chinese ethnicity people whose families have been in Africa or the Pacific or South East for more than 120 years. You need to do a pilot study of these people to see if they respond to the ancestry question according to race or culture or country. Because the word "ancestry" means different things to different people as does "ethnicity".
If I am of Turkish, Irish and Chinese descent do I have two or three ethnicities? European and Asian or three, Mediterranean, Anglo Celtic and Chinese?

ABS will miss out on valuable information for planning services or for academic research if it excludes ancestry. Some of the people in my social circle are racially Chinese, but their families came here from Mauritius, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. This is only one example. We have new settlers in this country from a range of countries in Africa. They can be of Indian, African, Chinese or European ethnicity but where people actually come from is also important. South Africa and the Sudan are very different places and should be recorded as places of origin.

Not allowing people to accurately report their ethnic identities by restricting the option to one only is being disrespectful to them. It also distorts the picture of how the Australian population is becoming more and more diverse.

Ancestry, origin, race, culture, ethnicity...what do they actually mean to respondents? You need a pilot study with a large sample across our diverse population to explore this