Review of 2021 Census Topics

A need to expand current questions on relationships to capture more of the diversity of family structures
A need to more clearly establish the nature of a person’s presence within a households.
The collection of family structure information through the Census is largely centred on establishing the relationships of residents with a single householder. While the answer options for a second person enable identification of an ‘other’ relationship to person 1, the answer options for all other persons in the household all (with the exception of child) are asked with reference to person 1. This doesn’t capture the range of relationships in households with two - or three householders (i.e. blended households/families).
Council considers that where possible, it is important for the range of family relationships within families to be identifiable through the Census.
At a minimum, additional answer options should be added to the Census’ relationship options for person 2 and for all other persons, answer options should enable identification of relationship to either person 1 or person 2.
Council considers that there is a case for adding an additional question (similarly to that asked in the United Kingdom national Census) which asks for the status of a person in the household, with answer options that include; person temporarily present on holiday, person temporarily present for work, person present as a permanent usual resident, person present as a resident of a second home (with examples provided), person present as a guest/visitor, person present due to lack of a permanent place to stay
The current question on where a person usually lives would need an additional answer option to enable a person to identify themself as living in the same address as Q1 plus another address.

The capture of household and family diversity via the Census is of significant and demonstrated national importance, telling us about our society and assisting the work of service deliverers and researchers looking at trends over time and between jurisdictions.

For Council, local information on family and household type provides us with the capacity to track trends within the municipality for planning purposes, and underpins our provision of services to families. It would make a difference to Council’s service provision to know, for example, how many children within the municipality live in shared custody arrangements. It would also make a difference for Council to know how many households are home to people temporarily resident on holiday (a marker of the transience of the population)

Council does not foresee any concerns arising from self-completion of more detailed household relationship questions.

Council does not foresee any acceptability concerns.

Collecting more detailed information on household relationships would require a longer survey with more answer options, but would provide valuable information to justify this extension.

Council considers that there is likely to be continuing need for information on this topic and continuing need for the capacity to collect information as the nature of families and households change with time.

There are other sources of information available on family structure, including the ABS’ Family Characteristics and Transitions survey . This survey however, was last conducted in 2012-13 and does not provide local area information that would be of most use to local authorities. This is the case with information from the HILDA survey and from Australia-wide surveys. Local area data is important because different communities have different family compositions, related to (amongst other variables), cultural and socioeconomic background and the characteristics of place (such as being a holiday location).