Review of 2021 Census Topics

Potential removal of the domestic work question from the 2021 Census to allow space for other topics.

The topic of the number of hours of domestic work done has been collected for the past 3 Censuses, and collects in broad ranges (eg. 5-14 hours) the amount of total domestic work done in the household. Apart from an initial media flurry around Census release, which usually focuses on gender differences (females do more domestic work nationally), there appears to be very little use of this data among policy and decision makers through our client base.

While there may be some interest in this at a national level, it seems that this could be catered for as part of a survey (eg. a labour force supplementary survey) rather than being a Census question. Removal of this question could allow space for additional questions our clients have requested, as per our other submissions.

This is where the premise for including Domestic Work in the Census is probably insubstantial. .id's community profiles have 38 pages covering most Census topics for Local Government Areas and suburb/town geography based on the last 6 Census periods. Domestic work by hours is shown in time series for the past 3 Censuses presently. Over the last year, this page rankes 37th out of 38 for usage among all users of our public LGA sites (the only lower ranked page is a derived page which is not directly collected from the Census). It has had 4,612 hits across all our approximately 250 sites in the past year (for comparison, the top ranked page, Labour Force Status has had 81,070.

This indicates that while there might be a broad interest (usually gender based) in national figures on domestic work, there is little need for this at a local level or for comparison among any more detailed sub populations than male/female. Additionally, in the training sessions we run for council clients, Domestic Work is rarely if ever asked about, while other topics not collected on the Census such as health and recreational participation are frequently asked about. These are the topics of other submissions. As a consequence of this, in an environment where space on the Census form is limited, domestic work seems a likely candidate to remove to make way for other topics.

This is another issue with the domestic work question. The categories based on number of hours are quite broad, and probably necessarily so, as most individuals would not know to any great level of detail how many hours they worked around the home, in the same way that they would for paid employment, for example. Relatively few people would actually keep track of this information and so you end up with needing to use broad categories such as "15-29 hours" which is a huge range, and likely to be meaningless for policymakers. Even with these, I know I personally had a hard time working out how many hours of domestic work I had done in the last week when filling in my own Census form. In that way it's not quick or easy to answer and may lead to respondent error. There are also a lot of grey areas about what exactly constitutes domestic work - eg. looking after children has its own topic, but substantial domestic work is related to the activities of children.

To actually get meaningful information about the division of labour within a household, more detailed questions would need to be asked, and it's unclear what purpose this would serve at a policy level, as these are usually issues for an individual household, not government or business decision makers.

As per previous point - while Domestic Work is probably not considered too intrusive or controversial, respondents are unlikely to be able to answer this accurately with any degree of certainty. Hence the need for the current question to be in broad ranges to the point of being unsuitable for telling the demographic story of an area. It also leads to minimal differences across geographic areas in the results of this topic.

As per previous points, the topic is currently collected, but to make it more useful would require extra questions, categories etc. which may add significantly to the cost of the Census. This money could be better spent on other topics which have both a national interest, and a need for data for small areas.

It is interesting to see that for the past 3 Censuses this dataset has been collected, the percentages in each category at a national level have barely changed. There has been a slight reduction in the percentage of people claiming 30 or more hours of domestic work since 2006 (down from 11.6% to 9% of population), but the total doing any domestic work has varied only between 69% and 70% and there is little spatial variation that can't be explained by changes in the "Not Stated" category. This indicates that it isn't likely to change much in the future either, and therefore less frequent collection, or collection via a national survey might be a better vehicle for data on Domestic Work.

We don't see much need for this topic among our clients, mainly Local Government decision makers. As the data don't vary much by geographic level, inclusion in a Labour Force Supplementary Survey or the General Social Survey which can provide outputs at state level would probably be sufficient to inform social debate generally, rather than having it on the Census form. The space saved on the form could then be used for other topics.

Thanks for the opportunity to put in this submission on behalf of our client base. While in a perfect world you could have as many questions as anyone wanted on the Census, if there is a need to cut questions to make way for others, this submission identifies Domestic Work as less relevant than many potential inclusions on the Census, and a key candidate for removal.