The City of Greater Dandenong makes extensive use of the findings of the Census for the development of its services and programs, for advocacy to the State and Federal Governments, and other purposes. The findings of the Census have proven an invaluable tool for Council planning, information sharing and research.
I am therefore pleased to take this opportunity to extend my gratitude and admiration for the work of the Australian Bureau of Statistics in generating and distributing this information.
In response to the ABS review of the 2021 Census topics, I propose several adjustments to the content of the national Population and Household Census.
Taking into consideration the cost of processing entailed in each Census question, and the prospect that an excessive number of questions may detract from the rate of completion of the Census and the accuracy of its findings, we are of the view that the benefit of the findings stemming from each question should be weighed against the cost of its inclusion.
Accordingly, our practical experience suggests that a number of questions may be dispensed with altogether, owing to their limited use in guiding decisions about policy and service delivery. In particular, we propose that the following questions are of insufficient benefit to policy, service planning, advocacy and research, to justify their inclusion in the 2021 Census:
• In which country was the person’s father born?
• In which country was the person’s mother born?
• What is the person’s ancestry?
The questions presented below also appear to yield findings of limited application or benefit. In this context, the distinction should be discerned between the importance of the issue addressed by these inquiries, which is not contested here, and the utility of the data collected by those questions, which appears doubtful.
The value of these questions may be further compromised by a lack of precision in the answers they elicit, due to limited accuracy with which people are apt to recall such events, coupled with a tendency to substitute poorly-recalled facts with guesses or self-serving estimates.
Those questions are as follows:
• In the last week, did the person spend time doing unpaid domestic work for their household?
• In the last 12 months, did the person spend any time doing voluntary work for an organisation or group?
As with the inquiries featured above, the following two questions, while also relating to social issues of undoubted importance, yield data that is of perhaps limited value to the formulation of public policy, the development of services and programs, or advocacy.
• In the last two weeks, did the person spend time providing unpaid care help or assistance to family members or others because of a disability, a long term health condition or problems related to old age?
• In the last two weeks, did the person spend time looking after a child without pay?
An additional consideration relating to these questions is the relatively modest level of change in the Census findings during the five-year inter-censual period. In Victoria, the percentage of people who provided care for a person grew from 12.2% in 2011 to 12.7% by 2016 – a rise of 4%. In responses to the inquiry about care for a child, the proportion of respondents who replied in the affirmative rose from 29.4% to 29.8% during the same period, representing an increase of 1.4%.
If these questions were to be retained at all, such modest changes in a five-year period argue against their inclusion in every census, and instead favour their incorporation into every second Census, enabling them to be documented with adequate frequency to trace significant change in the pattern of responses over time.
Finally, it is suggested that the inquiry ‘Does any member of the household access the internet from this building?’ be removed.
Two circumstances lend weight to this proposition. First, household internet access has become so widespread as to have largely eliminated differences in the prevalence of access among different communities, thereby diminishing the value of this question. Moreover, with the burgeoning use of mobile devices for accessing the internet, responses to this question now have limited bearing upon the characteristics of the dwelling in which an individual resides.
The adjustments to the content of the Census proposed here would entail the removal of between six and eight questions, thereby substantially lightening the burden of the completing the Census upon respondents and defraying the cost of tabulating and disseminating its findings.
It is the view of Council that the accomplishment of these key objectives may contribute to the preservation of the five-yearly national Census, which is an indispensable tool for social policy and planning, at all levels of government, and for informed community engagement.