There’s been a lot of discussion about the ABS decision to retain names and addresses in the Census until 2020 rather than deleting them more rapidly as in the past. Although the details differ, there’s been a dispute of this kind before every Census I can recall. Rather than debate the details, I’d like to think about the question: should the Census be compulsory, and if not what kind of requirement should there be?
I can think of three main reasons why we (Australians/the government/the ABS) might plausibly want to make Census participation compulsory. I’m not fully convinced by any of them
(i) Because we can. Historically, government agencies of all kinds have relied on compulsion simply because they are established by law. For example, public servants used to be banned from going on strike and teachers were shipped from one school to another at a whim. The military still works this way: the need for immediate obedience to orders in battle is taken to justify the use of this power in all contexts. Almost certainly, this contributes to high quite rates
(ii) The idea that a census is better than a sample, and that this superiority depends on counting everybody. The suspicions of the apocryphal critic who decried conclusions about the whole population derived from a sample of few thousand “and worse than that, a random sample” live on in most of us to some extent. But in fact the census can never be a complete count – around 2 per cent of the population is missed. Given that those missed are likely to be fairly atypical, the effect on aggregate estimates is probably comparable in magnitude to the standard error for a sample of, say, 10000.
(iii) The legal role of the Census in determining various kinds of allocations, most obviously electoral boundaries. Even if we were confident in a statistical sense, no one would be happy with the use of a sample of votes rather than a complete count in an election, and it makes intuitive sense to apply the same standard to a count used to determine boundaries.
Against this, the fact of compulsion creates costs and raises the risk that people will supply incorrect data. More fundamentally, the less compulsion we have the better.
Given all of that, my preferred policy would be to require everyone to complete the census form, but to allow an opt-out request, asking for the information supplied to be deleted except for the basic facts required to establish an accurate population count. My guess is that the opt-out rate would be very low, and that the 5-yearly fuss would go away.
As an aside, this is, pretty much, the situation we have with “compulsory” voting. You have to turn up and have your name crossed off, but there’s no compulsion to write anything on the ballot paper. So, simple laziness doesn’t give you an opt-out, but any genuine objection can be accommodated. This is, among other things, why I favor optional preferential voting.
John Quiggin 
We can do a better job by having a continuous Census. The continuous Census is one where each of us has our own records of where we are and our “characteristics” in a secure place accessible only by us – or by someone we nominate. The data can be kept on your own phone, or another connected device, or it can be with someone you personally trust. If you have an objection to disclosing some information you should be allowed to withhold it.
If any of your characteristics change – you move house – get married – have a child – get divorced etc. you agree to let the ABS know. The ABS can use the same system to do sampling census and this can save us time and allow the ABS to have a real-time understanding of the population.
“Given that those missed are likely to be fairly atypical, the effect is probably comparable in magnitude to the standard error for a sample of, say, 10000.”
In 2011, there were about 2,200 SA2s. Are you suggesting that the census provides information on the population, household and dwelling characteristics of individual SA2s that is no more reliable than a sample that collected information from an average of 4.5 people or households per SA2?
@Kevin Cox
Interesting idea but it assumes that 100% of the populatiomn has thrown almost their entire life onto the internet.
Otherwise iot would be too burdensome.
Naturally the Census has to be universal and compulsory because many of the groups that need to be identified may be too small for any sort of voluntary statistical sampling.
That depends on what you mean by ‘compulsion’. The law says explicitly and specifically that ‘the voter … shall … mark his or her vote on the ballot paper … and … deposit it in the ballot?box’; that ‘[i]t shall be the duty of every elector to vote at each election’; and that ‘[a]n elector commits an offence if the elector fails to vote at an election’. There are also detailed provisions about the procedures to be followed to deal with ‘electors who appear to have failed to vote at the election’.
I think that risk will be particularly high this year. The very year that anti-establishment sentiment is growing across the board including in Australia as evidenced by the last poll they make identification provision compulsory! The mind boggles. Dont these people remember the Australia Card fury (Maybe not as it was 30 years ago)?
More soberly it seems plausible that mass spoiling will happen and the big question for the stats bureau is whether the errors introduced will wreck the whole process.
As to the form it might take I am here reminded of the Jedi religion phenomenon, a religion I will likely be joining this year if I cant avoid census completion altogether.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_census_phenomenon
Will respondents this time go the whole hog and claim they arent married or have children (Jedi’s cant), have no possesions other than a light sabre, and give no answer to questions of income as the current exchange rate between the galactic republic credit and AUD is a little unclear.
Also note the past stats on this suggest the rate of false answers has been much higher in the part than you 10,000 estimate above suggests
The census is compulsory. Yes, it should be compulsory. Perhaps the fines for not participating should be less and seldom actually imposed, which latter I suspect is the case anyway.
I wonder what forces might be drumming up hysteria against the census? My guess is that it is the neoliberals and libertarians with their anti-state, anti-social-democracy agendas: the usual crowd who want to give more power to the rich and corporations. We ought to be very careful not to play into right-wing hands when they attack democratic state apparatus and legitimate measures for social democratic administration.
@Ikonoclast
So you think it should be compulsory in theory but not in practice? Or compulsory, but not too compulsory? 😉
You haven’t mentioned the justification I’ve seen for having names and addresses: tracking what happens to a population over the years. (I’m not sure what people want to look at — “proportion of people under 24 who moved from a rural postcode to an urban one” perhaps)
Otherwise couldn’t we just let people leave off their name and address, except for their postcode?
And you have a typo: “Almost certainly, this contributes to high quite [quit?] rates”
@Tim Macknay
Yes, pretty much. That sort of soft compulsion seems to work quite well in Australia. I am not sure about other countries. We get about 90% to 95% voter turnout with that strategy. It’s a bit of bluff. If a bit of bluff gets good compliance and no-one or hardly anyone gets hurt financially then it’s fine.
I am suspicious of some data sampling, not in theory (I am sure the mathematical theory is good), but in practice. Data sampling can have practical problems which compromise data integrity. I am also very suspicious of cost-cutting in government stats programs under neoliberalism. We have seen ABS employment survey, CPI and other data go downhill in quality after cost-cutting exercises. This census debate to me smacks of another cost-cutting exercise likely first floated somewhere by liberatarians and designed at weakening social democratic government. Given the history of neoliberalism and its effects I think my suspicions are fully justified.
You can get your ballot paper and draw anything you like – fold it and put it into the ballot box. This gives quite good amusement to electoral staffers as they go through the papers.
You can then leave the voting place satisfied that you have voted, and your paper will be counted as an “informal vote”. Just get the paper in the box – folks. It is still a vote, an “informal vote”. A blank paper is still a vote; an informal vote.
The main point as I see it, is that you must turn up and get your name crossed off, and deal with the paper in the privacy of the booth – so that no one else can either impersonate you if they know you will not be turning up, or buy your vote from you. There may be other factors.
It is compulsory – and this is good. It creates a “General Will” at least to some extent.
@J-D
I thought you’d be far more nuanced, logically, than that, J-D.
Just to complete the discussion, here is what the Australian Electoral Commission says about compulsory voting:
“Because of the secrecy of the ballot, it is not possible to determine whether a person has completed their ballot paper prior to placing it in the ballot box. It is therefore not possible to determine whether all electors have met their legislated duty to vote. It is, however, possible to determine that an elector has attended a polling place or mobile polling team (or applied for a postal vote, pre-poll vote or absent vote) and been issued with a ballot paper.”
So, how “compulsory” is something for which it is impossible – and indeed highly illegal even if it were to become possible – to detect a transgression. In short, “compulsory voting” simply remains a pious hope so long as ballots are secret.
You can check the AEC statement here: http://www.aec.gov.au/About_Aec/Publications/voting/index.htm
@J-D
A law that can’t be enforced even hypothetically is a contradiction. So, given the legal secrecy of the ballot, the compulsion clauses you cite must refer to casting a ballot, while the instructions on how to vote refer to the validity or otherwise of the ballot. That’s the law as established in practice as well as the only logical reading.
I didn’t know we were having a census until I got a letter yesterday. I thought we had done away with them so decision making wouldn’t be contaminated with information. So I went to the Australian Bureau of Statistics website and read this little gem:
“Yes, completing the Census is compulsory. The ABS has overwhelming community support for the Census. The vast majority of householders willingly cooperate.”
And thought – Not for much longer with that sort of attitude, ABS.
Newtonian, please don’t lie about your religion or lack of religion on the census. There are people who will quite dishonestly claim all the Jedi and Sith and Pasterfarians reponses don’t count as serious answers and excise them to make Australians look more religious than they are. Then they will use this to argue in favor of school chaplains.
You only have to look at Cardinal Pell to see why that’s a bad idea.
It is unfortunate we can’t thumb our noses at the establishment by proclaiming to be Jedi without putting children in danger, but that’s the world we live in.
The census has been a done deal for a long time because of privacy previously respected.
But this government is bitterly opposed to civil liberties and entranced with surveillance and data retention. It could claim “terrorism” warrants it, but I believe they are interested in gathering data to deal with or scapegoat internal adversaries.
I have filled out the census up to this date not because it was compulsory but as a contribution arising from citizenship. this year the switch to attaching my name, originally to be retained permanently and then changed to four years has been made without any convincing public justification. Government overreach and arrogance. I am currently contemplating not providing that information. It is a question whether the compulsion to supply statistical information covers the provision of my name.
Having read through the questions that are posed by the census, I have to wonder whether that information is worth the cost of doing a compulsory census. The only information that is recorded with some reliability is the list of names, addresses, etc of occupants of a given household. Of what value is that? It isn’t statistically useful information to know the names of occupants, except perhaps to say that “Belinda” is no longer a common first name in Australia.
I don’t see anything on the census that couldn’t reasonably be obtained via standard statistical sampling of the population. Some of the questions are quite intrusive, and I would expect a high error rate with those, specifically because once people have recorded their names on the form, they may feel that they wish some personal information to remain private. In a proper statistical sample, where the individuals are truly anonymous, they are more likely to feel comfortable divulging the otherwise private information. For people who have been refugees, fleeing war-torn chaos, they may be quite understandably reluctant to divulge names and other private (in their opinion) information, having had to do that under fascist rule in other countries.
In this day and age, a simple web-based form and randomised sampling could be managed, surely. Once up and running, it could be re-used for regular sample taking, rather than this monolithic static view of the census.
That they intend to hold my name and details for several years is another big point against it. People are entitled to some minimum level of privacy, even in as despotic a regime as Australia 😦
If it’s not compulsory there’s no possibility of any point; self-selected samples are strictly less useful than properly-structured stratified sampling.
Me, it’s out of my hands; seems like my notification letter’s gone missing or something.
I support the new approach because I like what could be achieved wih data linkage with census data as a tool for social analysis. See Melbourne Uni’s HILDA to see what can be achieved when you can track change over time as well as snapshot.
But, ABS should have done a much better job of explaining the why and the process. I guess part of the problem is that they are not a normal government agency which has politicians and advisors driving directions. It is an independent and introverted organisation which means it sometimes is too insular.
I am no fan of the current govt but I doubt knew or cared about this before last week.
The census data becomes part of the longitudinal data assembly in production. In order to do the linkage process, the previous census data must have sufficient information in it to be able to confidently marry this census data with the one from five years ago. Now, five years ago is outside the window that they (supposedly) hold your name and address details from the previous census, so that begs the question as to how they expect to perform reliable linkages. There are ways and means, but not with the reliability that having the same name and birth date provides.
So, what exactly is the mechanism by which longitudinal data sets are to be assembled?
Once made, a longitudinal set of anonymised data would be a snap for matching against metadata sets from any number of agencies and performing mass de-anonymising services (aka unmasking). I think this data has honeypot written all over it.
Civil Disobedience Penguin, we need you now.
@John Quiggin
It’s true that the way the law is structured makes it impossible for evidence to be produced that identified individuals did not mark their ballot papers as (theoretically) required by law; but this is not the same thing as saying that only attending the polling place and getting your name crossed off is compulsory. Attending the polling place and getting your name crossed off is a public act, and public evidence of it can be available; marking the ballot paper is (by law) a private act, of which there can be no legally admissible evidence; but there is another element of the process that’s been left out of that analysis, namely, taking the ballot papers and putting them into the ballot boxes.
If people attend at the polling place, get their names crossed off the roll, take the ballot papers, and then put the papers into the ballot boxes, there can be no legal evidence to show whether they actually voted or not.
But if people attend at the polling booth, get their names crossed off the roll, and then don’t take the ballot papers and put them into the ballot boxes, there can be legal evidence that they did not vote.
So the compulsion to take ballot papers and put them into the ballot boxes is of the same kind as the compulsion to attend the polling place and get your name crossed off, and it’s not accurate to suggest that compulsion is limited to attendance at the polling place and getting your name crossed off the roll.
@J-D
That does rather punch a gaping hole in the professed motivations.
I am not sure whether I’m being too cynical when I say that what matters is the data sharing *before* the names are removed, after that what the ABS does is irrelevant except to the people who steal the ABS dataset rather than that of one of the recipients of the original data.
The obvious next step is to use data matching with other government departments to catch and prosecute people who lie on the census form. Or use the census to catch people who lie to other departments. I’m sure that between the ATO, Immigration and Centrelink we have enough information to be pretty sure of most of the census data already.
@J-D
Wrong. There is clear legal evidence they voted, and their vote is added to the count. It will appear either as a formal vote or an informal vote.
If you want to pursue this = you need to produce a ruling that an informal vote is not a vote.
The only people who get their name crossed off but “do not vote” are those whose papers end up in the discarded pile. There are also a number of spoilt votes where people make a mistake and request a fresh paper.
If you want to pursue this – you need to produce an AEC guideline (or case) that indicates that this constitutes a breach of the Electoral Act.
I can only find a possible breach if someone removes a paper from the booth, or if they damage Commonwealth property if they tear the ballot paper up.
I hope John Quiggin and Bill Mitchell don’t mind me re-posting Bill’s opinion on the organisation of the latest census in this blog. It’s an opinion I agree with.
“Neo-liberal efficiency – Australian government style
Next Tuesday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), our national statistical agency, conducts its five-year Census of the population. It is compulsory and fines apply for failing to fill out the form.
In its wisdom (not!), the neo-liberal Australian government (and its Labor predecessor) imposed so-called ‘efficiency dividend’ on the Australian public service and its agencies, including the ABS.
Despite the fancy terminology, the ‘efficiency dividend’ is nothing more than a funding cut. The claim from the idiot government is that the ABS has to do things better with less and therefore reap ‘efficiencies’.
So with significant cuts to its funding, the ABS decided to make the Census ‘paperless’, meaning we now fill the questionnaire out on-line via the Internet.
One slight problem: a significant number of people (particularly the older citizens) do not have Internet access or even know how to use a computer. The ABS know that from previous censuses.
So, to deal with that little hiccup, the ABS install 300 help lines so that older people and others without Internet access can call up and get a paper form mailed out to them by Tuesday.
One slight problem further: the 300 lines are grossly insufficient to handle the number of people who have been seeking a paper document.
The result: the phone lines have been jammed for some time and people are complaining of being put into hold queues for several hours.
Some people are reporting extreme anxiety because they cannot get through and fear they will be fined for failing to lodge a paper form by next Tuesday.
Many will not get through in time.
The Government’s advice: ring early or late when the demand is less. Many older folk go to bed earlier than late! Many others cannot get to a phone at all!
The whole thing is a farce.” – Bill Mitchell.
Privacy is dead, get over it, is my view, based on the hysterical retreat from accessible public information over the last few decades. Electoral rolls, with addresses, used to be held at universally accessible venues; now not. I don’t think that the telephone book could ever get off the ground now if it wasn’t grandfathered in to our expectations – and that’s particularly significant, because until the mobile phone system came into use I wouldn’t have thought you could have a communication system without a central register. If it’s good enough for Facebook to extort our data, it’s good enough for the crown…. perhaps we could get round it by having all interactions with the government involving clicking on a 10,000 word set of terms and conditions, the way that Microsoft does it.
There’s nothing wrong in principle with the census being compulsory and with financial penalties for non-compliance, but there’s plenty wrong if people can’t get online because they haven’t been sent their log in code, or can’t get paper forms because the ABS haven’t got a big enough call centre to field requests from everybody who wants one.
The ABS system requirements for online access are quite up to date. To get access 10 million + users might be updating their browsers, getting Java running again, and then timing out, which might clog the pipes somewhat. I wonder what will happen if you mistype your unique login? Or forget your 9 digit password to get back in if the system crashes. StatsCan was off line for about an hour in their 2016 census. People gave up. I predict our census might look very like a DDoS. Paper? Attempts to leave your name and address blank on the paper form might fall at the first hurdle. Collectors will note addresses on the envelopes. Gender question: F M Other. I predict a surge in Other.
Sorry for the link fail. Please adjust if you have teh skilz.
What about those of us who suffer from Autism of the Form?
As a statistician I would just like to say that I very much like the idea of keeping everyone’s name for the census, the power of research opportunities it creates would be great.
What I don’t understand is why governments here and in the UK have to make this so unncessarily complex. It should be possible to establish an independent organization that receives just the names (and where necessary dates) from e.g. hospital records, or census records, and then assigns them a random number, keeps the data but hands the random number only back to the record manager. Then if anyone wants to do linked data analysis they just hand their set of random numbers over to that independent authority, and get back the linked data with no names ever leaving hte linked authority’s files. This has been proposed for the UK too.
Of course the UK then decided to abolish the census, because it’s all “too expensive.” I’m sure nothing will go wrong with that plan …
This whole idea of minimising government kinda beats me. I’m pretty clear that the places in the world with minimal government are places I don’t want to be. The idea is deranged.
If we’ve decided to go with this government thing, we should really try for a good one, which means they make good decisions based on reliable information. A reliable census is a small step in the right direction.
If you want your information protected, the fundamental requirement is a strong, properly resourced ABS. Some laws with severe penalties for misuse of the data would also help, but we have them, don’t we?
Hong Kong was notorious for refusing to collect statistics as a matter of policy and seem to get by.
I thought electorate boundaries were based on registered voters rather than population. Maybe the allocation between states is by population and then it is by voters per seat.
Jim, Hong Kong has held a census every ten years since 1961 and a by-census every five years in between. This is explained at Hong Kong’s Census and Statistics Department.
@ChrisB
#26
I suspect that the battle for privacy is already lost. Or if not, it soon will be.
This has been a recurring theme on David Brin’s blog “Contrary Brin”. He’s the scifi writer and futurist, among other endeavours. His argument is that trying to prevent surveillance is a lost cause.
He also offers a remedy. He argues that we can surveil the surveillers, to keep them honest.
“The only way to hold power accountable is to forcefully and effectively say to [them]: ‘We are watching you.'”
For more, search http://davidbrin.blogspot.com.au/ for ‘sousveillance’.
I won’t quote them in full here, because they’d take up too much space, but section 239 and section 240 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1981 (Cth) clearly set out how voters are required to mark their ballot papers; that is the legal definition of ‘voting’; therefore, people who do not mark the ballot paper in accordance with those instructions have not discharged their duty (s245(1)) to vote and are, theoretically, guilty of the offence (s245(5)) of failing to vote at an election. However, as previously discussed, if they have put their ballot papers into the ballot boxes there is no way of proving this in law.
There is no such thing in law as an informal vote. Section 268 of the Act provides that if no vote is marked on a ballot paper it is counted as an informal ballot paper, but says nothing about an informal vote; obviously, if there is no vote on the ballot paper, then there is no vote.
The entire Act can be studied online; feel free to look through it and let me know if you find anything in it that contradicts what I’ve observed.
Exactly right. The allocation between States by population is a Constitutional requirement and can’t be changed except by Constitutional amendment; allocation between electoral divisions within States is not a Constitutional requirement and is governed by an ordinary Act of Parliament, which can be amended in the same way as any other Act of Parliament.
(By the way, I just posted a comment in response to Ivor on the subject of the law on voting, but it’s been caught in moderation because it has two links in it.)
I have no problem with a compulsory census, and providing accurate information, but this requires basic trust in the authorities. A researcher from Bosnia told me that during the Milosevic days when students were required to register with the authorities many noted their ethnicity as “Eskimo”, quite understandably in the circumstances. There was also an interesting dispute in Wisconsin between a parent who upset the bureaucrats processing his baby’s birth certificate by answering the race question as “human”, challenging them to prove otherwise. Both cases more justifiable than “Jedi” responses to the ABS, I think.
@J-D
Suppose you go to the voting place, get your name crossed off, and then walk out the door before you get given the ballot papers. Are the AEC officials going to turn you in for violating s245?
The entire Act can be studied online; feel free to look through it and let me know if you find anything in it that contradicts what I’ve observed.
Ok, this is fundamentally misguided.
The meaning of a text cannot be found by examining only that text, for the simple reason that texts don’t encode the entirety of their meaning within themselves; texts need to reference the external world to have relevance to the external world, and the readers of a text need to understand the external-world references to understand the meaning the text conveys.
Real-world texts aren’t built from nothing but self-reference; they contain external references, and external references are, inherently, external to — not contained within — the text.
If you want to understand a text, looking at the text alone won’t get you there.
@J-D
The AEC states
and there are seven conditions.
If the AEC says “a vote is informal” then this means there are “informal votes”.
The Section is titled….
and yet we have someone arguing here there is no informal votes !!!!!?????
AEC discussion of informal votes is here: http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/informal_voting/
If you look at each of the seven conditions you will see they are all based on evidence.
This is evidence of informal voting using ballot papers.
An informal ballot paper means the voter has voted informally.
A formal ballot paper means the voter has voted formally.
No action under sect 268 would trigger the Commissioner to consider that the person had not voted under sect 245 if the requirements under section 232 have been met.
Sect 239 does not apply to people who are not voting above the line or below the line.
Section 240 only applies to those people who are:
If you are not in this category other provisions apply.
Crazy ….
The AEC states:
and there are seven conditions.
If the AEC says “a vote is informal” then this means there are “informal votes”.
The Section is titled….
and yet we have someone arguing here there is no informal votes !!!!!?????
AEC discussion of informal votes is here: http://www.aec.gov.au/voting/informal_voting/
If you look at each of the seven conditions you will see they are all based on evidence.
This is evidence of informal voting using ballot papers.
An informal ballot paper means the voter has voted informally.
A formal ballot paper means the voter has voted formally.
No action under sect 268 would trigger the Commissioner to consider that the person had not voted under sect 245 if the requirements under section 232 have been met.
Sect 239 does not apply to people who are not voting above the line or below the line.
Section 240 only applies to those people who are:
If you are not in this category other provisions apply.
They say their system, there can be no access to private details, but how can they guarantee this, straight faced?
Census outings in the past have ensured RELEVANT data is collected without a possible breach of privacy, by NOT including the requirement that people add identification.
If your personal details that identify you with your data are re not included, as has been the case, how can there be a security leak, surely not asking for intrusive info is the way to guarantee privacy in the first place?
@Jim Birch
Yes, but since when have the government used data or evidence to develop policy?
I don’t trust them, particularly not the current Christian-Fascist crop. Every response on my form will be a lie.
@Beethoven
According to what I was told by the Australian Electoral Commission when I asked this question, that is what they are supposed to do.
The Census should be compulsory! Anyone who has read Thomas Piketty’s great book ,
entitled: CAPITALin the twenty-first century; would know why it is important for economists to know facts from whole populations. Sample survey data is
all well and good, but can be misleading. Census data gives a five year snap shot
of the whole population. Any econometric analysis, involving correlated dependent
variables, is only as good as the applied data source. Having said that, personal
information needs to be handled like tax return data, that is it must be totally confidential.
Thanks, but it did not have balance of payments statistics until after 1997 as I recall. It was scant on national accounting statistics in fact many other statistics apart from that census you mentioned
@faustusnotes
@J-D
And, unlike the Police, AEC officials do not have official discretion.
@Beethoven
It would be logical to at least accept the paper when you get your name crossed off.
You cannot damage it or remove it from the polling booth.
You cannot do anything that a court would find is unreasonable – such as folding it into a paper plane and flinging it across the room. Although if this instance reflected a campaign of for example anarchists, the AEC may take action – but the AEC would not waste resources in mundane rare isolated circumstances.
As a researcher who regularly uses Census data, I totally support the compulsory nature of the Census. This is not primarily about sample size, but about representativeness. While 2% of people are missed by the Census (and around 10% for some questions) this is much better than sample surveys. Even the best surveys have response rates under 60%. (The compulsory ABS surveys have around 80-90% response). Census and similar data is then used to adjust these surveys to a least match the characteristics recorded in the Census.
The retention of names is to match other govt databases using a process that is similar to the one faustusnotes describes. For example, in the last Census names were held for 12 months after the Census to match to death records. This led to a substantial upward revision to estimates of Aboriginal life expectancy.
The longitudinal database does not match on names (as someone says, that would require holding names for more than 5 years). However, names are used by the Bureau to check the accuracy of the matching methods that are actually used.
It is a shame that so much fuss is being made over the Census. The information retained is much less sensitive than that held by financial institutions and health service providers – and the security provisions and legislative requirements for protection are probably better.
I am disappointed, however, that the Bureau and the government hasn’t done a better job of selling this message.