Census

The kids and I are officially counted in the Australian census!

A completely different experience than America's census.  First, it is completed every 5 years, not 10.  I'm guessing this is because Australia is growing so rapidly, and has such a high influx of immigrants every year relative to its population.   Second, the questions are just . . . well, there's a lot of them, and they are completely different from what America asks.

A sampling of the questions:
1.  Name
2.  Age
3.  Marital status
4.  Address today, one year ago, and five years ago
5.  Where your parents were born.
6.  What you claim as your ethnicity. This one really confused me.  If my parents are both American, and born in America, is it okay to say my ethnicity is American?  Is that even an ethnicity?  Do they want me to say Polish/Russian?   Joel's confused me more - if his parents were born in Ukraine and Poland, does that make him a Polish-Ukrainian-Australian?  And how meaningful is it to claim Polish or Ukrainian or Russian ethnicity when every one of these countries wanted to kick us out? It's not like anyone in the family fondly clings to our kielbasa tradition, or whatever.  Really hated this question.
7.  Weekly income.  Also what's your job title, your job description, your place of business, its address, and how you got to work today (bus, bike, car as a driver, car as a passenger, public transport . . . . there were about ten options, no kidding). Are you looking for work?  How hard are you really looking?
8.  Is your house rented/owned/borrowed, etc.  What do you pay for it per fortnight?  If rented, who do you rent it from?
9.  Religion  (this was the only optional question - many Australians are indifferent to religion, other than to just let people do their thing.  Unless it involves buying Halal-certified food, which is a whole other blog post) "Jewish" was not an option to check off, but there was a write-in space.  Thanks to that write-in space, apparently in the last census, there were more Jedi followers than Mormons in Australia.
10. For women, how many children you gave birth to.
11.  For kids, if you're a full-time or part-time student, and what kind of school you attend (the options were government, Catholic, or other independent.)
12.  For all people, if you need assistance with basic day-to-day self-care, communication or mobility.  I thought about listing Isaac since he still needs cajoling to shower and flush the toilet, but decided against it.
13.  Did you do any unpaid housework around the house last week?  How much?  How about watching kids?  Were they your kids?  Did you get paid for this?  How about helping old people last week, anything?  Were they related to you?  Any other volunteer work in the last two years?  What kind of organizations do you volunteer for?

The third big difference is that this census was done mostly online.  Residents were sent a piece of paper with a login code, that would then lead you to a password.  You were then redirected to a website where you entered your password and began.   For people who didn't have access to the Internet, you had to call the Bureau of Statistics and request a paper copy.  Australians were understandably worried about data safety.  The Bureau of Statistics swore up and down that their website was secure, they'd never been broken into, that they tested it on 150% of the capacity they expected, and it was rock-solid.  By 8 pm, with everyone logging on at the same time, of course it crashed.

Back in the olden days of this census, they had census takers going to people's houses, and they asked them all these questions.  I can so imagine folks getting angry at census takers if they had to sit and answer them in person.  The online version took me 20 minutes to answer - answering it for a person who is writing this by hand - bleah.

Fourth biggest difference - it's all done on one night.  The night for census was Tuesday 9 August.  Everyone was counted that night, and you were counted in whatever home you were sleeping at.  Everyone at our house was normally there, but I'm guessing if we had a guest at our house that night, they would be asked where they normally sleep as well as where they sleep now.  Those statisticians probably figured Tuesday was a day most Aussies are a) home and b) sober enough to log on and complete the census.   August 9 was the only day to complete the census.  Statisticians wanted a snapshot of where everyone was on that particular night, hence the overwhelmed website.  I had to try to submit twice before my answers went through.

Why would everyone log on and be counted if it involved all those nosy questions?  Well, I'll tell you . . . if you didn't complete your census, Australia will fine you.  Up to $180 per day until it's done.   I see a couple problems with this.  First, those who are most likely to not complete the census are those who don't have access to online service or are unfamiliar with using online services.  Who would those be?  The poor, the aged and the homeless - those who can least afford the fines.   To give the ABS their due, they did say the fines would not be applied after the website crashed.  And, some very funny tweets went out afterwards.

Couldn't resist . . .

This one cracked me up :)

Uh oh . . .

The same lack of access to a way to be counted (and I'm putting on my statistician hat now) would of course lead to under-counting of those most in need of government services, one of the reasons the ABS says it's collecting all the nosy work and commuting and school and need-help-with-day-to-day-living data.   The poor counting technique is nothing new.  Until 1967, Aboriginal people were either under-counted, half-counted or not counted at all in the census.  Politicians at the time used as one of the excuses for not counting or counting as "half-people" (yup - shades of the Three-Fifths Compromise) Aboriginal people the fear that politicians would use these numbers to gerrymander their districts or claim more representatives because of their large native population.   G-d forbid the Native Australians be represented appropriately in Parliament!

My other statistician concern with this is the nosy questions.  People don't really want all that information public, for different reasons.  I get that the ABS wants to get a big picture of where Australians came from, where they are migrating around the country, where there is a need for more public transport hubs, routes, dollars, where more public health dollars need to be spent.  But some questions might actually discourage people from answering, or encourage fake answers (or "donkey" answers, as they call them here).  We didn't want to answer the income question, but we had to, so we answered dishonestly.  We didn't want to answer the religion question, not because we aren't proud of being Jewish, but because there are very, very racist people in this country who don't hesitate to start attacking people of colour or Muslim women wearing hijab on the train because of their colour or clothing.  Jewish schools charge parents an extra $500 - $1000 per year per kid to pay professional security to protect their schools.  The guards are armed in a country that typically is not armed.  We don't necessarily want the fact that we are Jewish in a database that may or may not be as secure as they claim. We don't have armed guards at our houses.