I’m a census fan but, as a queer parent, my family still doesn’t count

This may be an unpopular opinion, but census night thrills me. The bold idea of taking a snapshot of the lives and homes of every person in Australia is deeply compelling to me, and I have always loved the feeling of playing a small part in that hopeful project.

Census data helps us understand and anticipate changes in how we create families, secure work, sustain households, pursue education, practise faith and more, including among disadvantaged groups. But to keep this data relevant, we need to be asking the right questions.

All families count, but how do we count them?Credit: Getty Images

It is no small thing to make changes, which is why years of consultation have been invested in the development of a simple set of questions on sex, gender, innate variations of sex characteristics and sexual orientation. Their inclusion would ensure everyone in Australia can complete the census accurately, including my household.

I still remember the feeling of being part of census night with my mum and dad as a kid. I could see myself embedded in the place I knew best at that time: as the eldest child of a two-parent household, with a sister and a brother, my world in one.

That thrill didn’t lessen when I started to create households of my own, even if my model of family life looked different. At the start of the new millennium, it was rare for what we then called a “same-sex relationship” to be recognised in any of the paperwork required for participation in education, employment, health care or any other social system. Not even Centrelink viewed a cohabiting same-gender couple as defacto. The census felt of that time and place: incomplete and inadequate, but familiarly so.

After my children were born, the census started to feel grim. I knew ours was a safe and loving (albeit very noisy) household for two lucky little Australians. But on census night, their family structure was impossible to code into the available options. Since then, I’ve also had the discomforting experience of completing a census form as a non-binary person and parent, feeling caught between the language of my citizenship and my private sense of self.

So it felt like a betrayal to learn the government had decided not to proceed with including new questions in the 2026 Census. Filled with rage, I was bewildered by how a party voted in with huge support from my community could make a choice to deliberately continue our historically harmful erasure from our most important national dataset.

While the prime minister’s “backflip” on Friday, when he agreed to test a sexuality question, was welcome, it came with another kind of heart sink. As we have felt keenly since marriage equality, even when sexuality is recognised as a legitimate form of diversity, differences related to gender identity, and to innate variations in sex characteristics (which are entirely distinct from both gender and from sexuality), continue to be actively diminished.

Adding to my frustration is the knowledge that everyone would benefit from the inclusion of these questions. Without them, every decision informed by census data that has a gendered component (as just one example), from broad-scale program design to localised service provision, will still be grounded in guesswork, until at least 2032.

When my parents began to complete the census on my behalf in the 1970s, they were fuelled by hope in a new kind of Australia. Committed Labor voters, they devoted their lives to protecting our environment, and healing the social harms inflicted by colonisation, forced migration and poverty. We now know an effective response to these and many other policy challenges requires truly representative population data. These insights help us to understand how Australians are organising and orienting their lives and households across the country, which is critical to achieving social cohesion, community wellbeing and adaptability to change.

My children are nearly grown, so if these questions are not added in for 2026, as had been planned, I will miss the opportunity to complete a census that truly depicts our family while they are still living with me. But beyond the personal harms created by excluding groups with specific needs from a survey that claims to represent us all, this choice implies a privileging of political palatability over the responsibility to meet statutory obligations.

Everyone living in this country, including those who are queer, trans or with innate variations of sex characteristics, deserves the opportunity to fully participate in our next bold and hopeful census night.

Professor Christy Newman is deputy dean of research at the UNSW Arts, Design & Architcture.