By Natassia Chrysanthos and Olivia Ireland
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is under attack for excluding trans and gender-diverse people from the next census count, despite a government backflip to allow gay, lesbian and bisexual people to be included.
An internal Labor revolt forced Albanese to on Friday reverse his government’s decision to block new questions in the survey so it could avoid a divisive debate.
But he opened another fraught dispute for minority groups when he maintained the call to exclude planned questions about trans and intersex Australians.
The Greens will seek to wedge Labor’s progressive MPs on the issue and accused Albanese of trying to “split the queer community down the middle”, while Opposition Leader Peter Dutton seized on the disunity in the Labor ranks and said, “the wheels are falling off the government”.
Albanese set off a new round of political attack on Friday when he backtracked from the government’s unpopular stance and said there would be one new question on sexual orientation in the 2026 census if testing by the Australian Bureau of Statistics was successful.
“They’re going to test for a new question, one question about sexuality, sexual preference,” Albanese said. He did not commit to resume testing for other planned questions on gender and sex characteristics.
The government scrapped plans for new LGBT questions just a week ago, and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and Treasurer Jim Chalmers then said it would have triggered a divisive culture war. That prompted six Labor MPs, including Assistant Health Minister Ged Kearney, to break ranks and tell Albanese to reverse the decision.
The Greens will try to wedge those MPs when parliament resumes by bringing a vote in both the lower and upper houses that forces them to either side with the government’s revised position to only count sexual orientation or to back the inclusion of trans people in the survey.
Progressive Labor MPs, equality advocates, and Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner had argued that collecting more data was vital to improving services and policies for LGBT Australians. Several opposition MPs said they were unfazed by the issue, while Coalition MP Warren Entsch joined the push for Albanese to include all the groups in the census.
Albanese defended his decision to change his mind. “This is the first time I’ve been asked about it,” he said on ABC radio in Melbourne on Friday morning. The station has an audience in Labor seats that are under threat from the Greens in the city.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has backflipped on the census.Credit: James Brickwood
“There are two years until this survey goes out. There were proposals for wide-ranging changes in the census and that has been rejected because we think that that’s not appropriate.
“But in 2024, or 2026, the world has changed as well ... And therefore the census, in terms of modernising, reflecting some of the changed values which are there, by asking a question, I think that people would think that was a pretty common-sense outcome.”
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said the government was “all over the shop” and indicated the Coalition could have supported the changes – a retreat from his comments earlier this week that criticised a “woke agenda” said, “We’re pretty happy with the settings that we’ve got in place”.
Asked for his position on adding questions to the census on Friday, Dutton said he was “fine” with members of the LGBT community being counted, although he wanted to see full details.
“We can have a sensible way forward, but the prime minister, at the moment, I think, is demonstrating to Australians that he’s lost control of the agenda,” Dutton said.
The Greens also indicated they would weaponise the fissures within Labor. “They need to count us in, all of us, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, intersex and everything in between,” said party spokesman Stephen Bates.
“The prime minister, panicked by criticism this week, is trying to split the queer community down the middle … It’s all well and good for some Labor MPs to break rank on social media, but will they cross the floor in Parliament when it counts?”
Victorian Equality Minister Harriet Shing said she had written to the federal government “seeking urgent confirmation that the 2026 Census will include specific references to gender identity and variations in sex characteristics”.
Advocacy group Equality Australia welcomed the government’s reversal on a sexuality question but said the government was still “picking and choosing” who to count. “Trans and gender diverse people and those with innate variations of sex characteristics deserve to be recognised as much as anyone else,” said chief executive Anna Brown.
Advocates for trans and intersex Australians said the decision excluded them. “If our identities are not accurately captured in the census, then the data will be extremely poor, and it will lead to years of ongoing health and policy failures for our communities,” said Jeremy Wiggins, the head of advocacy group Transcend.
Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody said it was not acceptable to exclude some sections of the community.
“We know the LGBTQI+ community are a vibrant part of our community, so excluding any part of our community from the national census would not be the correct thing to do. That would be the divisive thing to do,” she said.
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