Census 2016: leaders took the ABS for granted

Malcolm Turnbull and his ministers are keeping a strategic distance from the Australian Bureau of Statistics as a blame game starts.

Small Business Minister Mich­ael McCormack went to great lengths yesterday to say he had not known of the decision to shut the census website until half an hour after it was made. And he had been minister for only three weeks.

Yes, the ABS must answer for its handling of the online census, including the strength of the systems it bought from IBM and others, and there will be an inquiry.

But ultimate accountability lies with the ministers who oversee the agency. What did they do to ­ensure preparations were on track, especially with Australians being asked to switch to online forms and give even more personal data.

Politicians cannot avoid respon­sibility here. Both major parties have weakened the ABS in recent years. Labor cut $10 million from the agency in Wayne Swan’s last budget. The Coalition cut six times as much in Joe Hockey’s budget the following year.

A bigger problem is that polit­ical leaders allowed the agency to drift. It took Hockey most of 2014 to decide who to appoint to lead the ABS, leaving it with an acting chief for 10 months as it dealt with redundancies and cuts.

In other words, politicians thought they could take the ABS for granted. Now they find they were wrong. The skills and experience in place at the last census five years ago may not be there today.

While the ABS got $234.7m over five years in last year’s budget, the lack of direction at the top has been a problem. There has been a lack of engagement in preparations for the census.

At one point last year the ABS asked to postpone the census to give it time to fix its “antiquated” computer system. Bill Shorten complained about the requested delay, and so the August 2016 timetable was set in stone.

The assistant minister given responsibility in September for the census, Alex Hawke, did little to build support for the census or deal with privacy concerns. Then he was shifted to border protection. The new minister, Michael McCormack, has had just a few weeks to get across the issues and, for a time, it wasn’t clear who the respon­sible minister would be. Why did Turnbull change ministers with the census imminent?

Shorten exploited the problems yesterday to blame Turnbull. “If you can’t run the census, you can’t run the country,” he tweeted.

It is almost exactly the line Tony Abbott used against Labor.

For too long, ministers seemed to think the ABS would take care of itself. It may be a costly mistake.