Census night will reveal exactly how our lives have changed
This census is especially important because it is unlikely to deliver what every census for decades has delivered.
Tuesday is census night. It comes around like a comet once every five years and has been doing so for 60 years. Prior to that censuses were more haphazard.
One of the first things we Australians did after federation in 1901 was to conduct a census.
But our modern censuses administered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics are far more than mere festivals of figures.
The censuses serve as social dipsticks that measure the progress, the shape, the travails of the Australian people at regular intervals. And our censuses have such depth.
The Americans run a census once every decade (last April 2020) whereas we run two. At their censuses the Americans ask nine questions. We’re running 63 questions on Tuesday.
We Australians are naturally good at mining, surfing and sheep shearing but we’re also very good at counting things. We love it.
In the early days individual colonies produced annual statistics reports that “measured the colony’s progress” by population count and by other measures such as acreage under tillage.
The reason why we Australians are so focused on demography is because, I think, deep down we know that we’re barely 26 million people in charge of a sparsely inhabited continent. Not even the Americans with 332 million claim an entire continent. But we do.
It’s possible to drive from one side of The Netherlands to the other (say Rotterdam to Groningen) using motorways in 2.5 hours. The Netherlands has 17 million people. The Dutch, and the Americans and others, don’t have to worry so much about measuring markets; there’s enough people; just build it and they will come.
There are those who argue that a census is overkill, that surveys can deliver good results for less cost. I disagree. A survey can always be challenged on the basis of sample size. Less so with a census.
A census has authority and its results can be directly compared with preceding censuses. Plus in the vexed world of the allocation of tax and investment dollars it’s especially important to get these decisions right in a sparsely populated nation. The census helps direct funding to where funds are most needed.
There are questions in the census that reveal so much about our nation and especially when viewed across time. We are becoming less god-fearing and more godless. Although I wonder whether at the 2021 Census, conducted amid a deadly pandemic, and with ageing baby boomers now contemplating their own mortality, we might not see a bit of an uptick in matters of belief?
Some 21 per cent of adult Australians volunteer. Others deliver unpaid care for a family member, an act of support that peaks at the age of 58. The reason being, I think, that this is the age that most Australians lose perhaps their sole surviving parent. Isn’t that interesting.
At the 1996 census barely 5 per cent of Australians worked from home where one of those five percentage points comprised farmers who had to work from home. This proportion didn’t change for 20 years but I very much expect it to jump, as if triggered by the application of a defibrillator, at the 2021 census.
And not just in lockdown Sydney and Brisbane but in our “free” cities too at census time. And the reason is that working from home is being embraced by lifestyle-obsessed Aussies who have figured out that working from home, even in a hybrid arrangement, delivers a better quality of life.
The proportion of Australians living in a separate house on a separate block of land has been diminishing for 20 years or more.
But with ageing millennials now pushing beyond their mid-30s, partnered up, and with a few kids in tow they may well be reassessing the value (and the allure) of a four-bedroom, two-bathroom, Zoom-room house on a garden block in, heaven forbid, outer suburbia or in the regions, in comparison to their oh-so-chic minimalist apartment in the inner city.
This census is especially important because it is unlikely to deliver what every census for decades has delivered, and that is confirmation of social and cultural trends.
Indeed I think this census will confirm that we are living through an inflection point in the Australian way of life. From the way we work, to where we live, to the very essence of belief, and so much more, are all up for grabs. Triggered by the pandemic perhaps, helped along by generational change, all coalescing to deliver a very different post-pandemic Australia.
Mere surveys cannot prove the scale of the transformation that I think is currently underway. To do that you need a full-on, well-executed census conducted by nothing less than the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Do your civic duty. Fill out the census. And then we can all sit back and allow the ABS demographers to work their magic. For late next year they will deliver, by my reckoning, a census dataset that shows the new directions for Australia in the 21st century. The 2021 census is as big and as important, and as simple, as that.
Bernard Salt is executive director of The Demographics Group; data by data scientist Hari Hara Priya Kannan
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