What is enough to delay national stocktake?

THE census is an institution and has been since Federation. The idea that it be discontinued in its current form is distressing. The sequence will be lost.

Since 1961 the census has been conducted every five years. It is possible to track social change back through time at five-yearly intervals for different geographic communities. To suddenly push this out to 10 years loses the granularity, the certainty that in my view is the substance of social observation.

Ours is an immigrant nation with near record rates of newcomers arriving to offset the skills deficit caused by retiring baby boomers. We need to take regular demographic soundings to see where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

And then there are the pragmatic considerations. We are a small nation spread across a vast continent. Demographics matter in Australia. We simply cannot afford to get resource allocation wrong.

In North America, Europe and Asia there’s an abundant population base to support a new piece of infrastructure. Not so in Australia. We need to be razor sharp.

Accurate, trustworthy and timely data is the foundation of every investment decision.

And from a decision-maker’s point of view you cannot argue with the census.

I worry that if we move more in the direction to surveys as opposed to censuses we will lose a measure of certainty.

In the first-half of the 20th century the census was conducted every decade: 1901, 1911, 1921 etc.

The 1931 census was postponed to 1933 because of the Great Depression. The 1941 census was postponed to 1947 because of WWII.

It took a depression and a world war to get previous generations alter the sequence of the census.

What exactly is the reason today?