What does the most recent census say about Australia?

Now that the dust has settled following the release of the first tranche of the 2021 Census results, it’s time to make some big-picture observations. What does the most recent census say about Australia?

In many ways this census is the most important in the history of the Commonwealth of Australia, not so much because of the questions but the timing. The 1931 census was postponed two years by the Depression. The 1941 census was delayed six years by World War II. Arguably, 2021 was the first time a census has been conducted during a national calamity. In due course the results will offer historians and social commentators the opportunity to view a nation under pressure. It will show how we responded, adapted and even prospered.

Some may even take the view that conducting a census during a pandemic demonstrates a level of self-confidence that was not evident in the ’30s and ’40s. Maybe this shows that the Australians of 2021 were fearless, or that they underestimated the scale of the pandemic, or that they were the kind of people who simply pressed ahead. I think the fact that we soldiered on demonstrates our faith in technology, if only because 80 per cent of responses were completed online.

Indeed, the issue of faith was one of the great findings of the census: that the stalwart faiths of Presbyterianism, Anglicanism and Catholicism, while still significant, are receding. Religions such as Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam are expanding in this country and it’s the well-established Christian faiths that are losing ground.

I wonder whether meanwhile we are seeing a bigger shift, one in which our rising belief in science and technology is reshaping the way people think. The climate lobby implores us to accept the science. Advances in technology and in medical research give a sense of being able to control our destiny. Previous censuses were completed by Australians who had traditional religious upbringings, who had endured the privations of the Depression, who fought or lost loved ones in the war, who believed that fate wasn’t arbitrary but was determined by judgment of the Almighty; who thought that sacrifice in this world would deliver salvation and rapture in the next. The Australians of the 2020s do not think like this. We think we can control our destiny: we were threatened by plague; scientists came up with a vaccine. We’re not so different from the Australians who filled out previous census forms, but as a nation we are a work in progress; we’re trying to create a better place for all.

It is possible to see themes repeated, contorted, evolved from one census to the next. Our pursuit of inner-city living, replete with the newly evolved hipster life form, was yet another manifestation of the Australian pursuit of lifestyle. We viewed it as sophisticated. So, come the pandemic and the work-from-home mandate it was always likely that many Australians whose faith had shifted from God to Google, from the Almighty to algorithms, would seek to transform their homes from “hotel” to technology-infused lifestyle refuge. The home-as-hotel movement predates the pandemic; it is evidenced in the bedroom pillow architecture, in the restaurant-styled kitchens; it was a place to sleep, to recuperate from the earthly excitement of buzzing CBD-based activities.

The census, the glorious accounting document that encapsulates the mind, mood and motivation of the Australian people tells – or at least hints at – all of these stories.