Host:
Assistant Treasurer, good morning to you.
Minister Sukkar:
Good morning. Thanks for having me.
Host:
Thanks for your time. I guess the first question – given that there’s a bit of paranoia in the community about everything from QR coding to Covid apps and what have you – is, what does the government use this information for?
Minister Sukkar:
This information is used to inform a whole range of decisions of Government from infrastructure spending to health, education, basically anything that the Government is looking to do will be informed in one way, shape or form by answers that people provide in their Census. It won’t just be for the Federal Government, this is data that is used by state and local governments and in fact is used by a lot of community organisations around the country as well. This is really important information that goes into decisions that are made that effect South Australians and indeed all Australians lives for the next five years so we really rely on a good turnout of information, we rely on 95 per cent of people to complete their forms. The good news is we’ve got a third of people who have already completed their surveys, 3.3 million, which covers about 8.5 million Australians. We’ve got a third done and I’m very relieved to hear that you did receive your form so no doubt you’ll be one of those that get yours in tonight.
Host:
The number one question we’ve got from people, in fact I think we’ve got someone on now, this is a good sample of what’s coming in. Lucy in Golden Grove, what’s your question of the Assistant Treasurer?
Caller:
Hi, we haven’t received our Census form so does that mean we don’t have to do it?
Minister Sukkar:
No, Lucy. If for some reason you haven’t received your form, you can log straight on to census.abs.gov.au and you can complete it immediately, you can get it started. Or if you’d like a paper form, you can call the 24 hour hotline on 1800 130 250 and get a paper form. But no, everyone has to do it and if for some unusual reason either you didn’t receive it or you misplaced your letter, either get online or call that number and we’ll get a form to you really quickly.
Host:
Are there any new questions in this year’s Census, Assistant Treasurer?
Minister Sukkar:
Yeah there are a couple of new questions. One question we’re asking is for Defence Force service. We want to get a better picture of our veteran community around the country, where they are. Obviously we know there’s a range of issues we’re trying to address for veterans. Knowing where our veterans are and a bit more information about them is important. We’ve also added a second new question this time around which is asking about long term and chronic health conditions. Again, such a large proportion of our health budget is taken up with, quite rightly, with people who have got long term health conditions. Having a better picture of who they are is important. We try to always keep the Census as short as we possibly can. You can’t just keep piling in new questions so we’ve added two questions and we’ve removed one which was a question in the last Census which asked if people had an internet connection and given internet connections are ubiquitous, we thought that was redundant so we’ve removed that. It’s one question longer than last time. Still should only take people 15 or 20 minutes to get it done so it’s a pretty quick process.
Host:
What kind of assurances have your IT people given you that the system will hold up tonight?
Minister Sukkar:
Well look we’ve worked very hard. Obviously we learnt a lot from the 2016 Census. We worked closely with the Cyber Security Centre, the Department of Defence, ASD. We’ve worked very, very hard to try and ensure that this is a seamless process for people, we don’t have outages as we had last time. Encouragingly, we have had a third of all surveys returned without any problems, touch wood. Obviously tonight, during the day and tonight there will be peak load on the system but we’re confident about how it will go but we never say mission accomplished until it’s done. So we’ll be working hard today and watching it very closely and responding to any issues but, touch wood, it’s been a pretty smooth process thus far.
Host:
Good stuff. We’ll all log on tonight. Good stuff, Michael Sukkar, the Assistant Treasurer. Thanks for joining us this morning.
Minister Sukkar:
Thanks for having me.