Gareth Parker:
It is Census day. On the line, the Federal Assistant Treasurer who has responsibility for the Census. Michael Sukkar, joins me on 6PR Breakfast. Minister, good morning.
Minister Sukkar:
Good morning, Gareth. Thanks for having me.
Gareth Parker:
It’s a pleasure. So it’s different this year, isn’t it? For most people, we will be completing online. Why is that?
Minister Sukkar:
Well, Gareth, we expect about 75 per cent of people to complete it online. I think that’s just a realistic part of where our society has gone as far as migrating online as much as possible. That’s what we commenced in the 2016 Census and it’s obviously been ramped-up for this year’s Census. We’ve had about 3.3 million surveys returned which covers about 8.5 million Australians so we’ve had a really good uptake already. The message today to all of your listeners is, for the remaining two thirds of Australians who’ve got to do their Census – get on today or tonight, get it done, it only takes 15 or 20 minutes and it gives us really quite important information that will inform decisions for many years to come in relation to not just government decisions but decisions made by many organisations in our country.
Gareth Parker:
That’s an interesting point about the information and the quality of the information. Given that half the country is in lockdown, do you think that that’s going to affect some of the results, particularly around things like transport and work and those sorts of questions because these aren’t normal times?
Minister Sukkar:
There’s no doubt, Gareth, that there will be some quite peculiar trends that will be related to the impact of Covid. I think we’ll be able to probably look through a lot of that data and of course there are many surveys that the ABS conducts on an annual basis. But there will be some interesting and some different outputs that I think are the result of a lot of the country being in lockdown. For a number of the basic questions about your family and income and composition and health, those are sorts of things that shouldn’t be too drastically impacted. It’ll be fascinating to see what the impact of Covid is when this data is looked at and released in June next year.
Gareth Parker:
Just on that, the questions that are being asked, why have you settled on the selection of questions that you have? There’s obviously lots of questions that have been asked in the past that are not necessarily all included in this. There’s all sorts of questions that people wanted asked. Some of the activist groups were saying that you should have asked more about gender and these sorts of things. How do you actually decide on what gets asked and what doesn’t?
Minister Sukkar:
The ABS goes through a process where they basically invite groups to present on what questions they think and then you get specific groups who raise questions they would like. We have a pretty strict view – the ABS that is – that really you can’t allow the Census to get too long. If it gets too long, you start getting fewer people completing it so we tend to have a rule that for every question that you add, you’d want to take out a question. This year’s Census, we landed on two additional questions. One in relation to defence force service – getting a better picture of where our veterans are around the country, and also long term health conditions. So many of those long term, chronic health conditions really do have a significant impact on our health systems around the country. Knowing where those people are and what their long term health conditions are, was determined to be the most important. So we added two questions and we only took out one question from the last Census and that was whether you had an internet connection or not. That’s pretty irrelevant these days but it was a question that was asked for the last couple of Census. So we’ve added two questions, removed one, but you can’t just keep piling in new questions because if the Census gets too long, fewer and fewer people complete it. Most of your listeners, Gareth, should be able to get it done within 15 or 20 minutes so it’s not a huge imposition but the data and information we get from it is just so important.
Gareth Parker:
It feel like shorter than in previous years when we used to do it in paper and pen. Is it or not or am I just misremembering how long it takes to complete the Census?
Minister Sukkar:
It’s funny you say that, Gareth. I completed mine last week and I felt that it was much quicker too. Maybe because I wasn’t shuffling through the papers. A quarter of people will do a paper form but it’s a very intuitive process, you get straight on, you’re answer questions about yourself and most people can answer those pretty readily. I found it pretty quick and we want it to be as quick and easy as possible. We want 95 per cent of Australians to complete this. That’s a very, very high level by international standards and the simpler you make it – the most straightforward you make it – the more likely we are to get to that 95 per cent threshold.
Gareth Parker:
There was huge issues five years ago on the technical issues and there suggestions of cyber-attacks. I heard reports yesterday that there had been some attempts to interfere with the systems. What can you tell us about that?
Minister Sukkar:
We’ve really rebuilt the digital capability, Gareth. We are, again, very keen to make sure people don’t encounter any problems when they get online to do their form. We’ve worked closely with the Australian Cyber Security Centre, the Australian Signals Directorate, we’ve really invested a lot in the security of the Census and the integrity of the Census. Now you can never, unfortunately make these things foolproof but we’re very confident and as I said at the outset, we’ve had 3.3 million surveys returned covering some 8.5 million Australians. Touch wood, it’s been pretty seamless, we haven’t had any technical issues to date and we’re very hopeful that that can continue over the course of today and tonight when hopefully the remaining two thirds of Australians get on to do it. So a big investment into security and not just security of the systems, Gareth, but also the encryption of Australians information. End-to-end encryption, protecting our data sovereignty – these are things that we’ve invested a lot in but in my role, you never claim ‘mission accomplished’ until it’s all said and done and we’ve got all of those surveys returned without any issues. So we’ll be watching it very closely and working on it pretty hard today.
Gareth Parker:
Minister, thanks for your time.
Minister Sukkar:
Good on you, Gareth. Thank so much.