A former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Bill McLennan, says the ABS has no authority to demand that people supply their names in the forthcoming census to be conducted in August.
McLennan, who helped rewrite the Census and Statistics Act in the 1980s, has written a paper for the Australian Privacy Foundation which appears to be the lone organisation campaigning against what seems to be an organisation that has gone mad.
The ABS made its unilateral move in December, issuing a statement that the mainstream media missed in toto, saying it had “decided to retain names and addresses collected in the 2016 Census of Population and Housing in order to enable a richer and dynamic statistical picture of Australia through the combination of census data with other survey and administrative data.”
In his paper, McLennan says the ABS is collecting the names and addresses of all Australians and will retain that information “and will match the census records with various administrative records held by government (health, tax, New Start, social security, etc)”.
In other words, it is open slather for a government that has grown increasingly reluctant to tell the public anything about itself, while at the same time demanding more and more that the people reveal everything about themselves.
Over the last few years, we have seen the introduction of a draconian data retention act. We have also seen moves to collect biometric data that would enable facial recognition.
And now comes the ABS with its demand that we provide our names for the census.
As McLennan points out, this invasion of privacy could see many people provide incorrect information or else boycott the census altogether.
And this would mean that government, business, academic and other users, who rely on high-quality census data, would have data which was substantially inaccurate.
Secondly, the census data is used to determine the number of seats that each state has in the House of Representatives. If there are doubts about the accuracy of “the population counts coming from the 2016 Census, then this would be a very serious matter indeed, and it would be difficult to redress”.
McLennan points out that the public has not been consulted before making this change and the ABS has not bothered to tell people that the exact same change was proposed for the 2006 Census and then dropped after a damning privacy impact report by Nigel Waters, a privacy expert.
The Australian Labor Party, which always bends over backwards when any proposal that violates the privacy of Australians is mooted, has kept silent on this issue. This is not surprising. The Greens are silent too. So too, the champions of the masses like Nick Xenophon and Andrew Wilkie.
McLennan adds that the data collected by the ABS is done on a voluntary basis – and if anyone should know, he should.
As he points out, “by regulation, the ABS has prescribed ‘name’ as a topic on which statistical information may be collected and from which statistics may be produced. However, as far as I can determine, no statistics are planned to be produced from the Census about ‘name’. Therefore that statistical information, that is ‘name’, can’t be considered as being collected ‘for the purposes of taking the Census’.”
And, he concludes, “The ABS doesn’t have the authority to collect ‘name’ in the 2016 Census on a compulsory basis”.
