The Census !

A lot of meticulous people will not fill out the Census form until today because the whole purpose of a census is to establish exactly where the twenty-four million people that call Australia home will sleep on census night.  In practice, many forms will be filled in days in advance and more will follow until the deadline for lodging arrives next month.

It really is an innocuous document.   It simply wants to know who you are and where you live and it helps to know a bit about your background.   Were you born in Australia and what overseas family background relates to your family.   That can be very important to the medical people in screening out diseases that are relative to national groups and we do need to know how and where out indigenous people are located in this great land.

There is a degree of hysteria from the people who see a government spy behind every tree.  Past census papers were shredded after eighteen months and this census will be kept longer.  The boffins think they can extract more analysis and they do promise that the actual names and addresses will be discarded before this fine tuning begins.

One question may result in some navel gazing.  The census wants to know how much we earn ?  The form offers a range of weekly amounts that add to an annual total and that certainly suits those who get a weekly pay packet, but it will probably confuse pensioners - who get their pension fortnightly.  Many of the self employed may also fill in that question - with the proverbial grain of salt !

The census also provides a working snapshot of how we are housed, and that can be very valuable to those tasked with making more land available for housing and allocating city densities in relation to transport.    There is no doubt that what this census reveals will be worked over by numerous Federal and state government depatrtments - and that worries some people.

We now live in the information age and few people are spared a constant barrage of letters through the mail soliciting donations for worthy charities.    Despite " Do not call " registers we are constantly having meals interrupted by inward phone calls offering unwanted services and many of these are impossible to end with a firm refusal.

We hope that this census does not result in an avalanche of government department mailouts seeking to correct anomolies that have been discovered in the census.    Many people are cautious about giving personal information because the age of the computer has become an information sorting house that feeds into commercial applications by cross checking to develop ever accurate mailing lists.

Hopefully, the personal information we reveal in this census will retain the promised confidentiality and not leak into the commercial sector.