Government and logic are strangers.

The form online to request a paper census still requires you to use your phone number for verification, but I still see that as preferable to doing it online where I am expecting a 3rd party app for face verification, google chrome, windows 11, a blood sample, and a scan of every book in the house.

I stopped answering these things accurately when they left them tagged with your details.

If you want vulnerable people to fill out forms accurately you've gotta make sure that said forms can't be used to round them up when the political winds blow the other way or an occupying force takes over. Governments keep records for a very long time and censuses have a history of being used for violence.

This comment includes the core issues that concern me.

I struggle with the assertion that the data is used for government decisions that benefit me. I'm sure they are to an extent, but the extent to which the data is used in this way is infinitessimal to what's implied in the census marketing IMO. For example, a decision about funding a local school or hospital will be based on data from local schools and hospitals, not from a census. A new school is not going to be built in my area because I indicate that I have 2 kids in my home.

I don't really "trust" anyone with my sensitive data but I trust government departments less than most. It's likely that at some point Australia will have a PM elected on a populist anti-immigration platform. I believe that the likelihood that census data will be weaponised against migrants is a near certainty. I understand that there are legislative protections against this, but we've seen time and again that these protections are ineffective both at home and abroad.

Re-idenfication of de-identified data is only one of many concerns, but you do not need to be "unique enough to be obvious" to be re-identified. It's a bit like fingerprinting on the web. With a handful of datapoints you can filter a set of many million down to one or two. You don't really start with a list of names and the census data and merge the two together. It's more like, you start with someone's tax return and the census data, and then you discover a whole lot more about them.

In summary, the benefits of completing the census just don't seem to stack up against the risks. Perhaps they did 40 years ago when it was a handful of questions about language ability and earnings capacity, but not in 2026.

"Sex assigned at birth", like that has any fucking relevance to my life. It's not the sex on my birth certificate. It's not the sex that aligns with my lived experience, my medical needs, the way the world perceives me etc. It's irrelevant, and like many trans people, I will just be lying on that question, because my lived experience today is more relevant than out of date information.