Australia Oppresses Jedi

eberry writes "Despite over 70,000 respondents (.37% of the population) replying "Jedi" to an optional faith question on Australia's census, it will not become a recognized religion According to CNN "Australian officials say respondents could face a $1,000 fine for supplying false information. Citing, and I quote, "...people of a particular religious affiliation do not provide the correct information, certain facilities might not be built that otherwise would be." Personally I find their lack of faith disturbing." And I find the fact that this is on CNN even more so ;)

Comments

Same story as for New Zealand

[Lenbok]

Here is some information from Statistics NZ about the NZ equivalent. Two obvious conclusions from this: with 1.5% of the population, the Jedi faith is much stronger in New Zealand; and statisticians have no sense of humour.

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Thanks for your enquiry. There were 53,715 people who identified
themselves as Jedi in response to the question on religious affiliation.
This was 1.5 % of the people who responded to the question.

For your information, most people realise the importance of the Census
and therefore provide meaningful and accurate answers. The religion
question, which has been asked in the Census since 1851, asks people
to identify what religion, if any, they affiliate with. They may elect
not to answer this question. If people's belief system was genuinely
Jedi, they could mark the "other" box and write Jedi in the space
provided. These data were captured during the processing phase but have
been coded as "Response outside Scope". Jedi is not part of the
agreed list of religious affiliations noted in the New Zealand Standard
classification. Hence it will not appear in the official results from
the Census.