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Australia Conducting Electronic Census
ajdlinux writes "On 8th August 2006, the Australian Bureau of Statistics will be conducting the 2006 Census of Population and Housing. The big difference this year is that you will now be able to fill out your census online. The technology, developed by IBM, cost AU$9 million and is designed to be accessible to screen readers, and, unlike similar efforts in Canada, does not require any special software.
However, there is concern that the 2011 eCensus could be integrated with the proposed Human Services Access Card. Will this turn the Census from an anonymous snapshot into one connected with name-identified information?"
It is silly to worry about the cenusus being used to collect your personal information. The government already does that much more frequently and accurately through taxes.
Philosophy.
The census comes around every 5 years. The questions are so bland, and demographic as to really make this census, not useless, but a wasted opportunity.
It would have been so easy to include some extra questions (not political ones, because no government would agree in mid-term), but rather social questions. Like some national survey instead of a selective one (like a poll of a 1000 people).
I can think of one question that would be highly applicable to all Australians:
Would you support recycled sewerage being pumped back to the potable water supply?
Or
Rate your preference for a solution to the water shortage problems: 1) Desalination, 2) recycling, 3) more dams, 4) long distance canals, 5) relocate the towns/cities, etc...
But, all the questions are related to how do you get to work, how much do you earn and where do you study...
Sad. Same questions as last census.
Hopefully in the future this will change.
Christ, the last thing you want is to start putting questions like that on a census.
Almost all social research can deliver highly accurate findings using a relatively small sample. Interviewing one thousand people will give you extremely high levels of confidence in the results, providing of course you don't fuck up the methodology. After that, you're mostly wasting everybody's time.
Australians are required to complete the census by law. Even if you make the questions optional, adding a bunch of "nice-to-know"s is a big misuse of national manpower. And just imagine the kind of push-polling you'd get if you opened the floodgates and let government departments throw in social-research questions. ("Do you support the government protecting the lives of unborn babies by banning stem cell research?")
There's a need for social research, and governments already do enormous amounts of it. But you don't need to interview 20 million people to find out that most people don't like the idea of drinking recylcled sewerage.
I should buy some cement.
You should. NZ is often well ahead of the pack when it comes to political freedoms. Universal suffrage, indigenous rights, social services and even the McGillicuddy Serious Party were established there well in advance of most of the world.
I'm an Aussie, so I should be taking the piss out of them, but the Kiwis benefit strongly from having a compact country, well educated population and a history of pragmatic politics.
PS, I'm a little ashamed of saying nice things about UnZudders, so if uny uv ewes read thus, please take the puss ut uv yersulves. Thunks.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Well, it didn't work for me. I s'pose I'm not the typical Canadian, but Firefox on Linux is not supported by the 2006 Canadian census (although Firefox on Windows is).
At first I thought it was 'cause I'm running a 64-bit Firefox on AMD64, but even the 32-bit version on my x86 laptop wouldn't let me finish. I tried to bypass their checks using a Firefox plugin that spoofs the User Agent, but then it froze part way through and I lost all my work. I was very frustrated, to say the least, considering it's just a friggin survey and you don't need anything more than SSL and HTML 4.0.
Ian