and I’m excited…

This year, 2021, is a census year. I’m excited. We have something certain and positive to look forward to apart from death and taxes. But, the census needs some good publicity. The public still has lingering doubts about the 2016 census because of suspicion over keeping names for four years instead of 18 months, because lots of people didn’t receive their forms or letters before census night and because the website collapsed. These concerns were politicised and received a lot of media attention at the time. Since then, everyone has moved onto more interesting issues and I have searched in vain for headlines such as ‘2016 Census a Resounding Success’ or ‘ABS consults on data matching’.

An audience of planners doesn’t need to be reminded of the value of the census. A detailed and reliable history of population and housing data underpins our work. I remember a senior Victorian government bureaucrat describing to my RMIT Planning class in 1988, the horror he experienced when he realised that the 1981 Metropolitan Strategy Plan was based on the hunches of a few powerful people who lived in Camberwell, Hawthorn and Canterbury! Since then, he had dedicated himself to providing an information base for first the MMBW and then the Ministry for Planning (MPE). Many of us have also spent the hours, days and weeks of our lives poring over census data. Many of us have been involved in collecting it.