Today’s release of data from the 2016 Census allows us to identify some of Australians’ more common characteristics, how they vary across states and territories, and how they are changing over time.
The failures of the 2016 Census have caused many Australians to ask whether it’s really worth it anymore.
Carlo Allegri/Reuters
How can we possibly know how many millions of people are living in the U.S. illegally? Demographers have actually refined a simple formula that’s worked pretty well since the 1970s.
Chinese Australians have been in Australia for more than a century, but they are invisible in our records.
Shutterstock/The Conversation
Dallas Rogers speaks with Alanna Kamp on how racism and sexism has excluded lives and experiences of Chinese-Australian women from our historical record.
In 2014, Obama signed executive actions aimed at narrowing the pay gap between men and women. Did they work?
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
The evidence the Census servers suffered a DDoS attack is weak. A simpler explanation is that they buckled under load of Australians filling out their Census forms as asked.
If you only consider average depth, you could drown at the deepest point.
Shutterstock
Despite assuring Australians its systems were load tested and secure, the Census site went offline at a crucial time. Could the ABS have avoided such an embarrasing failure?
South Australian senator Nick Xenophon has spoken out against census data retention.
Dan Peled/AAP
Census data have a real impact on the lives of Australians, from determining political representation through the distribution of electorates, to the allocation of government funding.
Women may be happy in jobs that are stereotypically seen as ‘women’s work’ because of the way gender roles have developed over time.
www.shutterstock.com
Reliable data about the homeless population is vital when developing policy, allocating funding and developing services for vulnerable people. But first the census needs to find them.
The ABS has safeguards to protect privacy and secure data collected in the census.
AAP/Alan Porritt
By linking censuses through time or by combining other information with the census, many more important policy questions can be answered than if we used one dataset alone.
The last census revealed that just over 60% of Australians identified as Christian, but only one in seven of those attended church regularly.
Shutterstock
Analyzing big data sets holds the promise of big insights. But the axiom “garbage in, garbage out” is particularly apt, since conclusions can be only as good as the raw data itself.
Census collectors go door to door in Sydney in 2011, the 100th year of census taking in Australia. Now the next census, due in 2016, is in doubt.
AAP/Dean Lewins
Before Australia proceeds with plans to devote fewer resources to a less frequent national census, we should consider the Canadian experience of what losing such rich data means.
Australia’s census covers a wide range of topics, including some that are very infrequently covered by other surveys.
AAP/Dean Lewins
If reports are to be believed, both the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the federal government are strongly considering moving from a five-year to a ten-year census cycle. This move has been…
Mobile phone networks join the dots about where we live and travel.
Ovchinnkov Vladimir
There are now more mobile phones in use than there are people in the world to use them – some 7.2 billion phones. Mobile phones are becoming integral parts of our lives, penetrating into areas of the developing…