The Senate Economics Reference Committee has released its report on the 2016 Census, available for download here. The Science Party made a submission to this inquiry in September last year (see it and the rest of our Census 2016 blog posts here).

Download this submission:
Submission to the Inquiry into the 2016 Census (PDF, 122 KB, 21 September 2016)

The Science Party cares about the right to privacy as well as good data collection. The 2016 Census threatened both of these ideals with the introduction of dataset matching, leaving respondents vulnerable to having their data re-identified. Download our submission to the Inquiry into the 2016 Census above and see all of our blog posts on the subject.

Cuts to the ABS, a failure to appoint a new head statistician in a timely manner and ministers playing musical chairs are partly to blame for the Census failure. 

OPINION

Update: the ABC this afternoon is reporting this timeline as the official sequence of events. More information, e.g. about the precise volume of hits, would be better but it is good to see more transparency around the census.

Last night, the online Census went down, and most people were unable to fill out their forms. The ABS claims that it was DDoSed. That means that it received lots of requests from computers all at once that took the service offline.

A concerned user of the online link aggregator Reddit recently highlighted some issues with the way the Australian Bureau of Statistics intends to link your personal data across other government databases. In addition, an article posted today by former Deputy Privacy Commissioner of NSW, Anna Johnston, outlines her reasons for boycotting the 2016 census. This led us to question some of the methods the ABS may be intending to use and how they might be of concern and in the public interest.