Ideas@TheCentre
Census apartheid
With preparations well in hand for the 2011 Census in August, we are assuming that the separate Census Interviewer Household Form, which has been administered to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in remote communities in past censuses, has been dropped by an embarrassed Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
The Interviewer Household Form was created because the separatist education philosophy of Indigenous schools has created illiterate generations in remote communities. The heads of households cannot fill out the census form. But nor can recent immigrants who are not literate in English. They, however, are given the ordinary census household form, and census collector staff help them fill it out. So a recent arrival from the Sudan got the regular form while remote Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders got the apartheid form. In a remote community, a non-Indigenous teacher got the regular form and an Indigenous teacher got the Interviewer Household Form.
The separate interviewer form was openly discriminatory. It explicitly states on the front that any person in the household concerned about privacy can ask the census collector for a Personal Form and a Privacy Envelope. The Interviewer Household Form assumes that Indigenous Australians do not have these rights to privacy.
The separate form was also objectionable from a statistical standpoint. Differences between the Household Form and the Interviewer Household Form used in Indigenous communities include:
* different questions
* different response options
* different examples of responses for given question
* differently worded questions
* response boxes in different order, and
* different sequence of questions.
These differences mean that data are not comparable between Indigenous Australians surveyed by the Interviewer Household Form and other Australians, including Indigenous Australians who receive the mainstream Household Form. For example, participation in CDEP – and its classification as employment (although it was mainly equivalent to work-for-the-dole and included activities such as ‘home duties’) – is included as a separate question. This distorts employment figures for remote communities and reduces the evidence value of census data for evaluating and formulating Indigenous policy.
The authors are seeking confirmation that the apartheid form has been abandoned. No information will be lost if the regular census form is used for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. No new processes are involved in administering the same householder form to all Australians. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders will be treated the same way as everyone else at census time, including the latest arrivals who lack English literacy skills.
Helen Hughes is Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. Mark Hughes is an independent researcher.
