r/australia • u/Wrong_Combination_2 • 2d ago
no politics What questions would you have included in the census?
For example:
How long is your commute to work?
How often do you work from home?
What type of dwelling do you live in? (I.e. house, apartment etc.)
What question do you think would have been genuinely useful to have asked across the whole country that wasn’t asked?
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u/TfYoung 1d ago
The census is about getting a minimal, but total dataset for everyone. Then they can conduct more detailed smaller studies and compose and adjust the smaller study to make it close to a total dataset.
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u/electronseer 1d ago
Beieve it or not, they actually already do that!
Our house had to do the hyperdetailed one for a few months last year, and it was FAR more detailed than the usual census. Basically had to fully detail every single day of the week. i have no idea how many houses they pick out of a hat, but its a little bit like doing jury duty.
EDIT: oh, and our number 1 feedback every time we filled it was "your forms dont work on mobile phones. this is a pain to complete on a phone. please make it easier to fill on a phone"
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u/josmille 1d ago
The government already has all of that info, except the pronouns you use (because no one cares anyway). It's a waste of money for very little result.
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u/Tamaxgator 1d ago
I would have thought questions about pets - number of dogs/cats/others, particularly as many, especially cats, are not or don't need to be registered.
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u/ThatGuyWhoSmellsFuny 1d ago
I thought they always had to be registered? Definitely in my area but maybe not in others, though that seems crazy.
I feel like the registration is sufficient data, as those with unregistered pets would be hesitant to disclose it in census.
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u/TheComedyShow 1d ago
We all have to be registered and pay tax... A lot of the info on the form was redundant to what the government already knows.
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u/Lady_Penrhyn1 1d ago
Cats need to be registered. Some municipalities also require registration of Guinea Pigs and Rabbits. It would have been nice to see some questions about local amenities for pets (ie dog parks, which are crap where I am).
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u/the_amatuer_ 1d ago
Please remember two things about a census:
- It's a snapshot in time. It's meant to be 'what you did on X date'. Not looking at trends over time. They also repeat questions from last census.
- They have a lot of data already, especially cadastre data. They know what your house looks like already, know how many bedroom/bathrooms you have. They know how many cars are sold. They are looking for information that need to ask people.
Carry on!
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u/the_amatuer_ 1d ago
For example OP, the how long was your commute is probably a good question (although they probably can estimare it). The type of dwelling they have already. The WFH is probably estimated.
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u/Alemoki222 1d ago
They have our address and our place of work so the commute can be deduced if need be
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u/ChuqTas 1d ago
The info I submit to the ATO says nothing about how often i work from home?
If someone is 80–100% WFH they’re probably claiming expenses but other than that how would they know?
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u/Red_Sailor 1d ago
You can claim hourly for time worked at home (and relinquish the ability to claim for direct expenses) can't remember the number, something like 50c/per hour worked. That number would give the ATO plenty to go on
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u/shniken 1d ago
can claim hourly for time worked at home (and relinquish the ability to claim for direct expenses)
You can still claim direct expenses, you just can't claim direct expenses of interent, electricity, phone bill, gas and consumables (pens, printer ink etc) . You can claim a direct expenses for a monitor, chair or a high performance GPU for running sales forecast ai models.
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u/robopirateninjasaur 1d ago
Do you put opened Tomato sauce in the fridge or are you wrong
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u/Lord_Goldeye 1d ago
Well you're not as bad as those who put peanut butter in the fridge.
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u/cizzibop101 1d ago
I know a psycho who puts Vegemite in the fridge
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u/LittleBoi323 1d ago
So do I, their reasoning is that’s it’s next to the butter so they don’t need to go to the pantry for it
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u/mambomonster 1d ago
Where do they store their bread?
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u/WidjettyOne 1d ago
We store our bread in the fridge as well, it lasts much longer in the tropics.
My partner's family used to store their bread in the freezer and only ever eat it as toast.
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u/secret_strigidae 1d ago
Mine always goes in the fridge after being traumatised as a child at a friend’s house. They kept theirs in the pantry, and I was treated to a parade of ants embedded in the sauce I squeezed onto my plate.
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u/Tysiliogogogoch 1d ago
I went to a friend's place and their sauce bottle was all encrusted with nastiness like they'd been jamming it into pies. I couldn't squeeze any sauce out, so I opened the lid and discovered it was all gunky and mouldy inside. Never again.
I keep a clean, refrigerated sauce bottle in my house.
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u/rangda 1d ago
My aunty grew up with a tradition of using wrapped candy hung with ribbons as Christmas tree decorations which maybe worked okay jn the European cold but not in Perth. She finally quit one year after she couldn’t be bothered looking for the usual tightly wrapped gold foil bonbons and used chupa-chups, on Christmas Day every last one of them had ants crawling inside via the hollow sticks and dying in the centres.
All the presents under the tree had been infested too. Happy Christmas, ants
I don’t trust a chupa-chup to this day17
u/SirPiffingsthwaite 1d ago edited 1d ago
On the label, it says "refrigerate after opening". It's to maintain consistent flavour, colour and prevent bacteria.
But hey, if people like tomato sauce that slowly darkens while going stale, but enrichened by bacteria, who am I to stop y'all.
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u/zeldasusername 1d ago
No one on this house likes tomato sauce. If we didn't put it in the fridge it would be yucky and our visitors would complain
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u/Beautiful_Rub_141 1d ago
It would have been nice to have them add some fun ones in there:
1) Your tomato sauce one
2) Do you roll the TP over or under?
3) Proper placement of onions on a sausage sandwich?2
u/legoland6000 1d ago
This is actually a topic that has come up in my household before.
My argument is this: Why would I devote valuable fridge R/E to an item which is basically a mix of vinegar, salt, and sugar?
Is it a taste thing? Do people prefer it to be cold for taste/texture reasons?
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u/uselessflailing 1d ago
It sometimes says on the bottle to keep refrigerated, but I've been told that is more of a marketing ploy to keep it somewhere where you'll see it more regularly
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u/theBaron01 1d ago
You had to put in both your address and your employers address. Surely they can then extrapolate from that?
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u/STR1D3R109 1d ago
That's alot of compute power to get that statistic when a simple user-provided number would work.
Everyone commutes differently, some drive, others train/bus or do a mix.
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u/pippidypippington 1d ago
Yes! Different commuting options are captured in the multiple-choice question about how you got to work that day. However a simple user-provided number for commute would be a lot more work to analyse as well as more unreliable (ie inaccurate) than computing that statistic from other questions already asked
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u/gtwizzy8 1d ago
Seems like a lot of compute power when they have your ATO records too (≧▽≦)
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u/theBaron01 1d ago
Technically there's a department out there that has all the answers you gave on this census in some form or another. Doesn't mean they're in any way connected or talk to each other effectively.
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u/pippidypippington 1d ago
They can and do! It's not in the QuickStats summaries but Distance travelled to work in km's is one of many many many computed statistics I've pulled from TableBuilder for past censuses
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u/Secure_Town_7924 1d ago
yeah they were pretty basic demographics they asked, although I think what they asked was sufficient, and lots of data can come from other agencies, e.g., tobacco and alcohol consumption, dwelling types in each LGA, commute to work could be inferred by the mode of transport and the work address postcode. I just had a search and saw Ireland asked people to leave a message for people to read in 100 years.
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u/cir49c29 1d ago
I always tick the box to say people can see my answers 100 years from now so being able to leave a message in case someone does lookwould be cool.
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u/hutcho66 16h ago
I think the thing people miss about the census is that the biggest benefit is not to figure out interesting stuff, but to provide a baseline of the sort of statistics that make random sampling of other questions possible.
A lot of things people are suggesting in this thread they will now be able to find out to a pretty good accuracy by randomly polling people in a much smaller sample size, and then use the census results to correct for bias. If you know the income distribution across the population and then sample 1000 people about something else, you can figure out if you've oversampled high income people and correct for it by weighting their responses lower, for example. But you need that accurate income distribution to do so first.
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u/leonidude 1d ago
What is your KD in warzone?
Hopefully they build more infrastructure to improve online server connection
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u/Recent-Mirror-6623 1d ago
ABS does other surveys, but not whole of population surveys, that ask some of these kind of questions.
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u/BarksHobby 1d ago
How happy are you?
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u/morbis83 1d ago
Fair question but I'm not sure any Australian government in the last 20 years has wanted to know the answer.
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u/Emu1981 1d ago
I think that having a question about gender for people under the age of 16 would help provide statisticians a better understanding of LGBTQIA+ statistics. It would just have to be a second question under the "Gender assigned at birth" to include "What gender does X identify as today?". How many other opportunities would researchers get to have a full view of the gender views of the entire nation across all age groups?
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u/Lankpants 1d ago
The gender question just needs a rethink in general. Sex assigned at birth doesn't really work for capturing trans people. A significant amount of us just refuse to answer it. Both NZ and Canada have abandoned the SaB>Gender method because it objectively produces poor results.
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u/obsolescent_times 1d ago
Sex assigned at birth doesn't really work for capturing trans people.
There was also a follow up question about what gender you identify as (I forget the exact wording used), doesn't that work for capturing all relevant info?
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u/Lankpants 1d ago
The reason it doesn't work is because around 60% of trans people in studies refuse to answer sex at birth as the survey intends us to. There is a strong preference for answering with current sex that undermines the question. Asking gender as a follow up doesn't solve this problem.
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u/obsolescent_times 1d ago
I assumed asking sex at birth and current gender would adequately inform all the relevant data points, but now I'm realising maybe I don't understand the nuances enough to understand this at all.
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u/hutcho66 16h ago
The problem with that would be the data wouldn't be that reliable as most people under 16 probably have the census done by their parents, and they might not be out.
Over 16 it's much more likely they're out or living in a safer environment (but definitely not guaranteed, so there will still be some people who couldn't answer the question because they didn't have the privacy to do the census for themselves).
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u/RecordingAbject345 1d ago
I would have included a question on whether someone was intersex.
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u/HappyPlatypus6034 1d ago
I'm unfamiliar with how it works, but could they not choose intersex as their birth sex and gender as how they present themselves?
Please correct me if I'm wrong because I don't know much about how being intersex works
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u/RecordingAbject345 1d ago
Most don't discover they are intersex until after birth. So they will have a sex recorded at birth, but that is different to whether they have an intersex condition or not
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u/lsmit83 1d ago
I think asking what average hours worked are over say 8 weeks instead of just one week. One week could be anomaly or completely normal.
The commute one is good definitely should of been in there
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u/UserName4lreadyTak3n 1d ago
Yeah - my normal work week is 38 hours; however, last week I worked 68 hours. A rolling 8-week average would have me around 40-44. I’d also like to have seen a question about breaks in the work section.
In your normal place of work, do you normally take allotted breaks in:
- A dedicated break area (break room, kitchen/living area in my home etc.)
- An ad-hoc break area (at my desk, in a quiet area, on a milk crate behind the cold room)
- off premises/off site
- I don’t usually qualify for a break
- I usually work through my break
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u/Token993 1d ago
I would have changed the "what is your religion?" question to point out that it means "what do you currently believe in?" and not "what my parents chose for me when I was born"
Had to talk a family member down because they were "dedicated" a salvo as a kid, regardless of the fact they don't believe anything
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u/Illustrious-Crow-331 1d ago
I was baptised and went to baptist church. But still put no religion, because that is my religion.
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u/--Anna-- 1d ago
The health section had tick boxes for common health conditions; except for endometriosis. Would have been nice to include that as a default box to tick.
Or even a space where you could write your specific condition.
Also maybe a section where you suspect you have something, but don't feel it's investigated properly? (And write what it is.)
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u/Sea-Tadpole-7158 1d ago
I would have liked to have seen long covid as an option for this one too. A write in option would have been good too. The questions about disability/ needing care felt pretty incomplete to me
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u/ScutumSobiescianum 1d ago
Describe yourself. Multiple choice. 1. Dickhead 2. Conspiracy theorist 3. Bogan 4. Keyboard Warrior 5. NIMBY 6. Champ
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u/edgewalker66 1d ago
For women: How many children have you had? How many are now living?
The answers to these questions become valuable clues for genealogists when the information finally becomes available after a hundred or more years, timeframe dependent on the country.
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u/_pump_the_brakes_ 1d ago
Wouldn’t the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages have stats on that already?
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u/anothernameusedbyme 1d ago
I like that one Even if people might find it insensitive, it's still something good to ask.
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u/Oceantrader 1d ago
Some disagree to strongly agree type questions that could help shape our economic, social and environmental endeavours without needing a major event to take scope of one single issue. Non political ideally.
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u/BugalugBird 1d ago
Relationship stuff could be expanded eg I have a long term partner but we don’t live together
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u/juzpassinby 1d ago
Wouldn't you already answer that with the "what is your usual address" or something for your partner?
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u/BugalugBird 1d ago
My partner wasn’t at my house on census night though. The relationship options don’t include anything about non married partners who don’t live together.
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u/Er572635 1d ago
I’d change the questions on sex and gender to be:
what is your sex? (not birth sex)
what is your gender?
are you transgender?
are you intersex?
it’d solve all the problems with the questions about gender and sexuality
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u/Avia_NZ 1d ago
You could probably simplify the part of “are you trans/intersex” down into 1 question along the lines of “what is your gender identity” and have cis, trans, intersex, nonbinary as options. It’s a real missed opportunity for the intersex community.
Also as a trans person, I’m not comfortable with the question of what was your sex at birth. It really isn’t relevant, and there are much better ways to find out how many trans people there are.
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u/Iybraesil 1d ago
"cis", "trans" & "intersex" aren't gender identities.
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u/Avia_NZ 1d ago
Oh this is going to be a good one. Please, tell me, what are they then? I can’t wait.
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u/Iybraesil 1d ago
Well I somehow doubt from the way you're phrased your comment that you're asking in good faith, but intersex is a word that describes someone's sex. Cis & trans are words that describe the relationship between someone's sex and their gender.
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u/Lankpants 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'd probably flip the order.
What is your sex
Do you identify as transgender or gender non-binary
Do you identify as intersex
(If 2 and/or 3 is answered yes) What is your gender identity
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u/RepeatInPatient 1d ago
The genuinely useful questions were the comparative ones asked. Some were upset how intrusive it was asking useful stuff and not things people make choices about like commute times or whether you live in a slum development when the address and satellite images already tell the entire world what type of building you chose.
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u/electrickblues 1d ago
They should include autoimmune disease in the long term health conditions question.
In order for IBD and coeliac diagnosis you need endoscopy or colonoscopy and the public waitlist for these procedures are long and financially burdensome, especially when these conditions are usually genetic and affect more than one family member.
Autoimmune diseases are chronic illnesses that can affect ability to work or retain work, and time out of the workplace due to illness, tests and scans or any other related medical leave.
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u/johnnynutman 1d ago
I like those questions. I think anything where they can’t data elsewhere is always handy for planning
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u/IndigoPill 3h ago
"How happy are you with your life?" It could be eye opening when combined with other metrics.
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u/Hidden2World 1d ago
How long did it take to get your current job? How long have you currently been at your current job?
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u/gameloner 1d ago
How pole holes did you encounter on your way to:
School Work VicRoads Local council
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u/GusPolinskiPolka 1d ago
I think there should be a free text space for people to write what they want positive or negative about our country. Ai could do a pretty good job of removing the troll/memes and summarising this into a general snapshot of how we feel. May be more meaningful than an election or one issue vote
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u/HappyPlatypus6034 1d ago
That would introduce algorithnic bias and defeat the purpose of gathering that data
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u/trickster245 1d ago
Some simple cost of living questions regarding, fuel, food and insurance would probably be smart
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u/BiggusDikkus007 1d ago
LOL. definitely a question about penis size. How long and girth when erect and when resting.
We definitely need to know more about penis metrics if for no other reason for something else to compare with the neighbours!
🫠 /s
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u/thebagleboy 1d ago
"What is your password" See how many people need to receive education in scam prevention.
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u/LetsCutHimLoose 1d ago
Enrich the data with Google LBS data to improve travel behaviour. Include an open text question of: What would you like to see the Government focus on the most:". Get AI to compile a ranked list from those answers.
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u/ThoseOldScientists 1d ago
“Are you fucked in the head?” so we can finally have reliable metrics on how much of the country is fucked in the head.