ABS buckles in face of religious lobbyists to keep biased Census question

We are disappointed that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has missed an opportunity to correct the long-standing and obvious presumption in the wording of the question on religion for the 2026 census.

Today, the ABS has announced that it will continue to use the same question on religious affiliation – “What is the person’s religion?” –  assuming the respondent has a religion.

Despite receiving overwhelming support for removing bias in the question as part of its public consultation process, the 2026 Census will again deliver data that inflates the importance of religion to Australians.

The coalition of freethought groups behind the Census – Not Religious? campaign in 2021 will now begin work on staging an even bigger public awareness campaign to coincide with the next Census in 2026.

Speaking today, Michael Dove, the spokesperson for the campaign, said the ABS had failed Australian taxpayers in choosing to continue with a fundamentally flawed question.

“The ABS has sacrificed accuracy in seeking to placate the powerful Catholic Church-led resistance to changing the question,” he said.

“Religious lobbyists had argued that the ability to compare with data from earlier censuses was more important than collecting an accurate snapshot of Australians’ current relationship with religion. So, we will continue to compare flawed data from the present with flawed data from the past.”

“As a result, the ABS will continue to provide an embarrassing case-study of how to create bias through poor questionnaire design.”

“All Australians will lose out by not having access to representative and accurate data. This will have a significant impact on the quality of evidence to support policy formation and resource allocation.” 

In 2026, the ABS will again use an assumption-based, leading question which presumes each respondent has a religion. This results in acquiescence bias, distorting the accuracy of the final counts.

“Given that it seems the ABS and religious lobbyists are not interested in having accurate data on religious affiliation, there is a clear need for another large public campaign to encourage Australians to mark ‘No religion’ if they are no longer religious,” said Mr Dove.

“We’ll be calling on all Australians who care about meaningful public policy to support our campaign.”

The Catholic Church hierarchy campaigned last year calling for the federal government to block the ABS from changing the question.

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