The Australian Bureau of Statistics has fallen into that common political failing – exemplified by Tricky Dicky Nixon – when the cover up becomes a bigger problem than the event itself.

The Rationalist Society of Australia’s Si Gladman has revealed that the ABS blocked a damning statement about the controversial ABS Census religion question.

Rationalist and humanists groups are supporting the campaign to change this misleading situation.

The group said: “Following overwhelming public support for change during a two-year consultation process, the Australian Bureau of Statistics had proposed making changes to address the leading nature of the question and deliver more accurate data.”

It wanted to change ‘What is the person’s religion?’ to ‘Does the person have a religion?’

If you think about the two questions there is actually quite a significant difference – a difference caused by a common (and misleading) phenomenon known as agreement set response. In simple terms the answer to the question is skewed by the question itself.

Why is this misleading question still going to be in this year’s Census? Because religious groups have been lobbying government to keep the existing question because it underestimates the number of people with no religion.

The decision to revert to the leading question also followed the Catholic Church’s lobbying of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to intervene and “reverse” the proposed changes to the question.

The Guardian (11/7) said “Australia would no longer be a majority religious country if the Census was changed.”

The Guardian based its reporting on an Essential Media poll which tested the existing Census format and found that 54% of respondents picked no religion when given a yes/no optional question.

….. and the ABS helped the obfuscation along with some clumsy redactions of critical documents.

The Rationalist Society of Australia’s Si Gladman says the ABS has blamed “a system error” in the software that it uses to redact documents for having blocked damning information about the religion question being used at this year’s Census.

Gladman wrote: “Last month, the ABS provided an explanation after the Rationalist Society of Australia (RSA) complained that the statistics agency had wrongly redacted from documents obtained under freedom of information (FOI) laws an ABS statement that the Census religion question “may lead respondents to a particular response”.

Sadly, for the ABS, the cover up was rather amateurish. Gladman says: “In documents provided to the RSA in 2025, the ABS blacked out the information from the slide presentation that ABS executives considered at a meeting in October 2024 when they decided to revert to the 2021 question wording — ‘What is the person’s religion?’ — for the 2026 Census.”

Indeed, the RSA was able to view the redacted text simply by copying the blacked-out section from the PDF provided and then pasting it into a word-processing document.

When in deep doo doo bureaucrats in difficulties often dig themselves deeper with the help of some gobbledygook – as in a letter last month to the RSA Gladman demonstrates.

Thew ABS said: A system error created faux redactions and obscured additional information (the black boxes not linked to a particular section of the FOI Act) which was meant to be released as per the decision on 02 May 2025.

The intended redactions and the relevant exemption provision under the FOI Act (s22) were applied based on the FOI team and the Decision-Maker’s examination of the documents and their contents. The system errors meant additional faux redactions were also applied.

Ask yourself when – other than in some clumsy defensive move – some bureaucrat would describe something as being ‘per the decision of 02 May 2025’?

Gladman said: “The slide presentation given to the meeting of ABS executives provides further evidence that the ABS is aware of the leading nature of the Census religion question and that it produces inaccurate data.”

He also said there had been a two-year public consultation process which raised concerns that the existing question “assumes you have a religion”, the ABS, in 2023, proposed changing the question wording — to ‘Does the person have a religion?’ — in order to “support more accurate data collection”.

“In early October 2024, after the Albanese government missed multiple deadlines and the ABS cancelled a major household test planned for September 2024, ABS executives decided to revert to the 2021 question wording. Internal correspondence showed that they made the decision because they did not have enough data to assess the performance of the proposed new religion question and because they thought returning to the 2021 question would ‘maximise comparability’ with past Censuses,” he said.

The FOI documents showed that the meeting had also considered the “public support for the change” and data accuracy versus comparability.

System errors, document redactions, genuflecting to clerics – a far cry from what you would expect in producing data on which important decisions on which government policies should be based.

Declaration of interest: The author is a Rationalist Society of Australia member.