While various religious groups are entrenched in wars – US Christian Nationalists, Muslims, Israelis – it is worth looking at another sort of religious battle – the one designed to prevent the forthcoming Census from accurately reflecting the status of religion in Australian life.

The August 11 Census will ask questions about religion.

What it doesn’t do though is provide the opportunity for non-religious people to register their position in replying to the Census. The current question assumes all Australians have a religion when many do not.

It was proposed that the question be modified to enable an accurate statement about the number of non-religious people in Australia. However, a concerted political campaign directed at the Albanese Government by religious organisations stymied that.

The campaign also demonstrates that religious organisations are aware that they are a declining force in Australian life and have to distort the Census questionnaire to hide that reality.

The National Secular lobby group Campaign – The Census Not religious – undertook attitudinal research to test the extent to which the Census questions inflate the religion result.

Based on previous work the campaign found that the existing question format may undercount by as much as 11%.

The new Essential Research poll conducted a survey using the question formulated originally but then abandoned after religious opposition. When asked the question Do you have a religion – rather than what is your religion – 53.7% picked ‘No’. This compared with 43.3% when asked the question to be used in the Census.

Michael Dove, spokesperson for the Census – Not Religious? campaign, said the new polling provided the clearest insight into the extent of the impact of the leading question.

“We’ve long known that the leading nature of the Census religion question significantly inflates the data in favour of religion and undercounts the non-religious population,” he said.

“The Essential Research poll is the first to test the actual question that the ABS had proposed using versus the flawed question design that it decided to re-use. So it provides the best insight yet into the impact of the bias in the question being used in the 2026 Census.”

He said the ABS needed to fix the question for future Censuses.