Census 2006 and the Interweb

This one is close to my heart, as my dear better half is spending quite a bit of time and leg power to distribute forms (and later collect them) for around 450 houses in our area (the fact that she's ultimately employed by John Howard I choose to ignore, for my own sanity's sake).

We received our forms two days ago and we had already agreed that we would submit our answers/data electronically at www.abs.gov.au/census. So late last night, while waiting for one of my very few current favourite TV programs to start on SBS, I logged in with the intention to complete it in less that 15 minutes.

Surprisingly, the experience was very satisfactory! The website is no-frills and definitely no-thrills, which is great for the purpose. Australia, as a population in general, is still a very web-illiterate nation so the last thing one wants to do is put them off completely by presenting them with government 'stuff' to do over a complex web tool.

Once logged in, you start by listing all persons in your house on August 8th 2006. Yes, we can fill the information ahead of time, as long as it is accurate AND true. Once that's done, the system creates one set of questions for each person registered. In the case of couples, some smarts exist to create a 'relationship' between non-married, divorced people (our case). Once the adults are done, it's a matter of churning through effectively identical questions for each child.

We completed the whole thing in under 15 minutes, which is considerably shorter, more accurate and less frustrating than filling in paper forms. But, like with everything else, we picked on a couple of things:

1. We are asked to supply Current Address, Address as of 12 Months Ago and Address as of 5 Years Ago. The first two, can be easily reused later in the questionnaire (eg. in the case of your spouse and children) by selecting a "Same As.." checkbox. However the third address (previous 5 years) has to be typed in by each person registered. We thought that was a bit dumb; there are 4 children in our house and they were all living together with the parents 5 years ago. I would have liked to see another "Same As person 1 or 2" checkbox to facilitate this.
2. One of the questions in the 'Dwelling' section is whether access to the Internet is available. Now, I can't work out how crucial this question is... The Census is normally about population and demographic statistics. I thought this was a very technology-oriented question, with very little point (other than perhaps helping the Bureau of Statistics predicting where to spend more money in the next 5 years). Where do you draw the line? Why not ask if we have Colour or Digital Television? How about mobile phones? Or motorbikes? I suspect that more useful data could be collected from an exercise of that magnitude, like work/lifestyle balance questions like "How many holidays a year does the family take?".

I would recommend that you fill in the questionnaire online. It's quick, a no-brainer and secure. Save yourselves time AND raise the bar for Australia's Internet future! Big Kev would be excited!...