Vulnerable community members push for Census recognition

Australia's national Census is happening this week, and many people from vulnerable communities want to make sure they are counted. Homeless people, Yazidi refugees, and Jewish Australians are all calling for better recognition in the survey. The Census collects information about who lives in Australia, and the results help governments decide how to spend money and create policies. Groups that are left out or hard to count say this is unfair and affects the support they receive.

In the coastal city of Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, a man named Timothy Coles has been living in a tent for several years. He said he planned to fill out the Census to help show the hardships faced by homeless Australians. Counting people who are sleeping rough is important because the data helps governments plan services and housing support.

A place called Pete's Place, run by St Vincent de Paul, helps homeless people in Coffs Harbour. It offers showers, laundry, tents, food, and caseworkers. Team leader Anna Millett said many of her clients find it very hard to fill out a Census form because some of them cannot read or write. Others deal with mental health problems, drug and alcohol issues, or family violence, which makes the process even more difficult.

To help with this, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) field officers visited Pete's Place and a local soup kitchen all week to answer questions. Starting the next day, those officers would interview willing people and write down their answers on a simple two-page homeless Census form. ABS spokesperson Emily Walter said the bureau had been working with homeless services ahead of time to find the best ways to collect data.

Demographer Liz Allen from the Australian National University was once missed in the 1996 Census herself when she was a teenager who had no fixed address. She said the ABS has since improved its definitions of homelessness to better capture people in those situations. She added that the bureau has trained workers to sensitively ask about living conditions and collect data from people in rough circumstances. In the 2021 Census, about 122,494 people were estimated to be experiencing homelessness on Census Night, a 5.2 percent increase from 2016.

The Census is also important for religious and cultural minority groups. In refugee families like the Al-Hassan household, the children often help answer the Census questions because they speak English more fluently. Sixteen-year-old Bahin Al-Hassan helped make community videos about the Census in the Ezidi language, also known as Yazidi or Yezidi. He said recognition in the Census was very important to his community.

The Ezidi community grew from just 63 people in the 2016 Census to 4,123 in 2021. However, the community must still tick an "other" box on the religion question and write in their faith by hand, because Yezidi does not have its own tick box. Community leader Sami Sheebo has been campaigning to change this, saying that having a dedicated box is an important step toward being seen and recognized. Her community recently gathered in Coffs Harbour to mark Roja Resh, a day of mourning for devastating ISIS attacks that killed, enslaved, and displaced thousands of Ezidi people.

The Jewish community in Australia is pushing for the same change to the Census. The Census currently lists five Christian denominations among its ten religion tick boxes, but not Judaism. Peter Wertheim of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry estimates there are about 117,000 Jewish people in Australia, but the 2021 Census recorded only 99,956. He said rising antisemitism — hostility toward Jewish people — has made many in the community hesitant to record their religion on official forms.

Mr Wertheim said Jewish families remember times in history when governments used census records to find and persecute Jewish people. This has created lasting fear about sharing religious identity on official documents. He believes a dedicated tick box and stronger data protections would help more Jewish Australians feel safe enough to be counted accurately. Census Night falls on Tuesday.