STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator ANTIC (South Australia) (13:42): Every five years, the Australian government demands—I might say, under threat of daily fines—that you hand over the intimate details of your life, like who you live with, what you earn and what your beliefs are. And now, of course, there are questions about your identity and sexual orientation. Well, last night was that night.

The census has really now become another tool of an overreaching administrative state. This is not neutral data collection. It's compulsory.

Refuse, and the state comes after you with penalties. That's the opposite of a free society. We've seen this pattern before.

In 2016, the ABS tried to keep names and addresses for longer and create permanent linkage keys so your census record could be matched across government databases. The principle remains true. Once the state holds the data, the risk of misuse, function creep or future abuse never fully disappears, no matter what the reassurances are.

It's not just privacy concerns. The form itself is being politicised. Questions that blur biological sex with subjective identity or that frame religion in a way that suits particular agendas turn what should be a statistical exercise into a cultural one.

In fact, in last night's census, question 8 asked what was my recorded sex at birth, and question 9 then went on to ask what my gender is. Sorry, what? What do you mean?

Then question 57 asked how I describe my sexual orientation. Why does the government need to know that? Good data for planning roads or hospitals doesn't require treating every citizen as a data point, under compulsion.

The census should return to its proper, restrained purpose—a simple, anonymised snapshot, not a vehicle for expanding state power or advancing social experiments. Australians deserve the freedom to keep their personal lives private, and the government, well, it has no business asking some of these questions.