The Road Forward:
The 2011 Census and Beyond

Collaboration & Consultation
As part of the census development process, the ABS consults widely within the community to ensure that topics to be included in the census are relevant, can be collected accurately on a self enumeration form, and do not impose an undue response burden.

To initiate public consultation regarding the nature and content of the census, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) releases an information paper that describes the proposed procedures and topics that may be included.

The ABS will soon be inviting public comment on the content and procedures of the next census. The invitation to have a say in the way the nation’s largest statistical collection is undertaken is in the ‘Information Paper: 2011 Census of Population and Housing, ABS Views on Census content and procedures’ and is to be released on 26 October 2007.

This is the first in a series of information papers about the 2011 Census. It marks the first step in the public consultation process for 2011 and outlines ABS proposals for the next Census, including:

• procedures for conducting the Census;
• protecting privacy of individuals;
• confidentiality of the information;
• topics to be included;
• topics under review;
• new topic proposals; and
• topics to be excluded.

The Information Paper and Submission Form will be available for free on the ABS website at <www.abs.gov.au/2011censusviews> from 26 October 2007. Information and guidelines about making a submission will also be available.

Consultation sessions for the 2011 Census are scheduled for 19 & 20 November, 2007. The sessions will discuss plans for the 2011 Census.

The Census Time Capsule
The Census Time Capsule was conducted as part of the 2006 Census, an initiative continued from the previous Census conducted in 2001.The Census Time Capsule gives people the option to have their personally-identified 2006 Census information kept on microfilm and securely held by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) for 99 Years.

Information held in the 2006 time capsule will be publicly available after 8 August, 2105. Those accessing the information could include genealogists, historians, academics, social analysts and other researchers in the twenty-second century. Individuals will also have access to enable them to research their family history.

According to genealogists, when the time capsule information is released in the year 2105 it will give families a much clearer picture of their ancestry; who they were and how they lived at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

56.36% of Western Australia’s usual residents (1,104,206) opted to retain their personally-identified Census information for access in 2105. This figure was slightly above the national retention rate which was 56.11%.

The ABS predicts that this figure will rise in future collections of the Census, when the adoption rate of undertaking the Census online increases. For more information, please visit the ABS website, at <https://www.abs.gov.au>.

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