Moving Forward: Towards a More Inclusive Census

Adapted from Chapter 14 of my soon to be published book Woke is Not a Four-Letter Word. Ch 14. The Impact of Intersectionality on Social Justice —Uncovering Hidden Inequities

When fighting for social justice, it’s vital to acknowledge that people’s lived experiences are shaped by various, interacting identities. Identity can intersect – a person may be a woman, a person of colour, gay, and disabled, for example, in ways that can combine to generate unique experiences of advantage or disadvantage. Intersectionality is a critical concept for examining social inequality in Australia.

Developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the concept of intersectionality helps us understand how different structures of domination operate simultaneously to perpetuate specific forms of invisibility, such as being both female and Black. Applying this framework to understanding the historical and present-day marginalisation of First Nations peoples and LGBTQ+ people in Australia, for example, is both timely and important.

This chapter explores how intersectionality affects social justice in Australia, and how failure to account for intersecting identities has seriously neglected the realities of how our society operates in key areas. We’ll focus on how this has been expressed in the development of one of the key tools for understanding our own population: the Australian Census.

The Australian Census: A Mirror of Society's Blind Spots

The Australian Census is taken every five years: it is supposed to be a snapshot of our country’s social structure. However, while it continues to be an exercise in social measurement, it is increasingly evident that historically it has not provided a representative picture of the contemporary nation either in relation to First Nations peoples or LGBTQ+ people.

First Nations Peoples: From Exclusion to Recognition

For a significant portion of Australia’s colonial history (indeed, until the 1967 referendum, enshrined in the Australian Constitution and officially lifted only in 1969), First Nations peoples were deliberately and categorically excluded from the national census.

This historical exclusion had far-reaching consequences:

Undercounting: The failure to collect First Nations peoples during the census resulted in severe undercounting of their numbers, which led to inadequate funding and poor policymaking.

Not just invisibility, but a lack of visibility First Nations peoples were invisible in national statistics. This obscured the causes of the difficulties that communities faced.

Entrenchment of racist attitudes: By formally enshrining discrimination in the constitution, the principle of separateness entrenched existing racist attitudes and treated First Nations peoples as categorically distinct from the rest of the Australian population.

Entering First Nations peoples into the census after 1967 would be a truer accounting – but that is still a work in progress, involving people in remote and difficult-to-reach places, who can still distrust government institutions.

LGBTQ+ Australians: The Ongoing Battle for Recognition

While First Nations peoples have been counted in the census since 1971, LGBTQ+ Australians are still disproportionately excluded from data capture. Unlike First Nations Australians and other non-white migrants, the Census never posed questions directly about sexual orientation or gender identity (beyond the binary male/female options), creating a major data void.

The implications of this omission are profound:

Lack of data: Without good data on the LGBTQ+ community, it’s hard to know where to put resources, which can make it harder for the government to create policies aimed at solving particular problems affecting that group.

Invisibility of intersectional identities: the absence of LGBTQ+ data in the census means that we will never know how sexual orientation and gender identity intersect with race, disability, class, and other demographic or social factors.

Internalised heteronormative assumptions: Not only does the exclusion of LGBTQ+ identities from the census perpetuate the mistaken assumption that it’s a purely heterosexual and cisgender world, it also allows the government to marginalise LGBTQ+ people while they remain blissfully ignorant and complacent.

The Impact of Census Exclusion on Social Justice

Avoiding harm requires recognising the harms caused by the historical exclusion of First Nations peoples and the contemporary exclusion of LGBTQ+ peoples from the census. In Australia, this has profound consequences for social justice.

Poor allocation of resources: without good population statistics, it’s hard for government bodies to allocate resources to the most deprived sections of society.

Troubling implications: The severe informational limitations mean that the specific needs of these communities cannot be addressed through policy interventions. 1098 words

Encouragement of systemic discrimination: the exclusion (or non-counting) from the census of certain groups reflects and reinforces the discriminatory attitudes of broader society towards these groups.

Structural intersectional invisibility: because the census fails to capture multiple identity categories, this makes it impossible to ever know how different forms of marginalisation overlap and compound on one another.

Moving Forward: Towards a More Inclusive Census

Accepting the limitations of ways past and present censuses have counted people is the first step to devising ways to make a more inclusive world. Here are some possible solutions:

Questions on sexual orientation and gender identity: Following, in particular, the examples of the UK and New Zealand, Australia could ask questions on sexual orientation and gender identity in future censuses.

Better enumeration methods: Continuing to refine methods of enumeration to ensure that First Nations peoples are counted more accurately, especially in rural areas.

Intersectional data collection: Developing ways to collect and analyse intersectional data to better understand interactions between multiple aspects of identity.

Community consultation: Seeking input from First Nations and LGBTQ+ communities to ensure that census questions and methodologies are culturally appropriate and inclusive.

Public education: Messages highlighting the importance of responding to the census for why the data is collected (eg, so that we know how many resources to allocate or what policies to make).

Recording the diversity of the population has long been a missed opportunity for the Australian Census, which has historically failed to reflect the reality of Australian society. Ownership of this failure, and of the consequences for social justice in Australia, has often been entirely avoided in relation to First Nations peoples in Australia, and only occasionally and incompletely considered for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender-diverse (LGBTQ+) peoples in Australia.

But acknowledgment of these limitations, and an effort to improve on this more demanding census, will be essential to capturing the intersectional character of social disadvantage in Australia. Only by accounting for the increasingly diverse lived experiences of all Australians can we reasonably hope to develop and deliver policies and services that advance meaningful equality and social justice.

This is also one thing we should carry forward into the future. We should continue scrutinising our institutions and practices, just as we have with the census, to make sure they fairly consider the needs of all those whom we call members of our society. These are some of the ways in which neutral-seeming tools can perpetuate systemic inequalities by ignoring intersectionality. Remedying them is one way forward toward a more inclusive Australia for all.