Census campaign ‘made me cringe’ says former government statistics chief
The former top statistician for the Australian Government has admitted the ad campaign for this year’s Census made him “cringe” and “was not up to par”.
Bill McLennan, who left from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2000, told the Senate inquiry into what caused this year’s systems meltdown that the publicity campaign around it had not managed to persuade people it was safe to hand over personal data online.
This year’s Census on August 9 was beset by a technical meltdown which stopped the majority of people from completing the online forms, leading to the inquiry.
McLennan told the inquiry: “The public relations exercise in respect to the Census was, shall we say, not up to par. Anyone who saw the skit they put on TV would, as I did, cringe when they saw it.
Even now the ABS is emphasising how many people completed the census, which is no guide to data quality, given how many people objected to linking of data sets within government.
The spin tried to talk about security from external hacking to deflect it away from what for many was a key privacy question.
I’m going to be wary of assuming that data from this census is true.
Yes of course, it was the fault of the advertising campaign that the ABS f—-d up the Census.