To quote the great Malcolm Tucker, this year’s Australian Census is an omnishambles.

The government has combined an unprecedented grab for personal information with genuine ineptitude, a headlong rush into technology it did not understand, and the threat of legal prosecution if we don’t participate in what is rapidly becoming an international farce.

Any respect for the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is dwindling faster than Malcolm Turnbull’s majority, and the saddest part is just how predictable and avoidable this nationwide failure should have been.

media_camera Malcolm Tucker is not effing impressed. (Pic: The Thick of It/Peter Capaldi)

The Australian Census is an institution. It’s been around since 1911 and the ABS had collected data using paper, pencils, and mathematics 16 times before yesterday’s nationwide bungle.

This year was different for two reasons: the Bureau changed the rules to retain Australians’ names and addresses, and link them to other government data, for up to four years after collection, and it made a bold move to make online forms the default. No more paper surveys delivered to your home, unless you specifically request them.

The Bureau’s bid to know more about you is no minor matter. Federal politicians including Nick Xenophon, Jacqui Lambie, Greens senators, and former NSW privacy commissioner Anna Johnston all announced plans to keep their names off the national survey or boycott it entirely.

Former Bureau head Bill McLennan even called its new powers “the most significant invasion of privacy ever perpetrated on Australians by the ABS,” and advised the collection of names might not actually be authorised by law.

As we now know, there was no need to rally for a nationwide Census boycott. The Bureau organised that itself last night.

You cannot boycott the Census any more than I can boycott marriage to Keanu Reeves. Neither of us have the necessary access to the source of our protest.

media_camera Where art thou, Keanu? (Pic: Getty Images)

The Census website remains inaccessible today, and advises visitors to come back in 15 minutes. And another 15 minutes. And so on.

In addition to this failure, many who requested paper forms are yet to receive them, myself included, and some are still waiting for the codes to register for either survey method.

What was supposed to be a snapshot of Australians on August 9 will now be a smattering of information gathered over two months or more, depending on protests, prosecutions, and whether the website ever recovers.

Unless Australia really is a nation of just 2.33 million people, that is.

But how did it go so terribly wrong? Anyone brave enough to order Wiggles tickets upon their release could have predicted the massive surge in online traffic and inevitable breakdown of an unprepared website.

Rumblings about abandoning the 2016 online Census first emerged in February last year, and funding cuts for the ABS under both Labor and Liberal governments cannot have helped. The ABS and government claims its $9.6 million investment in IBM technology wasn’t to blame, however.

Four distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the Census website and an eventual hardware failure forced the ABS to shut the website down, though it didn’t inform the public of this fact until hours later.

Curiously, worldwide DDoS traffic showed no spikes in activity yesterday, or heightened activity in Australia, indicating that perhaps the ABS just wasn’t as prepared as it should have been.

The ABS is also not saying why the Census website is still down, or when it will open for business again, hinting at a devastating hardware failure or a sad realisation that it simply wasn’t prepared for the job.

Even the New York Times notes “Australia’s first attempt to conduct a census online (is) in disarray”, while the BBC rightly reports our liberal use of IT Crowd, Simpsons, and Monty Python memes to at least prove the public is in on the joke Australia has become.

Despite threats of $180 daily fines, Australians still have until September 23 to complete the Census. The real question, however, is whether Census website can rise from the shambles to meet that deadline.

Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson is News Corp Australia’s National Technology Editor

You may have noticed there are no comments below. While we would like to blame this on the alleged Census hackers, it’s sadly not the case. Your access to comments will hopefully be reinstated soon.

The RendezView team