Illustration: Matt Davidson Credit:Matt Davidson Most of us answered "no". But when the question is rephrased, more carefully, in the bureau's separate Voluntary Work survey, something approaching 40 per cent of us say yes. And the answers are useful. It's the people with children who volunteer for sport, the young mothers who take part in mothers groups, the men who join emergency services. Volunteers are more trusting and satisfied with life than the rest of us, more likely to have parents who volunteered. None of this could be found out from the census, and the question was only included at the insistence of the then treasurer Peter Costello, who was gearing up to challenge John Howard as prime minister as the 2006 census approached using volunteering as his theme. It was included again in the 2011 census because the bureau didn't have the money to find a replacement (true) and again in 2016 for the same reason.

Tragically, perhaps because it has been in the census, the bureau hasn't conducted its proper volunteering survey since 2010. In some ways the census questions about childcare and unpaid domestic work are worse. We are invited to answer yes or no: "Did the person spend time looking after a child without pay." We are invited to pick a range of hours in answer to the question: "Did the person spend time doing unpaid domestic work for their household." What's bad about these questions isn't only that the answers aren't particularly informative (although for what it's worth, 14 per cent of women said they did 30 hours or more unpaid domestic work in the week compared to 4 per cent of men). It's that by being in the census they give the bureau an excuse for not conducting what's arguably its most insightful survey. Nothing is more valuable than time. It's the ultimate non-renewable resource. Decisions about who gets money can be fudged; money can be created and borrowed. Decisions about who to marry can be undone. But time is absolute. The hard trade-offs about whether we work longer hours or spend those hours with our children, whether we watch television or spend that time doing the dishes so our partner doesn't, they can't be undone. The way things are going it’ll take until the mid 2020s when we are next able to get a handle on what we do.

An examination of how we spend our time, five-minutes by five-minutes, tells us more about us and more about our relationships and the relationship between work and the rest of our lives than anything else. Every six years the Bureau of Statistics pencils in a time use survey. Incredibly expensive at $15 million to $20 million (although cheap compared to the census) it delivers diaries to 7000 households, each of whose members personally writes down in real time what they are doing every five minutes. They not only record their primary activity (such as cooking) but also their secondary activity (such as caring for children). And they write down where they were, who they were with, and their relationship to that person. The process only lasts two days, because after that the participants are exhausted. But the results tell us more than if we had asked them straight out questions in a survey like the census. The census is usually completed by the head of the household on behalf of others. If it's a man, he might put might put down how many hours he believes his female partner works in the house each week, he might nudge up his own. And he might be "primed". The questions in the census, and other such surveys essentially say: "this is a question about childcare". That priming changes memories in a way that real-time diaries do not.

Australia's foremost expert on time use, Lyn Craig of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW, values the survey because it measures paid work, unpaid work and leisure on the same metric. "You can see how one person's time use affects others, you can see the sequence over a day, you can see whether young people working while studying have enough time for study, you can see how people who lose their jobs spend their days, you can see what's normally invisible," she says. The time use survey was last conducted back in 2006, before the invention of the iPhone, before the gig economy. The 2013 update was ready, but it was pulled to save money after the Gillard government imposed an efficiency dividend. The 2019 update won't happen either. A Senate committee has demanded its reinstatement, but the way things are going it'll take until the mid 2020s until we are next able to get a handle on what we do. It's too long to wait.