Sarah Hanson-Young and Scott Ludlam add voice to protest over privacy as Xenophon says he will seek amendments to act

The independent senator Nick Xenophon says he will refuse to include his name on his census form, knowing he could be prosecuted for it, because he is not convinced the national census does not present a huge privacy risk.

As millions of Australians prepare to enter their household details on Tuesday, Xenophon will be joined by Greens senators Sarah Hanson-Young and Scott Ludlam in refusing to put their names to the national headcount.

Xenophon said he was willing to make himself a test case to challenge the government’s ability to prosecute Australians for withholding their name from the census.

Speaking to the chief statistician of the Bureau of Statistics had not changed his mind.

“I understand that, by refusing to provide my name, I will be given a notice under the act to comply and the $180-a-day fine starts from then,” Xenophon said on Monday. “I will contest any such notice and, by doing so, I will in effect turn it into a test case for the ability of this request.

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“In the meantime, I will be seeking amendments to section 14 of the act so that a person cannot be prosecuted if they fail to provide their name. In other words, it will ensure such information is unambiguously non-compulsory.

“I will write to both the prime minister and opposition leader by tomorrow, as well as my crossbench colleagues, seeking their support for this amendment, which of course will need to be made retrospective to census night.”

Ludlam said the government had “crossed a line” by threatening to prosecute people who withheld their names.

“No, I won’t be disclosing my name or address on the census,” the West Australian senator told ABC’s Lateline. “And I’ve got to say, it’s done with great reluctance, because I’m a big fan of the census.

“But I think, to be honest, they’ve crossed the line and they should have expected that a lot of people would do what I’m going to do.”

However, Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm said he would put his name on the form. The self-declared libertarian told ABC radio he was “broadly sympathetic” to the idea of withholding names but added that “it is the law to provide your name and I wouldn’t endorse breaking the law,.

The minister for small business, Michael McCormack, and the ABS chief statistician, David Kalisch, held a joint press conference in response to Xenophon’s announcement on Monday.

Kalisch said he had spoken to Xenophon and had explained to him how the ABS would protect and use the census data it collects.

McCormack said he hoped the briefing had encouraged Xenophon to change his mind, and he urged Australians not to follow Xenophon’s lead.

“I think we’re making far too much of this, names and addresses and privacy breaches,” McCormack said. “Anybody with a supermarket loyalty card, anybody who does tap-and-go, anybody who buys things online, they provide more information indeed probably to what is available to ABS staff.

“I note with some humour really that many people are going on Twitter and Facebook and making various comments about the ABS, about the census, and about me as well, when in fact wherever they go it tracks you on your Facebook account, so I can’t really see what the big deal is.”

Concerns about the 2016 census have been gathering steam after Anna Johnston, a former deputy privacy commissioner of NSW, warned in March that the ABS’s plan to collect and keep the name and address of every person in Australia, and to link census answers to other sets of data, like health and educational records, would allow the agency to “build up, over time, a rich and deep picture of every Australian’s life, in an identifiable form”.

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“This proposal represents the most significant and intrusive collection of identifiable data about you, me and every other Australian that has ever been attempted,” Johnston said.

She wrote in Fairfax Media on Monday that she would be boycotting the census this year, because the ABS had failed to listen to her concerns.

Bill McLennan, a former head of the ABS, has also warned that the ABS’s plan to collect and keep the name and address of every person in Australia would destroy people’s trust in the ABS, because it was trying to do so furtively.

“This is a direct and deliberate breach of the Australia’s privacy principles, which, to say the least, is a surprising action for the ABS to be taking,” McLennan has written.

He also says the ABS does not have the authority to collect peoples’ names in the 2016 census on a compulsory basis, despite what it has been telling the public.