Peter Martin has reported that the upcoming budget may not have money in it for a census. Like all pre-budget stories, it’s hard for readers to work out how much is hype, what’s speculation, whether it’s the government testing for a response, and how much is simply a stuff-up. This one, however, is extremely telling about a government’s political mentality. Censuses matter. That it’s even being run up the flagpole is a very significant sign.

Censuses are incredibly powerful tools, one of the basic foundations of modern States and of social research. James C. Scott’s remarkable Seeing Like A State makes the crucial point that the census – along with technologies like town planning, land surveying, tax collection, and consistent, recorded surnames – make a population visible, coherent, and governable. 2000 years or so of censuses of various kinds have created, as well as measured, the societies we now live in.

Until a state can answer the question “What and who exactly is it that is being governed?” you can’t really call it a modern state at all. Censuses are the building blocks for modern welfare states, for provision of health, education, infrastructure, for things as fundamental as sewered streets and lights. Nor is it just the public sector: it’s the information vast numbers of businesses rely on for their projections and planning. Ask any builder. It all starts with counting.



King Herod, the state authority in the Christian nativity story, knew this too. Joseph and Mary, Jesus’s parents, are made to travel to Bethlehem to be counted in the census. Herod, unfortunately, takes against the child they have there and orders the slaughter of all the local children born at about the wrong time. It’s a memorable story of classical-world statecraft, intelligence, borders, violence, and population, with all the elements of a good thriller. As someone with an interest in planning and government, the fact that it’s the origin story of Christianity is a bit of a side interest. It couldn’t have happened without the data.

Censuses are also crucial to social knowledge. A census is a basic tool of many of our fundamental intellectual disciplines. It’s impossible to really conceive of how social research would have emerged in early modernity without the data gained by regular reliable census collection. Sociology, economics, criminology, political science, modern history, epidemiology, public health, urban planning. Off the top of my head come just a few fields of study that could never have come into being without information like that collected by, once every few years, counting everybody.

Nor would it be possible to write a history of, let’s say, the Industrial Revolution, without the immensely valuable data about where people were and what they did at any time.

Who could object to such knowledge? It’s not coincidental that the Centre for Independent Studies’ “Waste Watch”, allegedly an “irreverent look at government waste”, identified the Australian Bureau of Statistics last October for its gaze. Run That Town, an app developed by the ABS to showcase census data, came in for this think tank’s irreverence and scorn: “it does not sound like much fun to us”, wrote William Shrubb, a researcher who seems to dislike data.

Think tanks like the CIS and Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) have this conservative government’s ear, and have been whispering into it so long that the Liberal party has taken on their attitude to government and governance; so dry as to be desiccated, with the fundamental premise that anything the government does is likely to be wasteful and illegitimate.

They claim an intellectual inheritance from academia and universities – the IPA has “Fellows”, the CIS “Research Fellows” – but their worldview, and the government’s in consequence, is blind to the value of others’ intellectual endeavours when they do not accord with their firm prior commitments. It’s the same view that informs the anti-democrat Adam Creighton of The Australian, who, in 2012, called for more “ideology-based policy” from the Productivity Commission – reversing the technocratic-wonkish notion that facts should come before conclusions.

As long as you’ve got crib guides to Hayek, von Mises, and Milton Friedman on your shelf, for these right-wing inquisitors, you’re an “intellectual”. For everything else there’s the pub test.

The attitude cloaks itself in borrowed academic robes and titles of respect but chuckles luridly at any sense of genuine inquiry. That the census or its data can be implicitly written off by the privileged giggling of the unimaginative is sad when it comes from a think tank. But when that attitude starts to infect government, it’s profoundly dangerous.