The Herald urged people to fill in the census form fully and honestly. It noted the Australian Bureau of Statistics's assurances that its security systems were robust enough to keep our personal information safe. That appears not to have been so. Trust is broken.

The Australian Statistician David Kalisch said on morning radio that the ABS website had been subject to malicious attack which prompted him to shut it down at 7.45pm on Tuesday. That meant about 4 million households which were attempting in good faith to fulfil their civic duty by submitting their forms could not do so.

The government is trying to spin the debacle positively. The Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has congratulated the ABS for its cautious approach, emphasising its website was not breached and no private information was compromised. The minister responsible Michael McCormack even insisted it should not be called a hack or attack, but rather an attempt to frustrate the collection of data. This is as thin as spin gets. Census 2016 is a multi-faceted shambles with far-reaching consequences, for the census, for the ABS, and for the Turnbull government.

According to cybersecurity experts, the attack on the system was of a type that is both simple and predictable, and it is surprising the ABS's systems were not resilient enough to deal with it.