When something goes seriously pear-shaped, two rules apply: the first is get your story straight, and the second is play a straight bat – obfuscation only makes things worse.



The Australian Bureau of Statistics said very clearly on Wednesday morning that the 2016 online census form was subject to “four denial of service attacks of varying nature and severity”.

We apologise for the inconvenience. The 2016 online Census form was subject to four Denial of Service attacks of varying nature & severity. — Census Australia (@ABSCensus) August 9, 2016

The first three incursions were manageable, but after the fourth “attack”, just after 7.30pm on Tuesday, the ABS took the precaution of closing down the system to ensure the integrity of the data.

So here we meet our first problem.

The ABS said on Tuesday afternoon that the process was going well while behind the scenes it was dealing with system disruption. The early problems didn’t rate a mention in the afternoon update, despite the fact the online universe was alight with people fretting about privacy and the security of their data. How does that happen? How is that OK?

Then the next problem loomed.

Apparently the minister responsible for the ABS thinks cyber attacks are only attacks if they succeed, a hitherto unknown definition of the word attack.

Attacks. Such an ugly word. “I’m not using the word attack, nor was it hacked,” Michael McCormack said. “I feel by saying attacked, it looks as though and it seems as though and it is so that information was then gained. There was no successful attack.”

McCormack was supposed to be fronting the media on Wednesday morning to do some straightforward damage control, but we ended up, bizarrely, in a philosophical tutorial, in trees falling in a forest territory.

Malcolm Turnbull, speaking later, was happy to describe the overnight disruption as an attack.

Then Alistair MacGibbon, special adviser to the prime minister on cyber security, was also sanguine about describing the incident as an attack, but he thought developments overnight could be more accurately described as “a confluence of events”.

Not that serious folks. “The attack was no more significant than the types of attacks we would see all the time against Australian government systems,” MacGibbon said.

“It’s just there was a confluence of events. The Australian Bureau of Statistics website was overloaded and unable to be used, when hackers tried to inundate the system. The decision to shut down the online form was made to safeguard and protect data already submitted. It was a decision taken by the ABS. Had these events occurred in isolation, the online system would’ve been maintained.”

So in the space of a few hours, after the online process for the census had been suspended due to MacGibbon’s “confluence of events”, we had several different official explanations, none of which sat well with each other: malicious attack, no (successful) attack, and shit happens.

The swerving around on Wednesday caps off days of what can only be described as a managerial debacle surrounding the census.

This incident has now snowballed into a competence issue for the Turnbull government, which is not what the prime minister needs given he’s fronting up to a new term in government mired in various agendas and untidiness.

This will be a complex parliament. Not much will be elegant or straightforward, so the Coalition is going to have to get its collective act together, not approach the task presenting themselves as Captain Chaos.

Because here’s something that’s happened during #CensusFail. A key player in the new parliament, the populist Nick Xenophon, (who led the insurrection adroitly over the past week or so) has sent a clarion signal about how he intends to use his balance-of-power opportunity.

Xenophon, like many of the players in the new Senate, prides himself on looking over the heads of institutional politics to the neglected citizenry beyond the parliamentary precinct.

That’s the constituency he’s playing to, and if you have to flout a few Canberra norms along the way, so be it.

This is the environment of the 45th parliament. The game has changed, and in the first significant case study, the Coalition has been caught entirely flat-footed.

