Vulnerable community members push for Census recognition

Vulnerable community members push for Census recognition Sat 8 Aug 2026 at 5:51am In brief: Census field officers are interviewing vulnerable people, such as those sleeping rough at homeless support service locations. Five Christian denominations are listed among the 10 religion tick boxes on the Census but not Judaism due to the population size. What's next? Census Night is on Tuesday. People sleeping rough face many hardships and completing a Census form is not often a priority. However, capturing the number and profile of the nation's homeless is important to advocates and government planners. For several years, home for Timothy Coles has been a tent at the edges of Coffs Harbour. He said he would complete the Census next week to give information about the hardship that it is faced by Australians. There is high demand for homeless crisis support at Pete's Place in one of Australia's homeless hotspots, Coffs Harbour in New South Wales. Run by St Vincent de Paul, Pete's Place offers showers, laundry facilities, tents, food and caseworkers. Pete's Place team leader Anna Millett said clients faced barriers to completing a full Census form. "Some of the people who come into our service can't read or write, so it can make filling out a form quite daunting," Ms Millett said. "We see people with complex issues, such as mental health, drug and alcohol use, people experiencing domestic or family violence and young people," she said. Census field officers have been at Pete's Place and the Uniting Church Soup Kitchen in Coffs Harbour for the past week to answer questions. "Having a complete understanding of how many people are experiencing homelessness in Australia can inform government policy and how the sector as a whole responds to homelessness," Ms Millett said. From tomorrow, field officers will interview those willing to participate and record their responses on a custom homeless Census form of just two pages. Australian Bureau of Statistics Census national spokesperson Emily Walter said the bureau had been working with homeless services much earlier to learn where and how to best gather Census data. "We've now got in place a strategy where we are in locations where we have known higher populations of people sleeping rough," Ms Walter said. "We are onsite at support services, where people sleeping rough seek support, so places like soup kitchens [and] streetside medical facilities. "Importantly, [we are] working really closely at those locations across Australia during the week of Census, to conduct face-to-face interviews with people sleeping rough." Australian National University demographer Liz Allen was missed in the 1996 Census count when she was "couch surfing" as a teen, but said more "holistic" ABS definitions now captured that population. "The Australian Bureau of Statistics has matured in their definition of homelessness and made the collection of data very deliberate and sensitive," Dr Allen said. "This enables them to build a workforce to go into these areas and sensitively ask about living circumstances and collect vital Census data from people living in improvised dwellings and having a rough go of things." The 122,494 people estimated to be experiencing homelessness on Census Night in 2021 represented a 5.2 per cent increase on the 2016 survey. "People can be homeless and working full-time jobs, in full-time education, with children, living next door to us,"Dr Allen said. The previous Census occurred during the COVID pandemic when there was deliberate government policy to house those sleeping rough to reduce infection risk. "I do expect that we will see a change in the proportion of people doing it tough; it's likely to increase," Dr Allen said. Census important for minority groups In refugee households like the Al-Hassan family, often the children lead in answering census questions. Bahin Al-Hassan, 16, was among local multicultural volunteers producing community language videos about the Census in the language he calls Ezidi, also known as Yazidi or Yezidi. "The Census has been a very important thing to our community and they are trying to get recognised as a region, a religion, as well as a language," he said. The Ezidi community gathered in several refugee settlement regional cities this week for Roja Resh, a day of mourning for ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria, which led to the death and enslavement of thousands of Ezidi people, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more. The Census reports on the faith as Yezidi, but outside of the top nine religions, individuals must tick the "other" box and write in the field provided. Coffs Harbour community leader Sami Sheebo has been campaigning for the community he calls Yazidi to be listed as its own check box, seeing it as an important step towards visibility for the community. "Basically, we want to recognise [the] Yazidi community. So, we want to be recognised as Yazidi," she said. "We will keep advocating, educating people and try to prove to the Australian government how many Yazidi people there are, through this Census." Australia's Yezidi population grew from 63 people in 2016 to 4,123 in the 2021 Census. The Jewish community is another community pushing for the same recognition. Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) co-chief executive Peter Wertheim estimates there are 117,000 Jewish people in Australia, although the Census set the population at 99,956. "The tick box answers to the religion question have never included the numerically smaller faith communities, like the Jewish community," Mr Wertheim said. Mr Wertheim said rising antisemitism had impacted the confidence of Jewish people in recording their faith. "It's heightened the sense of exclusion, but it has also heightened the traditional concerns of confidentiality and data protection of Census data," he said. "Any Jewish family can tell you of experiences in previous times when totalitarian regimes have used censuses to make lists of Jewish people, who are then targeted for persecution or even worse." Census night is on Tuesday.