Friends, census day is fast approaching, but there’s something you should definitely keep in mind when filling out all your details this year. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is slapping people with some rather hefty fines for a whole bunch of reasons, so let’s not risk draining our pockets, yeah?
Census 2021 is coming on August 10, and together as a country, including the little bubs too, we’ll all be filling out details about who we are, how much money we make and which fancy-schmancy school we went to.
The compulsory census forms basically help the government understand where they should spend their money, even though they never seem to really put it where it matters.
This year the ABS will be asking a whole smorgasbord of questions, except anything to do with being LGBTQ+, because hey, surely that doesn’t matter in getting to understand an entire population of people, right?
There will also be some hefty fines for failing to fill out the census, lying, or making some kind of joke as one of your answers.
For every day that you fail to lodge your sweet, sweet census answers, the ABS will require you to hand over $200. So yeah, if you wait a whole week, that’s $1,400. It all adds up.
However, if you lie or make shit up, you’ll be walloped with a $2,200 fine. It pays to be a clown.
Demographer Glenn Capuano, who previously worked at the ABS for ten whole years, wrote a brilliant blog post in 2011 about his experience with the 2001 census, in which over 73,000 people said that their religion was ‘Jedi’.
“A lot of people… answered ‘Jedi’, or some other variant such as ‘Jedi Knight’, ‘Jedi Master’, ‘Sith Lord’, or ‘Padawan’,” he wrote.
“In the 2001 Census, there were just over 73,000 Jedi in Australia, or 0.37 per cent of the population.
“To put in perspective, if it was allowed as an ‘official’ religion, it would’ve been larger than the Salvation Army, Seventh Day Adventists, and only slightly smaller than Judaism.”
Naturally, the ABS doesn’t want any of that nonsense this year, so just tell the truth and be on your merry way, or else you’re going to be one of the most broke Jedi in Australia.
