In about 12 months from now, Australians will again be asked to fill in a Census form that seeks information on all kinds of important questions.

The five-yearly Census is a key activity of the nation’s statistical agency, the Australian Bureau of Statistics. As the official source of data about the population, the ABS claims to “tell the real story of Australia”.

Among the questions on the 2026 Census will be one that the ABS has acknowledged is flawed and that itself wanted to change – the question on religious affiliation.

The Census will again ask the following coercive and biased question for the religion topic: “What is the person’s religion?” In assuming all respondents have a religion, the framing of the question produces acquiescence bias that inflates data — by as much as 11 points, according to a number of surveys — in favour of religious affiliation.

The ABS has decided to reuse this question despite having received, to its own two-year public consultation process, overwhelming public feedback that called for the wording to be changed to remove the bias. As part of this process, the ABS acknowledged the public’s concern that the question  “assumes you have a religion”. It then, in late 2023, proposed to change the question so as to “support more accurate data collection”.

As part of its critical testing process last year, the ABS was set to take to its large-scale test in September a reformulated religion question — “Does the person have a religion?” — with “Yes” and “No” boxes and an open text space for religious people to write their affiliation.

Regrettably, the ABS backed down following a media campaign by the Catholic hierarchy — who wanted to keep the question as it was, to ensure comparable data with past Censuses — and following the Albanese Government’s intervention on the Census design just days out from the large-scale test.

In an explanation for keeping the old question, the head of the ABS, David Gruen, said religious organisations had a “strong desire” for comparable data.

And so the ABS has traded away the accuracy desired by data users right across the community — such as governments and bureaucracies that make funding decisions, politicians, researchers, and the wider public — in favour of the comparability desired by a narrow set of data users. This is despite “comparability” having not prevented the ABS from making changes to the wording of other questions over the years.

While Catholic archbishops will, no doubt, be happy to keep in their column some of those “cultural Catholics” who are no longer religious but will mark “Catholic” for various other reasons — perhaps having been raised Catholic or having gone to a Catholic school — many Australians will find the exercise of completing the question particularly galling and confronting.

In July this year, my organisation, the Rationalist Society of Australia, raised human rights concerns about the Census question in a  submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council, which is examining Australia’s human rights as part of the  Universal Periodic Review (Fourth Cycle). Our submission — supported by another eight non-religious, ex-religious and pro-secular organisations — identified this issue as one of eight examples of discrimination and unfair treatment against non-religious people in Australian Government institutions and programs.

In the submission, we argued that the Census question’s framing was inconsistent with international human rights provisions in that it failed to treat religious and non-religious beliefs equally. We also said that the question interfered with each individual’s right to accurately record their religious or non-religious affiliation.

Australia is party to a number of international commitments that protect freedom of thought, conscience and religion and provide for equal treatment of religion and belief. These include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Plus, Australia is a member of the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, which commits it to protecting “freedom of religion or belief for all, including the right of individuals to hold any belief, to change it or to hold none”.

In the submission, we also argued that the Census religion question was coercive in that it created a perception that there was something wrong with not being religious. This would be of particular concern for those many Australians who have escaped from religious cults and high-demand religious groups, as well as people who have migrated from countries where repressive regimes or societies made identifying as not religious a risk to their safety. Many people have come to Australia as freethinkers, seeking safety from religious-based violence, or as migrants wanting to leave behind religious-based trauma and suffering.

Importantly, the ICCPR also speaks to the issue of coercion on matters of religion and belief, specifying that each person has the right to not “be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice”.

In March this year,  I asked Dr Gruen whether the ABS had considered the human rights impact of reusing the coercive and biased question that would again fail to accurately count non-religious people. I have not yet received a reply.

We are hopeful that, when Australia appears at the Universal Periodic Review next year, members of the international community will help shine a spotlight on this issue and the other examples of discriminatory and unfair treatment against non-religious Australians in government institutions and programs that we raised in our submission.

Despite the inherent bias in the Census question, Australians marking ‘No religion’ next year will  likely overtake Christians as a share of the population for the first time. Even if that eventuates, the Census results will still not come close to telling the “real story of Australia” in regards to religious affiliation. Only when the ABS finally removes the bias from the question will we, as a nation, get an accurate picture.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.