Coming to our Census

Evidently, 2006 is the year of the population census in Australia. According to what I heard on Triple J this morning, a few officials are a little concerned because evidently young people (i.e. anyone under 30) are "under-counted", because apparently some of them don't bother to fill it out. Given that I fit that category (at least for another couple of months), I figured I might say a few words about it. I qualify further in that I've never actually filled out one of these forms in Australia (although I did do one in New Zealand once).

First of all, aren't these forms actually supposed to be sent to every household? I know that my address has somehow disappeared from the mailing list on the last two occasions (although I bet the could find me if I had a fine they wanted to collect), and I also know that I'm not the only one. I suppose that one could argue that I should make the effort to obtain one from somewhere, but what people don't understand is that many of us are simply far to busy to waste time on what is essentially a pointless survey.

That's right, it's pointless as far as I'm concerned. Yes, I've heard all the arguments about how it gives the government information on how and where they need to fund infrastructure and so on, and frankly, I think those arguments are an absolute crock! One only has to look at the third-world public infrastructure on the Gold Coast to see that. Public transport is non-existent, emergency response times are ridiculously long (more often measured in hours than minutes), and exceeded only by the waiting times for anyone sufficiently unfortunate to need to use the Gold Coast Hospital.

Surely the census should have told the politicians that the population of this area was growing at a ridiculous rate and they needed to make provisions, so why hasn't it happened? Probably because at both State and Federal level, the Gold Coast is a safe electoral seat for the Conservatives. Anyone who lives in a "safe seat" for either of the major parties will probably tell as similar story of a lack of funding and so on, while politicians of all persuasions fall over themselves to buy votes in the "marginal seats". This, ladies and gentlemen, is how funding is allocated. It has nothing to do with the needs of the population or anything else. The only time people in the "safe seats" get anything is if they start whining loudly enough to make a politician think they might vote for someone else next time around -- and that doesn't happen in the census.

So, given that all the important decisions are made on Election day as opposed to Census day, can someone tell me why we need a Census?