Stephen Bates (Brisbane, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I rise to table this petition, calling on the House to make changes to the Census and Statistics Act 1905 to legally mandate the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people within the census. This petition has been considered by the Petitions Committee and found to be an order. It calls attention to the fact that the Australian Bureau of Statistics does not currently collect data on LGBTQIA+ people. I thank the petitioner, Evalyn Venture, who is in the gallery today, for all her work on gathering 4,946 signatures and bringing light to this issue.

The data collection omission by the ABS means that governments and support services are unable to understand the health and wellbeing needs of queer people. Therefore, they cannot sufficiently plan for both the development of policy and allocation of resources for LGBTQIA+ communities. In the 2021 census, the ABS failed to adequately collect data on transgender, non-binary and gender diverse people, conflating gender identity and sex. While it counted same-sex marriages and some LGBTQIA+ people who live with their partner, it failed to identify queer people who were not living with or married to their partner at the time. These omissions amount to our community's erasure by the government and the ABS, and it must change. They have the opportunity to change this policy in the lead-up to the 2026 census. They must take it; it is time to count us in.

The petition read as follows—

In 2021, despite a campaign with the support of over 100 peak bodies, health experts, and community organisations; data collection about LGBTIQA+ Australians were dropped due to the conservative position of the Chief Statistician within the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This essentially means that neither the federal or state governments within Australia have any definitive data about lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse, intersex, queer and other sexuality and bodily diverse Australians within their communities; or the intersectionality of this data with other factors such as health, income, culture, location, etc. The lack of current population-level data limits understanding of health and wellbeing needs of LGBTIQA+ people, and both the development of policy and allocation of resources for LGBTIQA+ communities

We therefore ask the House to makes changes to the Census and Statistics Act 1905 to legally mandate the inclusion of LGBTIQA+ data within the census. The Chief Statistician's current authority to include this data per the Act "as he or she considers appropriate" subjects marginalised people such as LGBTIQA+ Australians to the personal bias of a singular individual. No one person has the right to say that a group of people are invalid and do not deserve to be counted, and this authority needs to be stripped away and replaced with statutory directives mandating the collection of this data.

from 4,946 citizens (Petition No. EN4848)

Petition received.