Table of Contents
In broad organisational terms, a national census poses particular problems because of its scale and the five-year gap between census events. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) cannot keep on its permanent staff the thousands of people needed to coordinate the exercise on the ground and to distribute, collect and code the data from the forms. The 2006 Census exercise therefore involved the hiring of a temporary workforce of more than 42,000 people, who had to be trained adequately to carry out their allotted tasks. In such a context, the flow of information becomes vital—across time (so that the accumulated wisdom from previous census exercises is brought to bear on the organisation of the current one) and within the organisation itself, which is multi-sited and hierarchical.
One of the unique aspects of the research reported here is that it was itself multi-sited. This enabled us to observe aspects of the flow of information from the centre, the ABS headquarters in Canberra, to the periphery, the collector-interviewers (CIs) in four remote Aboriginal community settings, via the intermediate institution of the Census Management Unit (CMU) in Darwin, which was responsible for managing and planning the count in the Northern Territory, and its emissaries, the Census Field Officers (CFOs) and their Assistants, charged with responsibility for coordinating the count on the ground. We have also been able to observe the reverse flow after the count, from the ground back to Darwin and then back to the centre—in this case, the Data Processing Centre (DPC) in Melbourne.
This chapter is concerned primarily with the pre-enumeration flow of information from Canberra to Darwin and to the CFOs, and concentrates primarily on the pre-field training of the CFOs and on the information that was made available to them from Canberra and locally in Darwin.
The collection of census data from Indigenous people living in remote Australia is a dauntingly complex exercise. In recognition of this the ABS began, in the 1971 Census, to put in place a special Indigenous Enumeration Strategy (IES), which has subsequently been developed and finetuned with each successive census (see Taylor 2002). From the ABS’s point of view, the remote count poses particular logistical problems because of the difficulty of access to the remotest small communities, the mobility of individuals within their regional networks, the low levels of English literacy of many Indigenous people and their relative unfamiliarity with and lack of understanding of the workings of the bureaucracy of the nation-state (instantiated in this case in the census exercise).
To ameliorate these problems, the IES uses CIs rather than expecting people to self-administer their forms. Ideally, the CIs are local people, so that advantage can be taken of their local knowledge, their knowledge of local languages and their familiarity with the interviewees. Ideally again, the CIs are selected and trained by the CFO in charge of the region with the help of local Community Coordinators (CCs). (The CCs might also act as CIs, but their main task is to help the CFO in coordinating the count in their community and managing the daily workloads of the CIs.)
In the Northern Territory—and in remote areas generally, such as parts of Western Australia—distance and remoteness, and the size of the areas that CFOs are responsible for, make it impossible to achieve a count in a single day. In the Northern Territory a time-extended ‘rolling count’ strategy is employed: notionally a CFO has between six and seven weeks to complete the count in their area of responsibility.
The CFOs, then, are a crucial link in the chain of information between the centre (the national guidelines of the census) and the periphery (the CIs on the ground). They are not permanent employees of the ABS, so must be trained from scratch. They have varying degrees of experience of working or living in remote Aboriginal localities and come from a variety of different working backgrounds. None of the 2006 CFOs in the Northern Territory had worked on a previous census. Their task is logistically complex and multifaceted, and the training they receive has a very direct bearing on the success or otherwise of the count—in terms of its completeness and of the quality of the resulting data.