Before considering the training for the census, I make a brief digression to comment on the Community, Housing and Infrastructure Needs Survey (CHINS), which the ABS conducted again in 2006 on behalf of the Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS, now FaCSIA). This too was in the job remit of the CFOs. On the ABS website, the CHINS work is portrayed as complementary to—and possibly helpful to—the conduct of the census itself: ‘To minimise disruption in communities, CHINS visits to communities will be combined with visits to consult on arrangements for the 2006 Census’ (http://www.abs.gov.au, accessed 12 February 2006).

At the Darwin CMU, the CFOs were trained first to conduct the CHINS in their region, and one day of training on the census—concerned mainly with pre-census arrangements—was added at the end of that week. They then went out to conduct CHINS before returning to Darwin for the fully fledged census training. I attended the one-day census training day and the full census training.

The CHINS and census exercises are quite different, and arguably require different skill sets on the part of the CFOs (this opinion was put to me in retrospect by CMU staff)—at least under the current IES arrangements. In CHINS, the CFOs’ major contact is with staff of Indigenous Housing Organisations (IHOs) rather than directly with community members, and their work is largely office based. For the census, on the other hand, the CFOs and their Assistants had the responsibility for recruiting, training and managing the CCs and CIs, as employees of the ABS.^[1] This is a potential source of tension at the community level (see, in particular, Chapter 5).

On their return to Darwin after undertaking the CHINS, the CFOs’ first day of the training for the census consisted of a debriefing on the CHINS exercise. The CFOs were generally of the opinion that, far from assisting with the census, the CHINS exercise got in the way of their attempts to prepare for the census count.