The problems caused by the CHINS were compounded by the request that was put to CFOs—and that had been covered only briefly at the end of the CHINS training—to fill in a detailed Indigenous Community Information form for each community they visited. It was the first time that a form of this type had been used.

In the debriefing, the CFOs commented that this was a big task that had been given to them at the last minute, and that the instructions about the status of the form were unclear. Some said it had interfered substantially with their ability to undertake census promotion activities. The form was time-consuming to fill in and CFOs had felt reluctant to take up more of people’s time after doing the CHINS exercise. Some organisations were reluctant to cooperate, saying that this kind of information was already being collected and held by other agencies, and expressing distrust about the uses to which the information would be put. The CFOs had therefore mostly not completed them fully.

The information from these forms is to be fed into a Discrete Indigenous Communities Database (DICD) that will be maintained by the ABS’s National Centre for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Statistics (NCATSIS) section and will be for ABS internal use only. If properly maintained and updated, it will provide invaluable background information for subsequent surveys and censuses. The form and the necessity to fill it out for each community was mentioned in the written instructions to the CFOs about their roles and responsibilities, so possibly this indicates that—like the CCs and CIs—the CFOs did not make much reference to their written instructions. More charitably, given the amount of information and documentation that they have to absorb, more thought needs to be given in the training sessions to highlighting information that is considered crucial.

As noted above, this particular census took place in the context of considerable changes in the policy settings in Indigenous affairs, and many community organisations were under extreme pressure and were feeling somewhat distrustful of government intentions. In such a context, it appears to have been difficult for the CFOs to persuade them that the ABS, although a government agency, was not government per se, and that much of the data it gathered was for internal purposes only.