The single most important reason for the improvement, it seems to me, was the new IHF. Although physically a little cumbersome, as an administrative system for enumerating people associated with a dwelling, the new form worked well. It was far less cumbersome and demanding than the previous system of household and personal forms. Under the old system, the collection task had only just begun at the point where people associated with a dwelling had been listed. A vast task of attempting to fill in personal forms for each person listed then still lay ahead. With the new IHF, once the people associated with a dwelling had been listed at Questions 10–12, together with their gender and age, the collection task was about half complete. What lay ahead was a more routine process of answering substantive questions about the people listed predominantly by putting marks in boxes and occasionally doing a bit of writing. This was far less demanding than the daunting task of separate personal forms required in 2001.

Another reason for improvement—specific to the Alice Springs town camps in 2006—was that Tangentyere was far better tied into the ABS than in 2001. The research unit in Tangentyere provided a focus for forward planning and negotiation for the ABS, which had not been there in 2001. Issues such as the need for cars, working in pairs and being paid in pairs were negotiated well in advance. This laid the foundations for an orderly collection process that, although still demanding for CIs, was realistic and achievable. That the CIs could use the Tangentyere research unit office as their operational and social base was also particularly important, even though, in the end, the group of CIs recruited included only three people who had been involved directly in the Tangentyere population and mobility study. There were also two employees of the Tangentyere research unit operating in the background who had been involved in the population and mobility study and who were supporting the CIs and the CC, even though they were not themselves employed directly by the ABS. In a number of different ways therefore the Tangentyere research unit provided an enormous base of strength and support for the 2006 Census collection process and personnel.

A third reason for improvement was that the ABS committed more of its staff time to the Alice Springs town camps in 2006 compared with 2001. In 2001, the District Manager had acted effectively as CFO for the town camps, squeezing his involvement between other commitments. In 2006, the town camp collection process had the full-time attention of a CFO for a week and a half in order to get training done and the count substantially under way, before he went off to do similar work out bush. After the CFO had moved on, the District Manager and her Assistant took a continuing monitoring and support role for the next two weeks. I would say that, compared with 2001, the level of ABS staff attention and support for Tangentyere and the town camp collection process was probably about double.

A fourth minor reason for improvement was possibly also the greater engagement of the Northern Territory government in 2006. This was partly because the Territory had almost lost a House of Representatives seat in 2003 on the basis of the 2001 Census count (Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters 2003). It was also because the recommendations of the Commonwealth Grants Commission for general revenue sharing relied heavily on population numbers and the Northern Territory government believed it might be missing out here as well. Indeed, in the lead-up to the 2006 Census, the government ran a newspaper advertising campaign under the slogan ‘We’re counting on you’, in which Chief Minister, Clare Martin, explicitly made the link between the numbers of ‘Territorians counted’ and ‘the amount of money we receive from the Australian government’ (see, for example, Centralian Advocate 2006). The Northern Territory government also directed its employees to be as helpful as they could to the census process. At the regional office level, this led to the ABS’s temporary administration in Alice Springs being co-located with the Territory government’s Department of Local Government, Housing and Sport, which through its field staff could provide intelligence on situations and service personnel in various Aboriginal communities. My intuition is that these intergovernmental links probably contributed more to improving the census collection process in outlying areas than in the Alice Springs town camps, where the ABS had well-established, direct relations with Tangentyere and did not need to rely on government connections and intelligence.