In conclusion, I would simply return to and reiterate three of the reasons for improvement from the 2001 Census identified above. The first of these was the redesign of the household and personal forms into the single, integrated IHF. Although still not perfect—and still quite demanding on interviewers and interviewees—this new form did at least give CIs a task that was possible. This was not the case in 2001.

Beyond this general improvement, the second factor was a specific improvement in relations between the town camp servicing organisation, Tangentyere Council, and the ABS. Tangentyere’s own research capacity had grown significantly since 2001, partly as a result of its dissatisfaction with the results of the 2001 Census. Because of this, Tangentyere was more interested in the census in 2006 and more assertive in its relationship with the ABS. Tangentyere could now draw on its own experience of doing surveys in the town camps and knew the difficulties and the requirements of doing so. For the ABS—perhaps somewhat unusually—Tangentyere was now a highly engaged and quite experienced Indigenous partner organisation. This was no doubt at times somewhat challenging and uncomfortable for the ABS, but it laid the basis for an orderly and achievable census collection procedure in the town camps in 2006. Tangentyere negotiated with the ABS about committing resources adequate to the task—in personnel and in other costs such as cars—and the ABS responded. This level of commitment of ABS resources was the third factor behind the vast improvement from 2001. To what extent this level of commitment of ABS resources was different from, and possibly even at the expense of, other Indigenous communities with less-engaged service organisations could throw some light on the rather less orderly accounts of the 2006 Census collection process that my colleagues report (Chapters 4–6). While the Alice Springs town camps were seen by some within the ABS in 2001 as possibly a ‘worst-case scenario’ (Sanders 2002: 88), in 2006, they might well come to be seen as more of an example of best practice, which the ABS will aim to repeat in the future and emulate elsewhere.