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Before embarking on a description of processes at the Census Management Unit (CMU), I will present some interim comments about the organisational structure of the Indigenous Enumeration Strategy (IES). I will use the debriefing of the Census Field Officers (CFOs) in Darwin as a frame for doing so, for two reasons:
in the course of the debriefing, the CFOs raised many of the issues that I would like to raise myself
as the people who were responsible for the practical implementation of the IES strategy, their perspectives on what worked and what did not are significant.
That being said, I am presenting my comments from the point of view of an outside observer. I am interested here in what the CFOs perceived as the problems, as an element of my own analysis. They sometimes saw similar problems, but offered different solutions. In some cases, the recommendations that we make in Chapter 9 coincide with solutions offered by some or all of the CFOs. In other cases, they are different.
The debriefing session took place on 15 September, when many of the CFOs were still attempting to complete the counts in their regions. In some respects, then, they had not had a chance to gain any distance from the process and some, like the CFO I had been shadowing, were feeling tired and discouraged.
The topic of time—or lack of it—featured prominently in the discussion. It was felt that their own training had been too compressed, that the time allowed for pre-census publicity in the communities was insufficient and that the Community Housing and Infrastructure Needs Survey (CHINS) work had interfered with their census publicity efforts. The time allowed for training the Community Coordinators (CCs) and collector-interviewers (CIs) was insufficient, given people’s levels of skill and knowledge, but they saw problems in keeping people engaged in longer training sessions. Finally, given the size of their regions and the logistical difficulties involved in keeping track of what was happening at more than one place at a time, they felt under constant time pressure. There was no time and little opportunity to carry out the validation checks that they had been asked to do in the field. Most had been unable to complete the count in the six to seven-week window, and they were concerned about the implications of this for the accuracy of the count, given people’s mobility.
All of these time pressures are symptomatic of one thing: the current remote IES arrangements are unviable. One could level criticisms of the individual sub-strategies employed by some of the CFOs, such as making too much use of vehicles and not enough use of planes. This does not, however, alter my view that, fundamentally, the CFO’s job as currently constituted is inherently impossible. These CFOs were hard-working and conscientious people. They were putting in tremendously long hours under often physically demanding conditions—sometimes to the point of exhaustion—and they all felt that they were not able to do the job as well as they would have liked, or as was required.
In part, it is an issue of the resources that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is willing to put into the IES. The CMU staff and the CFOs were unanimous in their opinion that the whole exercise was under-resourced. The more fundamental question is the uses to which the available resources are put. More resources might indeed be necessary, but they also need to be deployed differently. This issue is discussed in detail in Chapter 9.
Many of the CFOs were critical of the outdated technology that they had to operate with. Although they had been given laptop computers for the CHINS exercise, they were not allowed to keep them for the census enumeration. They were forced to carry around huge amounts of paperwork and, unless they took their own laptops with them, they were unable to keep up-to-date electronic reports as they went along. It would have been useful to have electronic access to databases such as the recently completed CHINS and the Discrete Indigenous Communities Database (DICD), and they would have been able to update the latter electronically as they went. They were happy with the level of support that the CMU had attempted to provide, but had to rely on fairly unreliable satellite phones as their main means of communication. Having spent some time at the Data Processing Centre (DPC) in Melbourne, I find the contrast between the high-tech environment there and the low-tech environment visited on the CFOs startling.
The CFOs were generally critical of the ABS publicity for the census; they felt there was not nearly enough targeting of the IES areas with IES-specific information. The mainstream information that was disseminated was more confusing than helpful. They also felt it was largely a waste of time to target publicity at the general population in Indigenous communities. The effort should be targeted more to local organisations, and more time should be spent training the CIs in an understanding of the purpose of the census, so that they in turn could explain it properly to the interviewees. Several were highly critical of the materials they had been given to use in training. The DVD was ‘not relevant to the bush’ and the storyboard was a ‘shame job’.
I am sympathetic to the CFOs’ criticisms. The census remains an alien project to most people in remote Indigenous communities, and publicity campaigns of short duration will not change that. It is no longer enough to simply tell people that the census is a good thing because it measures levels of need in housing and other basic services. This has been true for decades, and census results, in the eyes of many, have had no discernable effect on the government departments responsible for delivering these services.
The CFOs and the assistant CFOs all felt that the introduction of the Assistant role was a good thing. As one of the CFOs put it: ‘The [region name], that’s a lonely place down there. You need someone to offload with. There are lots of reasons to be working in pairs.’
Having two people also increased flexibility, with the CFO sometimes being able to leave the Assistant to supervise the count at one community, while moving on to start the training at another. They felt, however, that the respective roles and responsibilities of the CFO and Assistant CFO had not been mapped out clearly enough, and that this was a potential source of tension between them. They also thought that the Assistant CFOs had been brought on board too late in the exercise.
There was a discussion about the role of CCs, which it was felt was not differentiated sufficiently from that of the CIs. One suggestion was that CCs should be recruited and trained much earlier, and that they should be given responsibility for—and paid for—publicity activities and the recruitment of CIs. There was universal agreement that the training offered to CCs in 2006 was inadequate. In practice, because time was short, they were not given any more training than the CIs. One person suggested that the TAFE system could be used to deliver an accredited community-based training course on working for the census as a CC.
The CFOs were also very critical of the payment system for the CCs and CIs—it was complex, cumbersome and inefficient. Getting the pay details organised took up a substantial amount of time on the training day. They felt that people lost motivation because their pay was so delayed. Recruitment and retention of CCs and CIs in sufficient numbers had been an almost universal problem. The CFO for the Yolngu-speaking area brought up the example of a community of 1500 people in which he had been able to recruit only four people.
On the subject of their own training, the CFOs felt that their comments during the training had been vindicated. Not nearly enough time was spent on the content and implications of the questions on the form. They were particularly concerned about the ‘persons temporarily absent’ (PTA) question, feeling that they had been ill-prepared to assist the CCs and CIs in how to make decisions about moving people from the PTA table into the main body of the form. This comment can be linked to another, made by one of the CMU staff, that the longer the count went on the more complex this problem became. She felt that the count needed to be concentrated into three weeks at most, but acknowledged that this would require major changes to the organisation of the IES, and better resourcing. She suggested that one way of achieving the count in a shorter time might be to employ many more CFOs and give them responsibility for much smaller areas.
The CFOs also had some thoughts about the organisation of the CMU. There were three main issues. They thought that there should have been an IES-specific unit within the CMU—the managers to whom they were reporting had too many roles that involved them in the mainstream count, and this sometimes made it difficult to get the support that they needed in the field (at least one of the CMU managers concerned agreed strongly). They were critical of the lack of coordination and communication between themselves and the Area Supervisors of the mainstream count, and they questioned whether the State Indigenous Manager’s role had been sufficiently well defined.
All in all, the outcome of this debriefing session was a fairly comprehensive critique of the IES in 2006, with a variety of solutions proposed to particular problems. In Chapter 9, we draw from this critique and from our own field observations to make our recommendations.