"Reckless" doesn't begin to describe the new culture at the top of the Bureau of Statistics.

Its most important product apart from the census is the monthly employment survey. Two years ago it decided to modernise. It moved much of it online, accepted a lower response rate and changed the months in which different questions were asked.

Australian Bureau of Statistics chief David Kalisch tells ABC radio its website was attacked four times on census night. Audio: ABC.

Against the advice of ABS veterans, it didn't run a backup survey using the old system.

In August 2014 the number of Australians officially employed jumped an incredible 121,000. The next month, September, it dived 172,000, or it would have had the ABS not pleaded with users to ignore the seasonally adjusted numbers which it no longer trusted.

With no leader, treasurer Joe Hockey and prime minister Tony Abbott had left the position at the top unfilled for the best part of a year, the ABS developed grander plans.

It wanted to abandon the 2016 census altogether, moving from five-yearly to 10-yearly, to save $200 million.

Told by the government that would require legislation that would be unlikely to get through the Senate, it decided to get extra value by using the names collected with the census to create permanent linkage keys. Previously destroyed after processing, the names would be kept indefinitely in a separate file and used to link the answers to census questions to the answers to other ABS surveys and data collected from organisations such as the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and the Australian Tax Office. If it could find out whether Australians or certain ethnic backgrounds or family circumstances were more likely to claim certain tax deductions or be prescribed certain medicines it could sell the results.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/census-meltdown-just-the-latest-bureau-of-statistics-bungle-20160809-gqow3e.html

Bill Shorten says this is the "worst-run" census we have ever had and the actions of the government "undermine confidence in government institutions".

As this new census process has been in process for many years, I'd ask Mr Shorten if he would have the same view had the Labor Party won the election and he had to deal with this situation. Mr Shorten needs to be careful not to become a Tony Abbott-style Opposition Leader by being negative for the sake of it.

Please hold the government to account, but don't become a whinger.

Bruce Russ Annandale

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-letters/when-a-picture-or-three-is-worth-more-than-millions-of-census-forms-20160810-gqpvdj.html

Here we get a whinging letter from someone who seems to come from the whinging right side of politics. Bill shorten is right to say "this census is the worst run ever census". No whinging here. A statement of facts. Had Bill Shorten been elected he would have been in his own right to blame the then "Turnbull opposition" for the fiasco, so close after the elections. The Turnbull/Abbott government had 3 years to prepare this cockup. They went with a doozy option, like most of the other rightwing fucups using private business connections to do the bad job that the government could do with public funded system... Nothing new. 

Now is not the time to stand aside, according to the chief of the embattled Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in the wake of significant problems with the 2016 census.

• PM has launched investigation into census incident
• Consequences to be determined once review is complete
• ABS chief says "leaders stand up when there are issues"

Criticism has been hurled at the ABS and its handling of the census, after the bureau was forced to pull down the census website on Tuesday nightamid ongoing denial of service attacks which blocked access to the site.

It resulted in the census being offline for more than two days, and came after weeks of discussion about the privacy and security of the 2016 survey.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull launched an investigation into the incident, and said "which heads roll, where and when, will be determined once the review is complete".

"My view is that leaders stand up when there are issues," ABS chief statistician David Kalisch told the ABC.

"They respond and they fix the issues, and there will be a time for the facts to come out and for accountabilities to be made."

Mr Kalisch said he was aware the ABS had suffered significant harm to its reputation.

"I think the community recognises the important information we provide about how the economy is going, how society's going, what are the features of the environment, and they support our work because they know the importance of that information," he said.

"We do regularly test community support and community trust in the ABS, we know that in 2015 the Australian community had very high trust in the ABS, and it was well above what some of our other statistical agencies across the world have achieved.

"We're working hard to rebuild that trust."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-14/abs-working-to-rebuild-trust-after-census-failure-chief-says/7733234