Where's Jewish In The Religions Question In The Census?

Last night was time to answer 60 questions in Australia’s 5 yearly census. Most of them asked for information which the government already has or could easily pass legislation to obtain from its various databases: address, previous address, age, income, children. Although it’s a bit of a pain in the arse to have to tell them something they already know, it’s not exactly an invasion of privacy.

At least this time it could all be done online, which only took about 15 minutes. Aside from the lack of a navigation frame, it was all pretty easy.

The religion question always gets a few people going. Since 2001, some people in several countries have some fun by answering Jedi and some other people get a little too precious about it.

One aspect of this question which really pissed me (and probably a lot of other people) off was the set of listed categories which had a check box:

• Catholic
• Anglican
• Uniting Church
• Presbyterian
• Buddhism
• Greek Orthodox
• Islam
• Baptist
• Lutheran
• Other [ box to type in ]
• No religion

What’s missing?

Jewish or Judaism. It’s not exactly a minor religion in this country. They probably could have put Hindu and Sikh as well.

There are seven branches of Christianity, which is fair enough since checking a radio button makes the stats a lot easier than parsing a free form text field. They could easily have thrown in a few more, like Mormons.

Well no I don’t actually: I think their religion is a cult, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be in the list.

Given the primary purposes of making the form easy to fill out and the data easy to collate into standardized categories, what could possibly have led the ABS to add Islam and Buddhism to the list, but exclude Judaism?

This must have been a conscious decision. Are they trying to say Islam and Buddhism are sufficiently important in Australia to have their own box, but Judaism is not?

Who is responsible for designing this form, the ABS or Marrickville Council?

In fact, both Judaism and Hinduism are in the ABS’s broad categories of religious groups: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Other Religions, No Religion. So why then exclude Judaism and Hinduism from the check box list in both the online and paper forms?

An innocent oversight? Hard to see how it got through. A lefty trying to make a statement? Hard to see how that got through either, unless it was a cabal of lefties. Possible if the census is written by sociologists.