Got my letter in the mail today, doesn’t seem that long ago that we had the last one…
Census date is 11th of August if you haven’t gotten the letter yet.
I note they’re definitely trying to spread the load this time by highlighting you can do it as soon as you get the letter rather than waiting for the actual date. Smarter move - albeit less amusing - than everyone doing it on the night, crashing the servers, and the ABS claiming it was a DDoS attack (I mean most of the country accessing your server does fit the definition, but they asked for it).
Did they address the ability to deanonymise this pretty easily? No way I will fill out a truthful census when from my answers and a postcode I could trivially be identified. Not with the current political climate, the nsw government was mandating trans people be steralised till last year and apparently a lot of people think that wasn’t going far enough.
Why on earth would I paint a target on my forehead for a regime that eugenicsed me?
You’ll just have to choose between whether you want to be potentially identifiable or whether you want to make it known that there is a certain percentage of people with your specific circumstances/situation (who might need particular services, or be likely to vote for particular policies).
If you’re unique enough to be obvious from a postcode and census answers then I don’t really see how you can definitively avoid identification without removing potentially useful data (i.e. you’d have to remove/generalise questions or move to a higher level location category). It’s a bit of a balancing act as evidenced in this thread with you worried about specificity while ada wants to narrow things down even more.