The ABS Still Hasn't Paid the Employees Who Went Door to Door Saving the Census

A fun video promoting the Census, aired earlier this year. Via

ABS

Remember the 2016 Census? You tried to put a bunch of personal information into a website, then the website crashed. There was a bit of panicking, and then it turned out that the government had spent millions of dollars to create an online form less secure than your average Survey Monkey quiz?

You gave up and forgot about it for a while, and after a few weeks some ABS workers showed up on your doorstep to remind you that the Census is compulsory, and you probably ended up completing it in order to avoid being fined $180 per day.

Well, those ABS workers who showed up at your door were the unsung heroes of Census 2016: the only people who successfully did their one job, while probably putting up with a lot of complaining. Well, it turns out that those workers haven't been paid, and are still owed up to $30 million in wages and out-of-pocket expenses. This doesn't seem entirely fair, given that it was revealed in the wake of #CensusFail that Australian Bureau of Statistics head David Kalisch, the guy responsible for the switch to an online Census form, earned $705,030 last year—which is a higher salary than the Prime Minister's.

There were about 15,000 field officers responsible for resurrecting the Census, which was eventually completed by about 95 percent of the population. The Canberra Times reports that only a tiny minority of these workers have been paid, or reimbursed for expenses like petrol.

The ABS told the paper that they would process claims "as soon as possible," which is no doubt extremely comforting to those who have already been waiting almost three months.

David Kalisch and other representatives from the ABS will appear at a Senate inquiry Tuesday, where they're set to be grilled over what caused the 40-hour website outage on August 9. The ABS has formally apologised for the crash—thought to have cost taxpayers around $30 million—but it has also placed the blame on IBM. They claim this was the company paid to look after website security and make sure the census wasn't vulnerable to the exact kind of DDOS attacks that brought it down.

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