This may be an unpopular opinion, but census night thrills me. The bold idea of taking a snapshot of the lives and homes of every person in Australia is deeply compelling to me, and I have always loved the feeling of playing a small part in that hopeful project.

Census data helps us understand and anticipate changes in how we create families, secure work, sustain households, pursue education, practise faith and more, including among disadvantaged groups. But to keep this data relevant, we need to be asking the right questions.

It is no small thing to make changes, which is why years of consultation have been invested in the development of a simple set of questions on sex, gender, innate variations of sex characteristics and sexual orientation. Their inclusion would ensure everyone in Australia can complete the census accurately, including my household.

I still remember the feeling of being part of census night with my mum and dad as a kid. I could see myself embedded in the place I knew best at that time: as the eldest child of a two-parent household, with a sister and a brother, my world in one.

That thrill didn’t lessen when I started to create households of my own, even if my model of family life looked different. At the start of the new millennium, it was rare for what we then called a “same-sex relationship” to be recognised in any of the paperwork required for participation in education, employment, health care or any other social system. Not even Centrelink viewed a cohabiting same-gender couple as defacto. The census felt of that time and place: incomplete and inadequate, but familiarly so.

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After my children were born, the census started to feel grim. I knew ours was a safe and loving (albeit very noisy) household for two lucky little Australians. But on census night, their family structure was impossible to code into the available options. Since then, I’ve also had the discomforting experience of completing a census form as a non-binary person and parent, feeling caught between the language of my citizenship and my private sense of self.

So it felt like a betrayal to learn the government had decided not to proceed with including new questions in the 2026 Census. Filled with rage, I was bewildered by how a party voted in with huge support from my community could make a choice to deliberately continue our historically harmful erasure from our most important national dataset.

While the prime minister’s “backflip” on Friday, when he agreed to test a sexuality question, was welcome, it came with another kind of heart sink. As we have felt keenly since marriage equality, even when sexuality is recognised as a legitimate form of diversity, differences related to gender identity, and to innate variations in sex characteristics (which are entirely distinct from both gender and from sexuality), continue to be actively diminished.