It’s census night and as many Australians gather on the couch to giggle over whether they’ll put ‘Jedi’ on their census form, many indigenous Australians answered their census questions days ago in an interview with census staff.

Why an interview? It’s not just an excuse to have awkward PR inspired photographs showing dinky white census collectors interviewing painted Aboriginal dancers.

Around 2.3% of Australia’s population identifies as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, but in the last census in 2006, post-census surveys showed that somewhere around 11% of the indigenous population weren’t counted. More specifically, the indigenous and Torres Strait Islander communities were under-counted by 19% in NT and more than 20% in WA.

Thanks to $20 million from the government to address the undercount of indigenous people this time around, a significant amount of census resources have been allocated to ensure indigenous communities are counted accurately, particularly through conducting interviews by census staff rather than just relying on citizens to fill out census forms.

“Over the past two years we’ve been engaging with indigenous and Torres Strait Islander communities about the best way to conduct the census, we’ve sought their input and our research and testing shows that census interviewers are the best way to get the most accurate data about indigenous communities,” explains Paul Lowe, head of the population census program.

Interviews are also available in regional centres and urban communities with high indigenous populations, not just remote communities.

Beyond confronting language or literacy issues, the biggest struggle with the census in indigenous and Torres Strait islander communities is getting people to understand the importance of the census, says Lowe.

“Confidentially is a big issue with the indigenous and Torres Strait islander population,” Lowe told Crikey.

“There was a lot of anecdotal evidence from 2006 that people were worried we’d pass it on to Centrelink or taxation or housing authorities,” Lowe explains. “I know of a community outside Broome where they weren’t telling the correct number of people living in a house because they were worried Homes West would find out and they’d get in to trouble. We’re really stressing that this is private, their story is confidential.”

But Sara Hudson from the Centre for Independent Studies has criticised the process, saying that differences between the two formats of census make it discriminatory.

In a statement released by the Centre for Independent Studies, Hudson claims that differences between the interview form and the regular census form — namely, the questions asked, response options, wording of questions, sequence of questions and order of responses examples of responses — mean that the data collected is “not directly comparable between indigenous Australians surveyed by the Interviewer Household Form and other Australians, including indigenous Australians who receive the mainstream Household Form.”

“Absolute total rubbish,” Lowe told Crikey. “The questions are exactly the same as those on the mainstream form, we ask them in a different way to account for language barriers and cultural differences. The information we get from interviews is directly comparable from the normal forms.”

“There is no doubt about that in my mind, it’s not discriminatory, it’s about getting the most accurate information.”

Lowe explains that rather than asking completely different questions, it’s more that census interviewers can ask supplementary questions to make sure all the necessary information is collected. These supplementary questions are usually needed in relation to questions surrounding employment and relationships and need to be clarified due to cultural differences, says Lowe.

Another technique census interviewers use is to get respondents to draw their family tree, as they may better understand a pictorial representation.

“In ‘normal’ suburbia, the family relationships are quite straightforward — husband, wife, daughter son, etc,” said Lowe. “In indigenous communities, families tend to be larger and have concepts of relationships such as aunty and uncle which are different in their culture to the western culture.”

When asked if census interviewers collected family relationship information only in the style of traditional western relationships, Lowe admitted the limitations of the census format. “Our whole family classification is a western construct and it’s a difficult to get the family understanding of indigenous relationships into a western construct. It’s one area [of the census] that’s fairly weak and we’d like to improve,” said Lowe.

But perhaps things aren’t going as smoothly as the ABS hoped. One community worker employed by the census in the tiny town of Yuendumu in the Northern Territory told Crikey that because of a local sports carnival, it was almost impossible to complete the census over the weekend. The worker — who asked to stay anonymous — said that with people flooding into the town to stay with friends and relatives, it was a challenge to get the all of the census questions answered, and in some cases, they may even need to start the process again.

“There are tens of thousands of collectors and occasionally procedures break down, but as soon as we find out where there problems, we try and rectify them,” said Lowe.

Lowe doesn’t want this indigenous focus to be a once-off event. “Every man and his dog goes and does studies in indigenous communities and then they just disappear and the community never sees it. This time around, we’re going to return the information to them, we’re running statistical literacy community programs and we’re going to show them how they can use the information to plan for their future and how they can use it for funding grants etc,” said Lowe.