Albanese’s Singling Out Trans People from the Census is a Move from the Morrison Playbook

“When populations are invisible in the Census, they are at increased risk of marginalisation and disadvantage,” reads a 5 August joint statement by the UNSW Kirby Institute and other key health organisations, regarding Albanese’s decision to rescind on a pledge to include questions identifying gender identity and innate sex characteristic variations that were slated for the next national survey.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics issued a statement of regret in August 2023 regarding complaints that the Australian Census, which is taken every five years, fails to adequately address gender identity, variations of sex characteristics and sexual orientation, and it outlined that it would be working with federal Labor to address this omission in the 2026 national demographic questionnaire.

But ABS chief statistician David Gruen confirmed on 26 August that test questions had been dumped, as the Albanese government had determined not to progress them, despite the Labor Party National Platform 2023 having promised to include the LGBTIQA+ community in the next Census. And this has been taken as, yet another, betrayal of queer people by Labor and the backlash has been fierce.

In response PM Anthony Albanese told ABC Radio Melbourne on 30 August that there had been confusion around the issue and that there would be a question addressing sexual preference in the national survey, but he didn’t quite make clear that this means data on gay and lesbian people will be collected but as for trans, gender diverse and intersex people, they’ll continue to be Census closeted.

And as Senator Lidia Thorpe pointed out on Thursday, a recent Victorian coronial inquiry that considered the suicide deaths of five young transgender people found a direct correlation between the lack of data collected in regard to the trans and gender diverse people and the high levels of adverse health outcomes experienced by them.

Closeted by government survey

Victorian coroner Ingrid Giles handed down her findings on the Inquest into the Death of Bridget Erin Flack, a 28-year-old trans woman, who took her own life in December 2020. And the coroner’s court inquired into her suicide death due to the fact that around the same time as it received notification of it, four other trans women had also taken their own lives in similar circumstances.

The coroner identified a number of systemic issues that were leading to trans women taking their own lives, including a failure of police systems to prioritise such cases, and a lack of adequate gender-affirming and culturally appropriate healthcare available, and these failures are in part due to a dearth in data regarding transgender and gender-diverse people in the community.

“Robust data is needed as a matter of priority to inform health, wellbeing, and suicide prevention initiatives in the TGD (transgender and gender diverse) community,” Giles outlines in her report.

“It is evident that accurate estimates of the proportion, distribution, and composition of the TGD population, as well as projections of resources required to adequately support health needs of TGD people, will ultimately depend on the availability of systematically collected high-quality data, such as via the Australian Census,” she added, just days after the ABS announced its change of plan.

Thorpe said in a statement on Thursday that the “irresponsible and divisive decision will harm intersex, trans and gender diverse people, not only because it singles them out to be left uncounted, but because it will have real impacts on people’s access to healthcare and services”.

The Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung senator further set out that if the Australian Census continues to deny the existence of transgender, gender diverse and intersex people then adequate provisions cannot be made for them, which contributes to the high levels of self-harm and suicidal thoughts amongst their community.

Trans exclusionary

But singling out transgender, gender diverse and intersex people is distinctly how Albanese has played this issue, in almost the exact same manner as his predecessor Scott Morrison did when he singled out trans and gender diverse students, when it came down to the crunch on whether his hallowed Religious Discrimination Bill was going to pass federal parliament in February 2022.

Morrison’s divisive religious freedoms crusade saw the last leader of the nation attempting to pass a bill that not only provided discrimination protections to people of faith, but actually privileged their religious beliefs to the point of permitting it to be the reason for them to discriminate against other people in the community based on their attributes.

The debate further triggered societal awareness around the provisions within section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), which permits religious schools to discriminate against teachers and students on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity to the point of requiring them not to be a part of their educational institutions.

And with a looming federal election in early 2022 and years into his religious freedoms crusade, the then PM agreed, due to pressure, to revoke the law that allows religious schools to expel students on the basis of their sexual orientation but not their gender identity, and when five of his party members crossed the floor to ensure this provision was extended to trans kids, he shelved his bill.

In taking office, the Albanese government promised to resolve this issue by progressing its own religious discrimination laws, as well as in revoking the provision that provides that religious schools can expel gay and trans students. But on drafting new legislation, attorney general Mark Dreyfus instead of introducing it into parliament, gave it directly to the Liberals to sign off on first.

And on 9 August, the prime minister made a point of announcing that because the Liberals had not responded to his party’s legislation, he was going to shelve it, meaning that not only were religious people not going to be provided with protections from discrimination, but that LGBTQ students and teachers could continue to be thrown out of religious schools based on their identity.

So, just weeks after he reneged on revoking the divisive laws that discriminate against LGBTQ students and teachers, Albanese was then caught out trying to ditch the recognition of sexual orientation and gender identity in the Census, and when this happened, he did the exact same thing as Morrison and included gay people in the equation, whilst singling out trans people for exclusion.