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Should Australian Bureau of Statistics leadership change hands? A repeatedly altered Census religion question has some questioning whether Gruen can be trusted with the data.

Information is power. So, when the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) significantly changes how it asks census questions, red flags are raised about accuracy, bias and accountability.

At stake here is the ABS’s integrity and reliability. This is especially relevant when discussing the structure of question 24 in the 2026 Census: What is this person’s religion?

As The Daily Declaration‘s Kurt Mahlburg pointed out this week, skewed questions skew statistics (see here and here).

For example, approximately 2.9 million Australians who tick “no religion” this Tuesday could be Christians who are miscounted due to the question’s biased wording.

Partly this is because some devout Christians consider themselves to be actively nonreligious. They believe that the Christian faith is about relationship and not religion. The question works against them.

Highlighting the distinction between religion and religiosity, Mahlburg added, “there are people of no fixed Christian denomination who tick ‘no religion’ for want of a better option.”

According to the ABS, the religion question has also been changed five times since 1911.

Quoting Sydney-based firm Compass Polling, who ran group tests on four of those historical changes, Mahlburg pointed out that “while secularisation is real, the speedometer is broken.”

Commenting on that assessment, Warwick Marsh from the Australian Christian Values Institute said, “You can’t change questions so many times over the years in a census and expect a true and fair result. It is time for David Gruen, head of the ABS, to resign.”

Shifting Numbers

While atheists and agnostics go to war with the ABS over the wording, which they believe is discriminatory, another integrity question relates to the “No religion” poll position. Included here is the skewing of data to justify that positioning.

The 2021 Census showed Christianity, as a whole, topping the list with 43.9 per cent of Australians identifying as Christian, whereas the broad term “no religion” came in at 38.9 per cent.

Despite atheism not being Australia’s leading belief system as of 2021, the 2026 Census continues with the 2016 changes which gave atheists and agnostics prime census real estate.

Before 2016, “no religion” was last on the list, as seen in this 2011 version of the question:

After the 2016 changes, “no religion” hit 30.1 per cent, compared to 22.8 per cent in 2011, and 18.7 per cent in 2006. The ABS then headlined a media release stating, “2016 Census data reveals ‘no religion’ is rising fast”.

A Buried Admission

A big part of the concern is the reliability of Question 24’s “modern” structuring. There’s a strong suggestive element that could influence how time-poor Australians answer this important though voluntary question.

The ABS justifies the positioning decision by stating that in 2021 “no religion” outdid individual denominational responses. According to the ABS, the “no religion” top spot reflects 2021’s individual box-ticking results.

A key problem here is that those numbers are inflated: the ABS do not compartmentalise “no religion” the way it does Christianity. This produces a false figure, or at the very least a flawed picture of the socio-cultural Australian landscape.

Most Australians won’t know that nuance needs to be applied when reading the “no religion” stats, and many an atheist will capitalise on that to spread misinformation about Christianity in Australia.

Poorly recorded data empowers bad actors, who will deploy that skewed statistic against Christians — all with the full authority of the ABS, to steer media narratives, influence culture, and drive political agendas.

This is why The Daily Declaration‘s advice to write Christian in the field provided, even if you don’t have a denomination, is important.

The poll positioning of “no religion” and lack of transparency about what constitutes “no religion” in the final result seriously compromises the integrity of the ABS’s core mission.

That criticism applies to how flawed data collection creates a flaw in the application of the organisation’s newfound commitment to increased “inclusiveness.”

As ABS head statistician David Gruen admitted in a letter to the Rationalist Society of Australia last year, “The current question design gives non-religious Australians full opportunity to record that they have no religion.”

In other words, the 2016 changes give an unfair advantage in the “eyeball attention” competition.

Despite pushing back against atheist demands to change the question again, Gruen appears to have capitulated to a working, institutional bias against Christians initiated in 2016.

Notably, the ABS decision to put “no religion” at the top of the census question was made during the Turnbull government. Turnbull’s disdain for Christianity was well known.

A Credibility Problem

At the time, the ABS defended the change as their response to a “topic review process.”

“Many responses,” they said, “believed that the religious affiliation question held a perceived bias in the question format and consequent potential underestimates of the number of people who stated they had ‘No Religion’.”

Three other reasons were offered by the ABS in 2016. These were:

1. “The growing trend for people to report No Religion in previous Censuses.”
2. User friendliness: “making the question more consistent with other questions and the order of their response categories.”
3. Everybody else was doing it. E.g., “This approach is consistent with that of a number of other countries.”

Appearing to appease those who screamed the loudest, the ABS subsequently put “no religion” in poll position.

This looks like discrimination or preferential treatment. At the very least, it indicates a blatant, detrimental double standard that deliberately undermines accurate data about Christians and the extent of Christian faith in Australia.

If this is the case, David Gruen and the other ABS heads carrying the torch for their colleagues on “no religion” need to seek another job.

The ABS should be a reliable source of unbiased data drawn from a considered and rigorous bipartisan process.

The 2016 change putting “no religion” into a poll position proves the ABS cannot be trusted with the truth.