Anthony Albanese says the nature and scope of question on sexuality in the next census will be a matter for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, not the government.
After a week in which his government was heavily criticised for excluding proposed new questions on sexual orientation and gender identity, the prime minister reneged and said the 2026 census would include “one question about sexuality, sexual preference”.
On Saturday morning, the prime minister defended the government’s shifting position.
“We are consistent about having a commonsense approach to these issues,” he told reporters in Queensland.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
“We want to make sure that everyone is valued regardless of their gender, their race, their faith, their sexual orientation. We value every Australian and we’ll work with the ABS.”
Albanese denied a suggestion his position – that the census would include a single question on sexuality – would limit the scope of the data collected.
“There’s a range of other questions … there’s already an identity question in the census.
“The ABS will work these things through. You’re talking about 2026 and it’s 2024 … we’ll work with the ABS on those issues.”
After the prime minister’s move to scrap the proposed set of new gender identity and sexuality questions – an intervention designed to head off a feared “culture war” distraction – members of the LGBTIQ+ community called for the government to ensure the next census comprehensively covers gender diversity.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has also said he is “fine” with gender and sexuality questions being in the census despite earlier attacking Labor for having a “woke agenda”.
Equality Australia welcomed the inclusion of a sexual orientation question in the next census, but said all members of the LGBTIQ+ community must be counted.
“Trans and gender diverse people and those with innate variations of sex characteristics deserve to be recognised as much as anyone else,” said its chief executive, Anna Brown.
“It would be a shame if the government doesn’t trust the Australian public enough to accept that the census needs to gather basic data about our nation for it be meaningful and useful.”
Brown said including LGBTIQ+ people in the census would bring Australia into line with similar liberal democracies such as the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand.
Jeremy Wiggins, the chief executive of Transcend, said trans, gender diverse and non-binary Australians were systematically erased across too many areas of Australian life.
“We face disproportionately poor health outcomes as a result,” he said.
“We exist across tens of thousands of households across Australia and, if our identities are not accurately captured in the census, then the data will be extremely poor, and it will lead to years of ongoing health and policy failures for our communities.”
The Community and Public Sector Union also said one question on sexuality was “a half-baked response”.
A full picture of the community was needed to ensure effective and equitable public policy and services, the union’s ACT regional secretary and queer network co-convener, Maddy Northam, said.
“Excluding the LGBTIQ+ community from the census was a mistake,” she said.
“It is now crucial that the government follows through by expanding the scope of questions to make sure all LGBTIQ+ Australians are counted.”
The sex discrimination commissioner, Anna Cody, said all Australians needed to be covered in the census, so the government had the data to make informed policy decisions.
This included the intersex community, she said, as the government works on a 10-year LGBTQI health and wellbeing plan.
The Greens will force a vote in both houses of parliament over adding the questions, but the exact political procedure is yet to be determined.
Senior Labor ministers said the government had scrapped the question to avoid a divisive debate, before the prime minister announced on Friday it would go ahead, after days of backlash.
Brown criticised any suggestion data collection was divisive.
“Frankly, it’s absurd and offensive to suggest that LGBTQI people’s existence is somehow a threat to our society,” she said.