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from the if-in-doubt,-challenge-the-system dept.
The independent senator Nick Xenophon says he will refuse to include his name on his census form on Tuesday, knowing he could be prosecuted for it, because he is not convinced the national census does not present a huge privacy risk.
He says he is willing to make himself a test case to challenge the government's ability to prosecute Australians for withholding their name from the census and he has not changed his mind despite speaking to the chief statistician of the Bureau of Statistics.
"I understand that, by refusing to provide my name, I will be given a notice under the act to comply and the $180-a-day fine starts from then," Xenophon said on Monday. "I will contest any such notice and, by doing so, I will in effect turn it into a test case for the ability of this request.
"In the meantime, I will be seeking amendments to section 14 of the act so that a person cannot be prosecuted if they fail to provide their name. In other words, it will ensure such information is unambiguously non-compulsory.
(Score: 2, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday August 09 2016, @12:33PM
The Australian census is very comprehensive.
Does anyone have a link? I can't find a form online. You'd think some .gov.au address would have a download / fill out official version or some media site would have uploaded a sample.
From what I've read
1) In .au the forms are all the same (which might not be true?), all are the equivalent of the USA long form on steroids. In the USA they give a long form to a small fraction of the population. My Dad filled out what seemed to be a 20 page long form for us in '90 and I'm not related to or met anyone else who's ever filled out a USA long form. In the USA the short form is nothing but the name and address so in burger land people are getting confused because if you leave off the name and address on the short form you pretty much have a blank form.
2) There is a lot of social media traffic about how it would be a great idea to "force" people to answer truthfully about the religious questions (how?) and change.org petitions and similar madness. All I can say is we just spent a century rounding people up and gas chambering some of them for their census religious records, anyone in .au who enters anything but "none" is some kind of idiot. Anyone dumb enough to tell the .gov they're a Muslim deserves to be on the not-fly-list for sheer stupidity. I mean, you just don't tell the government stuff like that unless you're an idiot.
3) The articles go nuts about $180 PER DAY fines for not filling out the form and people including government leaders are going nuts about not filling out forms both for and against and nobody is talking in the corporate media (probably a gag order?) about the fine for false data being only $1800 which is only ten days of fine for failure to fill out. I'm not seeing the problem here? Just lie about anything that can't be easily proven? Give big brother the data he already has WRT obviously provable in law court stuff like names and addresses, but if evil big brother wants to know about your relationship with God or Gods or no Gods don't be an idiot and not fill out the form over it, just make some shit up for anything that can't be trivially proven in a court of law.
4) A standard burgerland belief is that non-professional tax preparer citizens could never fill out something as complicated as a single page 1040-EZ tax form and you really need to pay at least $250 for a consultant who's dumber than you to "help" with the data entry. So I would assume there's a cultural belief that your average idiot off the street can't fill out a long census form. This ties in with the maximum $1800 for falsified data, note its not $1800 for wrong or inaccurate data, specifically falsified. If it gets investigated or you go to court you probably can't get away with pretending you have no idea what your address is or your name (well... maybe you gave your nickname or your kids nickname?). But if they ask something complicated and you shrug shoulders and write down likely looking idiocy you'll probably get away with it. When my Dad filled out the USA long form I vaguely remember him answering the BTU rating of our furnace and he just read it off the nameplate but you know darn well that 90% of the population is going to enter a random number or copy out of an ad in the Sunday paper.
5) .AU is super Puritan so you either think and do what the good people think is good, or the punishments are extremely severe, please remind everyone who's not .AU here about their crazy punishments for not voting. The opposition to the Puritan ethic is two fold, in that some fraction of the population wants to tell them to F off and mind their own damn business as a general principle, and the other fraction is terrified they'll be in a coma in an ICU in a hospital and in the USA you'd wake up to discover your entire family got the economic death penalty from the hospital bill but in .AU you'd wake up to find out you got the real death penalty for not voting while you were unconscious. They really are crazy Puritans like something right out of Massachusetts. At least thats how .au appears to outsiders, aside from every living animal on your continent being poisonous and the accents are pretty hot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @02:50PM
What a completely illogical rant about something you obviously know nothing about.
The crazy punishment for not voting is $20, assuming you don't just give them a 1/2 decent excuse.
One can only assume the rest of your post is just as ill-informed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @03:49AM
A grand total of 100 people were fined last census. One can only assume they were too stupid to put the empty forms back into the envelope.