December 4, 2023
The 2016 Census came back online at 2.30pm this afternoon and the Australian Bureau of Statistics has again apologised for the outage, whilst reassuring the public that the census is back on track.
The Chief Statistician, David Kalisch, and the Census Manager, Duncan Young, both gave televised statements at 5.20pm, in time for the evening news. No resignations were forthcoming.
The Opposition Leader, Bill Shorten, says the census has been a shambles and is a failure of responsibility and leadership on the part of the Turnbull government.
Speaking in Melbourne, Shorten said the census has been one of the “biggest shambles” of government in many years. “Turnbull is already talking about blaming someone else,” he said. The government’s “failure to take responsibility is a failure of leadership”.
Shorten called for an independent Senate inquiry. “The only thing you can be sure of is that the heads that won’t roll are the ones sitting at the Cabinet table,” he said.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he’s not happy with what he says is an ABC failure on the census.
As the Australian Bureau of Statistics census remains offline, Turnbull spoke for the second day on the failure of the online census submission technology two nights ago. “This is an ABS failure,” Turnbull told a press confernece. “I’m not happy.”
Turnbull said DDos attacks – distributed denial of service – were “predictable” and “always going to happen”.
Asked whether the system simply failed to cope with the volume of people attempting to submit their census form, Turnbull said the system was engineered to handle 260 form submissions per second, but the highest rate reached was 150 per second. He repeated claims that most of the DDoS attacks came from the United States, pointing out that Virtual Private Networks allow the origin of attacks to be disguised.
The Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, said the Turnbull is incompetent and is undermining Australians’ faith in institutions.
Shorten was speaking in Queanbeyan, in the seat of Eden-Monaro, won for the ALP by Mike Kelly at last month’s election. He said he couldn’t believe that the government couldn’t even run a census. It had taken 100 years to build confidence in the census but just one Tuesday night for Turnbull to undermine it.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison have emphasised that no data was accessed or lost during last night’s crisis for the 2016 Census.
Speaking at a press conference in Sydney, Turnbull said the census site will be back online as soon as the Australian Signals Directorate is satisfied.