In a week’s time, we’re all going to be sitting down and filling out our Census - the snapshot of Aussie life that the Australian Bureau of Statistics takes every 5 years. But while we’ll all have to figure out how to do it, exactly why we do it is a question we don’t think about as much. So in this Squiz Shortcut, we’ll unpack why we count everyone every 5 years, what we’re counting, and what the data is used for.

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Reading: This article from The Conversation, which talks about how the Census data is used - and it’s in many more ways than we were able to cover here…

Reading: And for the data nerds, here’s the QuickStats tool on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website - where you can find out all sorts of info about Aussies during the last Census in 2021. Have a play, go on…

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