I’ve been thinking on and off for days about what possible civic planning or public health initiatives could be done off the back of asking everyone their sexuality, and I keep coming up blank.
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I’ve been thinking on and off for days about what possible civic planning or public health initiatives could be done off the back of asking everyone their sexuality, and I keep coming up blank. Unless they use outdated stereotypes like “gay people are more promiscuous” then it’s not even useful for planning sexual health services. So, serious question, what use is collecting this statistic, even assuming people don’t lie on the form for safety?
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@futzle “civic planning” is the sort of boilerplate people use to describe how the Census is used but it’s used for lots of things in the policy world because you can get data down to fairly small geographies. Lots of social research uses it – it’s used to analyse election results, for example because you can get characteristics of a small number of voters (pretty roughly, admittedly, by matching polling places to SA1s). At my last job barely a week went by when I wasn’t using Census data for something.
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@futzle This isn’t an argument for or against the use of certain question, just noting that it’s the one data source governments and other policy makers have to make all sort of policy decisions.
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@damonism Ok, but you’ve answered a different question to the one that I’m asking. I accept the usefulness of censuses in general, you don’t need to convince me of that. I just cannot come up with a way that having sexuality data at this scale and granularity is useful.
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@futzle @damonism IMO (and once again a different question) the argument shows up an extraordinarily trusting strain in Australian cultural life, and an urge to be formally represented & recognised by the State as a condition of citizenship. To be distinguished from other cultural strains that prioritise being left alone
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@liamvhogan We’re one of the few countries in the world that enforces (albeit lightly) compulsory voting. The political philosophers have a term for this but my 8am brain can’t recall what it is.
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@damonism it’s an extremely high level of civic trust. That’s good and bad. Good because it leads to confidence in public institutions (like the Census, and in elections, and so on). Without it we couldn’t have had the very good public response to the lockdown-vaccination requirements in 2020-2021. Bad because the same impulses are cop society ones