[Theme Music Starts]

RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

The census is supposed to reflect the country back to us. To give vital data on who makes up Australia.

But this week, it’s become a political landmine for the federal government who first cancelled questions on sexual orientation and gender identity, only to partially reverse that decision amid tense backlash.

But the question of data isn’t just academic. This debate is coming at a time when the Victorian coroner has specifically asked for more data on the trans community following a number of young trans women killing themselves.

Today, writer and co-editor of Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia Sam Elkin, on the government’s decision to exclude trans people from the census and why being counted could save lives.

It’s Tuesday, September 3.

And just a warning, today’s episode discusses suicide. Please take care while listening.

[Theme Music Ends]

[Advertisement]

RUBY:

Sam, welcome back to 7am first, it's great to have you back on the show.

SAM:

Absolute pleasure. And yeah, welcome back to you as well.

RUBY:

Oh, thank you. So, Sam, I thought we could start by going back to December 2020 to the moment that you heard the news that Bridget Flack, who was a 28 year old trans woman, went missing. What details did you have initially?

SAM:

So, yeah, Bridget Flack was last seen on Lygon Street in Carlton and she was believed to have gone for a walk around Yarra Bend, though she didn't return home later that night.

Bridget had been trying to get help for some mental health issues and had been waiting for a bed at the time that she went missing. So, you know, her friends and family were really concerned about her.

I got invited to join a Facebook group called ‘Have You Seen Bridget?’ Which was, you know, something that was set up sort of at a grassroots level to help gather people together from the trans and gender diverse community and our allies to help conduct the search.

I, you know, felt a really personally strong sense that, you know, we had to go out and look for her. It didn't feel like the police were doing enough to search for her and it felt really, really important that we do everything we can as a community to find her.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 1:

“A tragic end to the search for missing Melbourne woman Bridget Flack after a body was found in bushland last night. Police made the discovery…”

SAM:

She was ultimately found by two members of the LGBTIQA+ community.

Sadly, Bridget's case was not an isolated incident and the Victorian coroner received orders to investigate the apparent suicide to five trans and gender diverse people.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 2:

“The coroner also looked into the suicides of four other transgender women, including Matt Byrne and Heather Pierard. The inquest heard several had tried in vain to access medical and mental health treatments before their deaths.”

SAM:

It was thought that it would be a good idea to kind of look at them as a cluster, to better understand what the drivers of all of these tragic deaths were with the inquest aiming to provide new recommendations to prevent further deaths.

RUBY:

OK, so what did the inquest find?

SAM:

Yeah, so the Victorian coroner, Ingrid Giles, did a really comprehensive job of looking into the failures with the police search, specifically in relation to Bridget Flack.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 2:

“Today, a coroner found Bridget's case highlighted a bigger problem. That there's a lack of support for the transgender community, and police and health officials need to do more.”

SAM:

And there were a lot of recommendations around the need for improved data collection regarding the transgender diverse community was a really significant thing that the coroner pointed out. The fact that there's no population level data on the number of trans and gender diverse people nationally, or in Victoria, means that, you know, it's incredibly hard for policymakers or health services to make a case that they need funding or other resources to support our community when we don't even know how many of us exist. We don't know where we live. You know, these, these are the kind of questions that something like the Australian census could, could help us to understand.

RUBY:

Right, so the coroner specifically highlighted the need for better data to help prevent suicides in the trans community and singled out the census as one way to get that. So, how is information about the trans community currently collected?

SAM:

So back in 2021, which was the last census, that was the first time where there was any kind of question that talked about, sort of, something to do with gender identity. It was a fairly clunky question in the 2021 census where they asked people to select their sex from three options, so there was male, female or non-binary, but it didn't ask for gender identity in that census. And, you know, for somebody like me who is a trans masculine person. So, for the avoidance of any sort of confusion, like, I was assigned female at birth but I've transitioned and now live in the community and, you know, basically read as male all the time. That left me with a real question of like, what do I tick? You know, if I tick male that doesn't give the Australian Bureau of Statistics any information about my gender history, which could be, you know, an important evidence base for the need for trans healthcare, for example. In that census, almost 45,000 people ticked non-binary, but the ABS found that it wasn't meaningful data and so they kind of arbitrarily assigned either male or female to those respondents. So, yeah, as a result of that census there are a number of complaints to the Australian Human Rights Commission.

And following this, the ABS issued a statement of regret where they acknowledged the hurt that some people felt while completing the 2021 census, and they vowed to minimise the risk of further harm in future. And, you know, one of the big kind of commitments they made as a result of that conciliation was committing to establishing an expert advisory committee, which included members of the LGBTIQA+ community, for advice on topics and questions for the 2026 census.

So, on Sunday the 25th of August, the ABS was ready to begin testing the new questions and they were going to brief to the media on the Monday. And it seems like the federal government, you know, had a bit of a meltdown about them over that weekend and announced that they would not be including questions relating to LGBTIQA+ identity in the census. Despite that having been one of two, you know, very explicit election commitments made to the LGBTIQA+ plus community in that 2023 election.

RUBY:

Coming up after the break, why did the government pull the pin?

[Advertisement]

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 3:

“Comments by the government in the wake of its controversial census omissions are further angering the LGBTIQA+ community.”

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 4:

“Labor had promised to update the census to include questions on sexuality and gender diversity, but in recent days has ditched the plan, saying it's trying to avoid division in the community.”

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 5:

“The Albanese government opted against adding questions on sexuality to the census to avoid divisiveness. But with a wave of internal dissent growing, it may have started a fight of its own. Labor MPs…”

RUBY:

Sam, you were watching closely as the government announced that the trans and gender diverse community would not be counted at the next census. What struck you about the reasons politicians gave about why?

SAM:

Yeah there were various kind of explanations as to why the decision that had been made, which were rolled out across the week.

So, last Wednesday on the 28th of August, Deputy PM Richard Marles came out and said that Labor didn't want to inflict a divisive debate on the LGBTIQA+ community that could be harmful, which was a very strange and kind of paternalistic argument to make given the, you know, we’re the community that have been explicitly asking to be counted in the census and to be, you know, given the right to be counted and to participate in society in that way.

That leads us on to Friday, the 30th of August, which just happened to be Wear It Purple Day, which is, you know, a really lovely annual LGBTIQA+ awareness day, especially for young people. You know, that day I was hosting a very kind of like wholesome and lovely trans storytelling event at my local library…

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 6:

“The Prime Minister has confirmed back down on the controversy surrounding the census. “

SAM:

That day, Prime Minister Albanese phoned in to ABC Radio Melbourne and talked to a journalist, to say that Labor now would be supporting a single question around sexual orientation.

Audio Excerpt - Prime Minister Anthony Albanese:

“Well, we've been talking with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and they're going to test for a new question. One, one question about, sexuality, sexual preference.”

SAM:

But not, around the more substantive package of questions that the ABS was working on testing.

Audio Excerpt - Radio National Reporter:

“Sorry, Prime Minister, to interrupt. There will be a sexuality preference, or a sexuality or sexual preference, question in the census.”

Audio Excerpt - Prime Minister Anthony Albanese:

“Yes, there will as long as the testing goes okay and a question can be developed in a way that is sensitive and that gets the information that is required. And the ABS will be testing that…”

SAM:

So it was a confusing response from the Prime Minister, and it left us feeling quite unclear whether trans and gender diverse people, and non-binary people, and intersex people would have their correct information recorded or not. It seemed like maybe, Anthony Albanese was trying to kind of carve off sexual orientation from the perhaps more thorny debate around gender identity. But, you know, for me as a trans person, it felt like an even more targeted insult directed at us in our community by saying, okay, we'll accept that we can ask about sexual orientation but we don't want to ask anything too weird or whatever by asking about, you know, people's experience as transgender people in this country.

RUBY:

Yeah and I think a lot of people, when they look at this census debate, they see some pretty messy politics. But, when you look at it especially in the context of the findings from this inquest, what is at stake here Sam beyond the idea of being counted?

SAM:

Yeah, well, you know, the reason that the census is important, right, is because, well having a precise measurement of our community would, you know, help us understand, like, what services we need and where they should be. You know, particularly whether they should be in inner cities or regional or rural Australia. It would help people be able to actually, kind of, target like mental health campaigns on different parts of the community.

If we don't know where, you know, trans and gender diverse people live or what they do or who they're living with, it's pretty difficult for organisations who do really important kind of mental health support work like Switchboard and QLife. You know, they need an evidence base to be able to make an argument to government that they need financial support to meet our mental health and emotional health needs. And without that data, you know, we're just relying on, kind of, anecdotal information.

And we know anecdotally that the LGBTIQA+ community, and the trans and the gender diverse community in particular, is really struggling. Like, we are a community that is underemployed, is more likely to be homeless, is more likely to have severed ties with family or have really sort of complex relationships with our family of origin, like we’re generally not going super well as a community, you know, and we really need support and we want that support from our government.

It's incredibly ironic that this, you know, long awaited coroner's findings came out explicitly discussing the need for better population level data. You know, that that came out at the same time as the Albanese government was saying that they didn't want to ask these questions.

So, yeah it's been an absolutely wild week, and seems like Labor has really created a massive own goal for itself by creating a national debate around trans and gender diverse and intersex rights which is, you know, the very thing that they said they wanted to avoid.

This issue is not going to go away. This is going to become a real pressure point for the Albanese government if they don’t change their perspective on this.

RUBY:

Well Sam, thank you so much for talking to me.

SAM:

Oh, absolute pleasure. Thanks.

RUBY:

The support organisations mentioned today were QLife which you can call from 3pm to midnight on 1800 184 527.

Or Switchboard, which provides peer support for the Victorian LGBTQIA+ community.

[Theme Music Starts]

RUBY:

Also in the news today,

Senator Linda Reynolds harassed Brittany Higgins by engaging with the lawyer representing Ms Higgins rapist, a court has heard.

In closing submissions, in Senator Reynolds’ defamation case, Lawyer Rachel Young SC also pointed to the senator’s leaking of information to The Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen as evidence of the senator’s harassment of Ms Higgins.

But despite the alleged harassment, Ms Young said Brittany Higgins had a “profound and lasting impact on the way in which gendered violence and safety issues are addressed in Australian workplaces.”

And, a woman has been hospitalised after being bitten by a tiger at Dreamworld.

The 47 year old animal handler was taken to Gold Coast University Hospital after serious lacerations and puncture wounds to her arm and shoulder. Dreamworld hosts tiger presentations where guests are invited to be “mesmerised” by tigers as they “glide underwater”. Dreamworld has said attacks are rare and their focus now is supporting the woman who was attacked.

I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am. See you tomorrow.