Albanese backs down over gender identity census question

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has backed down to agree to the 2026 census including a question asking about a person’s sexuality.

Albanese said the Bureau of Statistics would test a question and if that went well, it would be included in the census. He said there would be “one question about sexuality, sexual preference”.

This was a “commonsense position”, he told the ABC on Friday morning.

The about-face follows a campaign by the LGBTQI lobby and criticism by a number of Labor backbenchers.

It also comes after ministers had dug in behind the earlier position, arguing to ask such a question could be “divisive”.

The Victorian government had written to Andrew Leigh, the assistant minister responsible for the census, calling for the decision to be reversed.

Labor’s platform says the 2026 census should gather relevant data on LGBTIQ people and “discontinue the practice of randomly assigning non-binary people and intersex people as male or female.”

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said earlier this week: “If you’ve got the woke agenda, which I think is at odds with the vast majority of Australians, then the prime minister should argue that case, but I think we’re pretty happy with the settings that we’ve got in place”.