Australia counts its LGBTQ population for the first time tonight. Intersex people are still not on the form.
The 2026 census asks 66 questions, two of them new, after the government dropped the gender and sexuality questions in 2024 and reversed within a week.
Everyone in Australia has to be counted tonight.
The census comes round every five years and it is compulsory. There are 66 questions this time: where you live, what you earn, what work you do, what language you speak at home.
Two of them have never been asked before.
People aged 16 and over will be asked their gender, and how they describe their sexual orientation. Both are optional and both carry a "prefer not to answer" box.
It is the first time in 115 years of counting that the country has asked.
"When we look at history this will be marked as a point in time for us, it's incredibly important," said Nicky Bath, who runs LGBTIQ+ Health Australia.
Demographer Liz Allen called it the biggest change since the census started counting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people more than 50 years ago.
"These questions mark a massive watershed for Australia," Dr Allen said. "It reflects a recognition of humanity."
Getting here was ugly. In August 2024 the government decided to leave the questions out, to avoid a culture war. The backlash ran for a week and Jim Chalmers put them back.
Dr Allen called it the biggest debacle in the history of the census, and said that level of political interference had no precedent in modern times.
Two groups are still missing.
Nobody under 16 is asked about gender, so there will be no national picture of gender-diverse young people.
Intersex people are not counted at all. A question about being born with a variation in sex characteristics was written and tested, then dropped because people taking the test could not work out what it was asking.
"The census is the biggest and most important survey in Australia, so not having this question is such a huge lost opportunity to get accurate data on our small population," InterAction Australia director Morgan Carpenter said.
The rest of the changes are smaller and overdue. Mother and father become parent one and parent two. People can now list up to four ancestries instead of two.
The numbers are not a curiosity. The Australian Electoral Commission works out how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives off census figures. The Commonwealth Grants Commission uses them to carve up the GST. Schools, hospitals and bus routes are planned off them, suburb by suburb.
A suburb that gets undercounted tonight looks smaller than it is for the next five years.
Which is why the ABS sends out about 30,000 field staff, and counts rough sleepers by hand over a fortnight in soup kitchens and street clinics, rather than posting a form to an address they do not have.
"Just showing up for a count with no relationship is a very cold way to go about it," National Shelter chief executive Jackson Hills said.
The other worry is the website. In 2016 it fell over and locked millions of people out.
Assistant Productivity Minister Andrew Leigh, who called the census the largest peacetime logistics job the government does, says the ABS has learnt from it and has been working with the cyber security agencies. He asked people to fill it in early and take the load off the servers.
The results land in three stages from June 2027.