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Census snapshot: Dirty laundry piles higher as 'chore wars' rage

Jessica Irvine
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Of all the intimate details of modern Australian life exposed in the recent national "selfie" that is the census, one factoid stands out. Get this: when asked how many hours they spent doing unpaid domestic work – not including childcare – in the week before the census, more than one in four Aussie men said none. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Not a single lawn mown, dish washed or washing machine loaded.

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Census 2016: if Australia were 100 people

The latest census data has been collected and analysed. Here's a snapshot of Australia shown as a group of 100 people.

Just to be clear, the actual question posed was: "In the last week, did the person spend time doing unpaid domestic work for their household?"

It came with the additional prompting to "include all housework, food/drink preparation and clean up, laundry, gardening, home maintenance and repairs, and household shopping and finance management".

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Then we were given a choice of five boxes to tick, including "Yes, less than 5 hours", "Yes, 30 hours plus" and  "No, did not do any unpaid domestic work in the last week", and 2.5 million Aussie men ticked the last.

As remarkable as this finding is (seriously, who pours these men's cereal in the morning?) more remarkable still is the brazen nature of these confessions of utter domestic incompetence.

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Perhaps some men left the duty of filling out the census – along with the rest of the household chores – to their wives, prompting some angry responses on their behalf.

One must assume the men who did complete their own answers did so privately, by the glowing light of the online census, or on paper booklets hidden safely from the view of wives, spouses and significant others.

But fellas, did you really think you'd get away with it?

It is literally the entire point of the census that WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.

And so, this week I made it my special mission to hunt down these lazy layabouts.

With the assistance of a very helpful boffin at the Bureau of Statistics, I obtained a postcode-by-postcode breakdown of the Aussie men contributing no domestic work in Australia.

Taking the crown – after excluding postcodes with fewer than 100 people – is the postcode of 5106 in Adelaide, home to Parafield Airport, a major pilot training facility, and a neighbouring suburb.

In second place, the Singleton Military Area in NSW, is home to 319 souls, of whom just 14 are women. Two thirds of the men here said they did no unpaid housework – I guess all that bed making and shoe polishing is part of the job – although zero women said the same. Two other military compounds, including HMAS Cerberus on the Mornington Peninsula and Blamey Barracks at Kapooka, near Wagga Wagga in NSW, also rank in the top 10. It's hard to label serving military men and women as "lazy".

Rounding out the list are three West Australian mining towns, including Barrow Island, home to the Gorgon Gas project and two universities, University of Queensland and University of NSW.

Clearly, these postcodes are home to men with better excuses than most for avoiding housework, such as national service or living away from home.

But the fact remains: when it comes to domestic drudgery, Australia's women are still picking up the slack.

But life is changing. Over the decade that the census has posed this question, an ever-increasing proportion of both sexes report doing no unpaid household work.

Women have, in fact, been ditching housework at an even  faster rate than men. In 2006, just 15.4 per cent of women said they did no unpaid domestic work – today that's climbed to 18.1 per cent. 

And the proportion of women aged 35 to 44 who say they put in more than 30 hours of unpaid work around the home has fallen rapidly from 25.8 per cent to 20.9 per cent.

We are a nation increasingly drowning in overflowing washing baskets – although more of us are also paying others to do our dirty work.

The truth is these census figures do not provide a very accurate picture of the real division of labour in Australian households.

Asking people to tally, from memory, the precise time spent on anything is a tall ask.

And answers are subject to deep biases. Some men may feel less masculine if they admit to doing too much household work.

Or maybe, like Mark Latham, they're having so much fun "looking after a huge native garden at home" and "cooking gourmet meals for my family" they don't even view it as work!

Perhaps some women even overstate the amount of work they do, young feminists angry at being left to carry the household load and older women whose sense of pride is more tied to keeping an orderly home.

Maybe, by question number 48 on the census, everyone's just a little bit pooped and not really thinking clearly.

Sadly, we've all been denied a more accurate picture of the true juggle between home and paid work ever since the bureau axed its time use survey in 2013 due to budget cuts. Before then, every few years, the bureau used to get a sample of families to keep a minute-by-minute diary of their tasks.

One of Australia's foremost experts on gender division of labour, Lyn Craig, an academic at the University of Melbourne, is calling on Treasurer Scott Morrison to find the extra $15 million it would take to run the survey again.

She says the social strains caused by overwork, both in the home and in the office, are taking a hidden toll on young families.

"The trends in men's childcare are definitely up," she says. "But at the same time they're no more likely to be cutting back on their paid work to do it. They're sort of adding it on, just as women are adding on paid work to their childcare.

"Both genders are adding more to their workload and getting stressed and anxious."

Until we know the true impact of these trends on family life, we won't be able to design better policies on childcare and parental leave to alleviate them.

It's time we took the work-life juggle seriously, rather than relying on a selfie.

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