Ask the Australian Bureau of Statistics when it knew about its role in the postal plebiscite, ask if it knew at all, ask whether it has the capacity to conduct the plebiscite, and you'll be told it's saying nothing. It's referring all such questions to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the Finance Minister Mathias Cormann.
Which is odd, because it's an autonomous agency used to speaking for itself. And the Finance Minister and the Prime Minister aren't the ministers it reports to. It reports to the Treasurer, through the Small Business Minister Michael McCormack. It was McCormack and the head of the ABS, David Kalisch, who kept the public updated during the computer meltdown that came to define the 2016 census.
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Government persisting with plebiscite
Despite being doomed to fail in the Senate, the Liberal Party is sticking with its election commitment to give everyone a say on marriage equality.
At a cost of $122 million, the postal plebiscite would become the second-biggest project it's ever undertaken, after the $350 million census.
Whereas its biggest regular survey, about employment, covers 26,000 households, the postal plebiscite will cover all of them. Whereas it normally eschews questions about opinions (which is one of the reasons why the Melbourne Institute rather than the ABS conducts the highly regarded Household Incomes and Labour Dynamics Survey) the plebiscite will ask only about opinions.
Whereas in recent years the ABS has tried to hang on to the names and addresses of those that it surveys and link them to answers (in what many see as an invasion of privacy) each response to the plebiscite will have to be kept secret.
The ABS is, on the face of it, the wrong organisation to be conducting the plebiscite. So why it, rather than the Australian Electoral Commission?
One reason is that only governors-general can call elections, and the High Court is likely to decide that an AEC-conducted plebiscite is much the same as an election. The ABS already has the power to conduct surveys.
Another reason is that the AEC is bound by rules about how long after distributing envelopes it can wait before getting them back. Australia Post's delivery standards have slipped so much in recent years that AEC staff fear it mightn't be able to meet their timetable.
But the ABS itself faces problems. Only one of the census questions is non-compulsory - the question about religion. The Census and Statistics Act prevents it from compelling people to answer questions about "religious beliefs". Many people faced with a question from ABS about same-sex marriage would regard it as a question about their religious beliefs.
On the other hand, the ABS is explicitly given the power to collect statistics about "births, deaths, marriages and divorces", and the act requires it to collect prescribed information if the minister directs it in writing.
An ABS 'opinion poll' conducted without the authority of Parliament would be better able to withstand a High Court challenge than the AEC ballot conducted without the authority of Parliament.
On a practical level, the ABS is the worst-placed organisation to conduct such a postal plebiscite. It moves slowly. It needs (more than) five years notice to prepare each census. In recent years it has abandoned the commitment to total privacy that used to define it. And it is trying to move its surveys online.
The ABS is, on the face of it, the wrong organisation to be conducting the plebiscite
That's why Cormann says it'll get help and staff from the AEC. If it pulls it off at short notice it could get back the reputation for competence it lost with the census. If there's a glitch (which would be likely given the short timeframe) its reputation will sink lower. What's just as likely is that it won't happen. So bizarre, and so obvious an attempt to get around the need for parliamentary approval, is the proposal that the High Court would very seriously consider saying no.
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