Staff at the Australian Bureau of Statistics endured hundreds of mental and physical injuries during the year of the Census, according the organisation's annual report released today.
The Census last year was dubbed #CensusFail on social media following an outage of the website designed to receive responses.
The ABS reported a $24 million budget blow-out — four per cent of its total planned expenses — and directly attributed this to the outage.
In its failure to meet a target for favourable media coverage, the organisation reported 576 critical media articles.
Its target was 96 per cent of media articles being non-critical, which would have matched the figure for 2015-16. For 2016-17, the ABS reported 81 per cent.
"The result was less than the target mainly due to negative coverage in 2016 surrounding the 2016 Census," the report stated.
The pressure on the organisation also resulted in an increase in injuries, even outside the Census operations.
Reported incidents of mental stress rose from 105 in 2014-15 to 122 in 2016-17.
But that figure was exceeded among staff directly working on the Census. In this group, 167 instances of mental stress were reported.
This was in addition to 262 falls, trips and slips and 258 people being "hit by moving objects".
The ABS did not report the corresponding figures in its annual report covering the previous Census and did not respond to a request to clarify the nature and variety of these injuries.
Safe Work Australia has reported that such incidents in the construction industry typically involve cars and trucks.
Over 38,000 field staff were recruited to work on the Census, suggesting fewer than one per cent of workers were hit by moving objects.
The ABS was given responsibility for the same-sex marriage postal survey in August. Reporting around this project will be covered in next year's annual report.
