简体中文
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) believes the results of Australia's botched online census will be of a "high quality" despite the debacle which forced the shut-down of the website on the official census night.
On Aug. 9, Australia's first online census was deemed a failure after a denial of service attack (DoS) caused the shutdown of the website for almost 24 hours. The website was eventually reinstated the following afternoon, but not before concerns were raised about the security of each submission.
Despite the debacle, and almost two months after the official census date, ABS head Duncan Young said 95 percent of households had filled in the census form - either online or by physical copy - ahead of Friday's deadline.
"It is right around the mark at the moment, in terms of response rate but we'll know the final response once we've got all of the data in and have a chance to process it," Young told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Thursday.
He added that while the official census closure date was Friday, the website would not be shut down until the end of Sunday, as to give Australians every chance to finish the national snapshot.
Young said this would help Australians avoid the costly 180 dollar-a-day fine (125 U.S dollars) for not filling out the census.
"We've made the decision to keep the online system open until Sunday night because we can, and it just gives people another couple of days to finish off their forms," Mr Young said.
Young said fining those who didn't complete the census was "an absolute last resort".
"It is something that we've always used sparingly," Young said, "Last census, right across the country, we fined less than 100 people ultimately and certainly that's our approach to this Census. "
The final results of the national snapshot are not expected to be published until April 2017.
(APD)
