WESTIR's December 2020 Newsletter

The office will be closed from Thursday 24 December 2020 and will reopen on Monday 11 January 2021. Have a pleasant Christmas and a wonderful New Year!

It is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic will leave a dark stain across the entire world for quite a while. It is still early days, but data is already becoming available regarding employment and deaths. Clearly, the biggest impact on Australia will be financial with job losses and an overall downturn in the economy.

This paper, by Barbara Beard, does not intend to answer questions but rather raise issues, propose some potential impacts on the Census Data and explore a range of outcomes and scenarios. How big does a major event have to be, before it affects the Census data, or causes a Census to be delayed or cancelled?

A MESSAGE FROM BARBARA BEARD

It was 2003 when I landed my dream job as a Social Researcher at WESTIR. What a privilege to have worked in a job that I have loved for 17 years. However, “Ramifications for the 2021 ABS Census” is the last paper I will be writing before taking extended leave and then retiring. For most of my time at WESTIR, Peter Rogers was the Executive Officer - a man of incredible knowledge, intellect and personality who will always be missed. WESTIR has been the incubator for many young researchers over the years and continues in that role today. I have had the pleasure of working with, and learning from, many of those researchers and the clients who have come to us with new and exciting projects.

The past few years have not been easy ones for WESTIR, and I would like to thank my colleagues for being there with me, through good times and bad. Although I will no longer have the title of Social Researcher, my interest in the community sector, data and the census will not disappear. I wish WESTIR all the best for the future and the ongoing quest to “let the data run free”.

- Barbara Beard

Ron Alder
Charles Casuscelli
Erich Weller
Shaun Beckley
Nicky Morrison

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