At a Senate estimates hearing last night, the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed the anticipated savings of moving this year’s census online was slashed by the now-infamous website outage — by up to $30 million.
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News.com reported he original estimated savings was $100 million, but the site shutdown has dragged that figure down to $70 million. Furthermore, additional costs of $20 million have also been incurred by the ABS, according to Chief statistician David Kalisch — with more to come.
“We anticipate possibly spending another $10 million,” he said.
Despite the issues, the ABS said during the hearing that the data collected from this year’s Census was still expected to be high quality “at this stage”.
“I’m sure the ABS has learnt its lesson,” Government frontbencher Zed Seselja told reporters in Canberra.
We will know the full impact of the site shutdown when the final response rate for the 2016 census is rel;eased in April next year.