The Auditor-General has warned the Australian Bureau of Statistics to lift its game in preparing for the next census, after finding it had not implemented all the lessons learnt after the 2016 meltdown.
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An audit of the Australian Bureau of Statistics' preparation for the 2021 census showed the bureau was lagging in implementing the required cyber security measures.
"The ABS has established partly appropriate cyber security measures for the 2021 Census," the report said.
"The high-level measures and controls in the ABS' cyber security strategy for the 2021 Census are sound. However, the strategy has not been fully implemented."
The ABS had not put dates on when key cyber security measures would be complete.
The bureau also had not fully implemented controls for managing the quality and protection of 2021 census data, the audit office found.
The ability - or inability - to protect census data was an "extreme risk" for the 2021 census.
It comes after the highly publicised failures of the 2016 census.
It was intended to be the first "digital-first" census, where 65 per cent of Australians filled the survey out online.
But the national survey website was shut down for two days after being hit with four distributed denial of service attacks, which occur when hackers send multiple requests to a site with the aim of exceeding its capacity to respond.
The Australian Signals Directorate was brought in to investigate the attack, while a subsequent review found the bureau and contractor IBM had not adequately planned for the crisis.
Despite this, 63 per cent of participants filled out the census online in 2016.
Australian statistician David Gruen told the audit office the ABS had developed a sound cyber security strategy, census procurements had been carried out within Commonwealth guidelines, and nearly all the recommendations from the external review into the 2016 census had been implemented.
But Labor's assistant treasury spokesman Stephen Jones said Australia could be headed for census fail 2.0.
"They haven't learnt from the last one and put in the the sort of governance arrangements and preventative processes required," Mr Jones said.
"We're less than 12 months out from the next census. Time's running out for them to get it right.
"They promised after the last debacle it would be fixed and it clearly hasn't and we're deeply concerned we're going to have another census fail."
Mr Jones said another census fail would undermine the public's confidence in the system.
"If people can't be confident that they system works smoothly they don't participate, and if they don't, we don't get the right data, then government doesn't have the information to make the right decisions and neither does business," he said.
"That's in no one's interest."