Rubbish, the Privacy/Data Protection laws in Australia generally only relate to the living and generally mean that if you are required to give information to an entity such as a Government Dept, a business large or small. or an organisation then that entity cannot pass your information to a third party without your permission.
If I fill in a form which states it is Confidential or Private then I expect that to be the case. I don't expect the information to be released to some distant relative or Genealogist just because they need it for their research.
The first Australian census was in 1911, prior to that there were a number of State censuses a few of which have survived and are publicly available. Australian census forms were destroyed up until 1996 but since then people have been asked about retention of information for release after 99 years. For those that said yes their forms were filmed. In 2001 some 54% said yes, it was a bit higher in 2006 and I haven't seen a figure for 2011. As far as I'm aware Australia is the only country that actually asks people if it is okay to release there census information in the future.
As far as the past is concerned you will find that there is a lot of information publicly available, the National and various State Achives are full of publicly available records, in fact many Australians are proud of their convict ancestors and have researched them in detail.
Andy
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Yes I should have said were rather than are.
However if you look at the history of acknowledgement of convict ancestors in Australia you will find it was not until the mid to late 1980s that people started ackowledging or coming to terms with their convict ancestors.
That in terms of legislation is virtually yesterday.
If the Australian people and government had been so at ease with it in the past none of the census would have been destroyed.
Have you ever asked yourself why was the LDS forbidden to sell their Australian Vital Records Index (released in 1997) in Australia if the attitude was so liberal?
Cheers
Guy