The embattled head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has rejected calls for him to stand down after last week’s disastrous online Census outage.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull warned that “heads will roll” after the Census website succumbed to a reported attack and was subsequently offline for two days.

Most people assume that the first head on the block will be that of ABS chief statistician David Kalisch,

Criticism has been hurled at the ABS and its handling of the Census, after the bureau was forced to pull down the Census website on Tuesday night amid ongoing denial of service attacks which blocked access to the site.

It resulted in the Census being offline for more than two days, and came after weeks of discussion about the privacy and security of the 2016 survey.

Mr Turnbull launched an investigation into the incident, and said “which heads roll, where and when, will be determined once the review is complete”.

“My view is that leaders stand up when there are issues,” ABS chief statistician Mr Kalisch told the ABC.

“They respond and they fix the issues, and there will be a time for the facts to come out and for accountabilities to be made.”

Fingers were pointed at ABS boss David Kalisch over the Census failure. Photo: AAP

Mr Kalisch said he was aware the ABS had suffered significant harm to its reputation.

“I think the community recognises the important information we provide about how the economy is going, how society’s going, what are the features of the environment, and they support our work because they know the importance of that information,” he said.

“We do regularly test community support and community trust in the ABS, we know that in 2015 the Australian community had very high trust in the ABS, and it was well above what some of our other statistical agencies across the world have achieved.

“We’re working hard to rebuild that trust.”

‘We’re in new ground’

Despite problems hampering the collection of data, the bureau is still confident most of the population will still fill out the Census – whether it is online or on paper forms.

“Last time it was around 96 per cent of households and 98 per cent of people, and that’s what we’re still pitching to,” Mr Kalisch said.

“My view is that leaders stand up when there are issues.”
ABS chief statistician David Kalisch

“From 2011, we know that we had about two million people that completed the census on or before Census night, that’s two million out of a lot of households.

“At the moment we’ve got over three million households that have completed the form online. We didn’t know how many people completed the paper form on the night, so we’re in new ground now.”

Key to the investigation will be whether software provider IBM delivered appropriate services to the ABS in preparation for the Census.