Politicians must be blamed for public sector failings after years of "foolish" outsourcing and staff cuts, a former senior bureaucrat says.
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Terry Moran, a former Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary, said the census failure was linked to years of neglect, cuts and poor decision making by politicians.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics shut down its website earlier this month after detecting denial-of-service attacks that could have compromised the security of public data.
"I don't blame the poor people at the ABS," he said.
"I blame successive governments which have denied investment in the ABS and also in this case the foolishness of outsourcing so much of the collection task to the private sector," he said.
Mr Moran said Australian Statistician David Kalisch was an experienced public servant who inherited a department ravaged by poor decision making.
"He's gone to the ABS at a time in which it has been ravaged by both sides of politics," he said. "They have taken out staff and failed to invest in the IT infrastructure of the ABS," he said.
Mr Moran, who was also secretary of the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet, said similar problems existed at the Department of Human Services and the Australian Tax Office.
"It is symptomatic of an unwillingness of the political class to put boundaries around their ambitions for what will be done," he said.
Shortly after the census, Community and Public Sector Union secretary Nadine Flood said public servants should not be blamed for the disruption.
"Staff saw these problems coming a mile off," she said. "There are 700 fewer staff at the ABS now than when the last census was conducted five years ago and as a result staff are suffering under massive workloads."
In a podcast hosted by University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Professor Glyn Davis, Mr Moran said there was "some truth" to the union's claim.
"I have not read their full argument but if that is what they have said, there is some truth to it," he said.
"In the case of the ABS, there has been a gradual shedding of the surveys they have done and they have contracted - each government has made a contribution to that."
"They are probably not collecting as much as they would wish to collect and maybe that has contributed to the downsizing of their staff numbers over time."
But Professor Helen Sullivan, director of the Melbourne School of Government, said public servants need to share the blame and learn lesson from the census.
"What I don't buy is that somehow the ABS is not culpable because it wasn't trained in being an informed client," she said.
"Governments have been contracting for years. This is not something that is new and not something we haven't tried before."
"It's not good enough to say it's because they did not have enough staff or were not trained to do that. This is something that is core to how governments operate."
