It would be deeply, deeply irresponsible to suggest you hold, or even attend, a party with a theme "drink yourself census". Such an event could see people swapping their official forms and filling in ridiculous answers for each other. Terrible thing, indeed. Moreover, the Census and Statistics Act allows for fines of up to $1000 for people who do such things. You need to take the census seriously. Think hard about your answers. Study.

If you're a witch or wizard, you'll want to check out www.pagandash.com for its "effort to educate" you on how to fill in the form. Answering "Jedi" to the religion question is so five years ago. As a stunt it worked and it was inspirational, but you might want to try telling the Australian Bureau of Statistics something new this time around. Episodes one to three of Star Wars really didn't do much for Jedi reputations, did they? At the very least, if you give a new answer this time you'll help spark a string of articles decrying the lack of religious commitment in society.

If you'd prefer to tackle some more interesting questions you could try www.altervista.com, which performs the task of cataloguing the bizarre, weird and strange. It keeps statistics on answers to questions such as: "If you were gay, would you be attracted to yourself?"

In 2001, around 43 per cent of Australian adults had access to the Internet at home. By last year, 56 per cent of us were domestically on-line. All that extra time spent in cyberspace should show up in the official data of our age.

Study www.antonellapavese.com for a lesson on how to harness the net for more than pornography. To cut a long story short, a lot of people spend a lot of time studying the satellite photos on Google Earth and finding individual people in them. Then they post the pictures to this site. Sometimes they forget they're supposed to be finding people and post pics of, say, the killer whales in a US aquarium.

That's the sort of lateral thinking we want for the national census. Don't just let them take a written snapshot of you, make sure it's a really good one. Compete, compare, conspire. Someone, create a site and have people post their forms. Don't sneer - who'd have thought the Bureau of Meteorology's weather maps (www.bom.gov.au) would have cult status?

As a sociologist I've sat and pored over census data, trying to work out what it all meant. Often it appeared to indicate a long session in the nearest pub was called for. It would be lovely to think that one day someone will be able to sit down to crunch census figures without risking death by boredom.

Let's get some momentum going. We're supposed to be a nation of larrikins, so the last thing the ABS really wants us doing is nuzzling up to the census form like a pack of pen-wielding sheep (okay, even I know that's a stupid simile, but you get my drift). It's our national duty to tackle this census with humour and imagination. If you can't think of a new religion to invent, at least consider wearing a stupid T-shirt while you fill in your form. Or between now and 8th August, you could submit some helpful suggestions for interesting questions to the ABS. If they're going to check out every aspect of your life, they might want to consider delving deeper into some of the more testing aspects of it.