The ABS purpose is to inform Australia’s important decisions by partnering and innovating to deliver relevant, trusted, objective data, statistics and insights.

To achieve our purpose, the ABS is focusing on three priorities to meet Australia’s contemporary and emerging statistical needs over the coming years:

• providing high quality official statistics
• transforming the ABS for the future
• delivering new statistical solutions to maximise the value of public data.

Our highest priority is to deliver high quality official statistics. To ensure that we can deliver relevant, trusted, objective statistics, we are transforming the ABS and partnering with our stakeholders to innovate, develop and implement new statistical solutions.

What we do

The ABS also has an important leadership role, coordinating statistical activities and collaborating with official bodies in the collection, compilation, analysis and distribution of statistics. In addition, the ABS provides technical advice and assistance to the Australian and state and territory governments in relation to statistics, develops standards for statistics, and helps to ensure compliance with those standards.

Our plan

The ABS Corporate Plan, outlining the ABS purpose, strategic priorities, operating environment and performance measures, can be found on the ABS website at www.abs.gov.au.

Our stakeholders

Maintaining the support of authorising entities including the Government, government agencies, and regulatory authorities is critical for the ABS to achieve its purpose. Equally important for our ability to deliver high quality statistics is the maintenance of social licence. The ABS relies on business and the community to provide critically important data. Any actions by the ABS or other entities that erode the trust of providers directly undermine our efforts to collect this data. ABS success relies upon demonstrating to the community and business that we can be trusted to protect their data and deliver reliable statistical information.

Our commitment to strong partnerships with our stakeholders is central to our ability to deliver. This commitment drives the ABS to find innovative ways to work with providers to inform our work while also guiding us in the identification of relevant statistical information that is of real value to their business. We have continued to seek ways to more effectively use the wealth of existing government and non-government information to more efficiently deliver insights, and reduce provider burden on business and households as much as possible.

Noting the increasing importance of privacy in light of well publicised breaches by both public and private sector entities, the ABS has continued to put considerable effort into maintaining the secrecy of the information provided to us, as required by the Census and Statistics Act 1905, while also ensuring that we meet the additional requirements of the Privacy Act 1988. It is worth noting that there has never been a privacy breach of Census data.