Maintaining the support of official bodies and people within our authorising environment, including the Government, government agencies, and regulatory authorities, is critical for the ABS to achieve its purpose. Maintaining our social licence – the trust of the community – is also equally important to our ability to deliver high quality statistics. The ABS relies on business and the community to provide critically important data. Actions by the ABS or other entities that erode the trust of data providers directly undermines our efforts to collect this information and produce quality statistics.

The ABS' success relies upon demonstrating to the community and business that we can be trusted to protect their confidential and private data and deliver reliable statistical information.

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

Privacy is increasingly important to the Australian community, especially in light of well publicised breaches by both public and private sector entities. The ABS has continued to invest in processes and technology to maintain the secrecy of the information provided to us, as required by the Census and Statistics Act 1905, alongside meeting the additional requirements of the Privacy Act 1988.