Oh no, you're thinking, yet another cookie pop-up. Well, sorry, it's the law. We measure how many people read us, and ensure you see relevant ads, by storing cookies on your device. If you're cool with that, hit “Accept all Cookies”. For more info and to customize your settings, hit “Customize Settings”.

Review and manage your consent

Here's an overview of our use of cookies, similar technologies and how to manage them. You can also change your choices at any time, by hitting the “Your Consent Options” link on the site's footer.

Manage Cookie Preferences
  • These cookies are strictly necessary so that you can navigate the site as normal and use all features. Without these cookies we cannot provide you with the service that you expect.

  • These cookies are used to make advertising messages more relevant to you. They perform functions like preventing the same ad from continuously reappearing, ensuring that ads are properly displayed for advertisers, and in some cases selecting advertisements that are based on your interests.

  • These cookies collect information in aggregate form to help us understand how our websites are being used. They allow us to count visits and traffic sources so that we can measure and improve the performance of our sites. If people say no to these cookies, we do not know how many people have visited and we cannot monitor performance.

See also our Cookie policy and Privacy policy.

This article is more than 1 year old

NEW BAN sees Australia HIDE value of networking kit imports

Who requested this? And why? Vulture South has some informed theories

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has quietly stopped revealing the value of communications and networking products imported to Australia.

The nation's new such requests appear in August's Confidential Commodities List, released last week, adds an entry for “Machines for the reception, conversion and transmission or regeneration of voice, images or other data, including switching and routing apparatus.”

Or in lay-speak: networking and telephony equipment, and lots of radio kit too.

As of March 2015 the Bureau also added "Telephonic or telegraphic switching apparatus (excl telephone switching apparatus for small business systems (SBS)" to the confidential imports list.

The Bureau is perfectly within its rights to do this and does it quite often under section 12(02) of the Census and Statistics Act of 1905 and its provision that statistics “shall not be published or disseminated in a manner that is likely to enable the identification of a particular person or organization.” There's nothing secretive about this: the ABS publishes and explanation of its data confidentiality regime and another explaining how to go about making a confidentiality request.

The Census and Statistics Act means the ABS won't say who requested confidentiality, or why, and analysts and networking vendors confessed they'd never even heard of the ability to crimp import data. But after sounding out a few folks around the industry, including a former senior bureaucrat who requested anonymity, The Reg offers the following explanations as within the bounds of possibility:

  • When big deals go down, it's possible to infer the price paid by looking at the spike in imports. Which is valuable commercial intelligence for rival companies as they can see the price paid for a deal. So if a vendor has discounted heavily to win a deal, the losing company can't make an informed guess about the dollar figure that won the gig.
  • Imagine that government has made a big purchase to be used for security and/or intelligence purposes. The spike in imports reveals that something's going on to any foreign power that bothers to look at import data. Removing networking kit from official statistics is therefore a defensive move that pays off in the long term by hiding future government purchases.
  • Imagine that a carrier does a big deal that represents important new commercial capability. Hiding the import spike denies rivals the chance to understand their activities.
  • Australia's keeping a close eye on certain multinationals that, like Apple, admit to pricing practices that, while entirely legal, are designed to help them to avoid taxation. Were such a company to secure confidentiality for those imports it becomes rather harder to assess their liabilities. Given the extent to which some companies structure their affairs to reduce taxation burdens, the effort to arrange for confidential imports can't be ruled out.

We've made a Freedom of Information request to the ABS asking for the justification for the confidentiality submitted by whoever it was applied for the ban. We don't hold out hope for a resolution: the Bureau keeps telling us it won't reveal anything that identifies the source of data. If we do get a result, you'll read about it here, folks! ®

Similar topics

Similar topics

Similar topics

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like