[hermanhermitage]

My recollection was that https://spacetimeresearch.com/ (ex ABS guys setting up a plum contract) did all the data processing of the raw data, providing a representative but anonymous set to ABS masses for reporting.

The real data was locked away (no electronic access) and I recall destroyed after a certain point of time. There were no names attached to the real data, even though the real data was not accessible by any mortal.

The representative set had the property that if you say queried a statistic at the national level it would be correct, but if you queried that statistic on a narrower area it get more "representative" and less applicable to the precise area queried. The means etc would however all pan out.

The data was accessible at 7 granularities of geographic areas. Some of the areas may have only had 100s of residents, so you can see why the data was fuzzed.

We were co-located in a building with the ATO, but there was a strict protocol and security personnel denying any access by non ABS staff. We had no internet access, no floppy drives, (no USB back then from memory), no CD burners no easy way of getting data in or out.