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it quite often under section 12(02) of the Census and Statistics Act of 1905 and its provision that statistics “shall not be published or disseminated in a manner that is likely to enable the identification of a particular person or organization.”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! ®