ABS chief statistician says data is safe, site will be back up as soon as possible

ABS chief statistician says data is safe, site will be back up as soon as possible

THE embattled government bureaucracy behind last night’s bungled Census pays its boss more than the Prime Minister.

Australian Bureau of Statistics head David Kalisch, whose official title is Australian Statistician, earns a base annual salary of $493,530 and a total salary of $705,030.

The package, which is higher than Malcolm Turnbull’s $522,0000 a year, was signed off in December by the Remuneration Tribunal.

By comparison, Michelle Guthrie, new head of the ABC, is on a $900,000 salary. The Defence Force chief earns $814,700, and the Australian Taxation Office boss earns $772,920.

Mr Kalisch, who was previously the chief executive of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, was appointed the 15th Australian Statistician in December 2014.

According to its most recent annual report, the ABS has 46 senior management personnel who were paid a total $11.08 million in 2015.

That averages to roughly $241,000 a year, slightly over the minimum base salary of $225,882 for Senior Executive Service (SES) Band 3 public servants.

Late last year, ABS employees voted down a controversial pay offer which would have given them a three per cent pay rise in the first year, followed by a two per cent and one per cent rise in the two subsequent years.

Nearly 2550 ABS employees voted, with 1449 voting against the pay deal, The Canberra Times reported, prompting Mr Kalisch to search for answers.

“I would like to understand the reasons for this very close outcome and have asked the Human Resources Branch to put processes in place to gather this information,” he wrote to staff.

The ABS has come under fire for its bungled handling of Tuesday night’s Census after an apparent denial of service attack brought down the website.

The government department had already come under fire for its poor public relations job handling privacy concerns in the lead-up to the five-yearly population snapshot.

On Wednesday morning, the minister responsible for the Census denied that the national survey was “hacked” or “attacked” despite public statements from the ABS claiming otherwise.

In an overdue press conference after more than 12 hours of confusion, Small Business Minister Michael McCormack said: “This was not an attack, nor was it a hack.

“It was an attempt to frustrate the collection of data, an attempt to frustrate the collection of data. People should feel rest assured their data is safe.”

It came after Mr Kalisch told ABC radio this morning: “It was an attack. It was quite clear it was malicious.”

The ABS shut down the website after a series of denial-of-service attacks on Tuesday night, with the strongest one coming just after 7.30pm.

Mr Kalisch insisted the ABS adopted a precautionary and conservative approach. “The integrity of the Census has not been compromised,” he said. “The online system will be operating as soon as we are assured it is robust and secure.”

There were several denial-of-service incidents detected between 10am and 7.30pm, with the last starting about the same time as millions of Australians logged on to the site to try and fill out their Census forms.

About 2.33 million Census forms were successfully submitted and stored before the site was shut down at 7.45pm on Tuesday.

Mr Kalisch said prior to the attack, the site was receiving forms at a rate of 150 per second, well under its capacity of 250 per second.

“The denial of service breached the online form because it didn’t get caught up by the geo-blocking. That was the aspect in the protection system that didn’t operate fully,” he said.

— with AAP