About this site

publicdata.au is built and operated by National Digital, a software company in Burleigh Heads, Queensland. It is a private website. No government agency runs it, funds it or has endorsed it.

Why it exists

Australian governments publish a great deal of data under Creative Commons licences, and most of it arrives as a CSV or an Excel file on a portal. The file is replaced when the next release comes out, the URL often changes, and the history is gone. Anyone who wants JSON, Parquet or a database has to convert it themselves, and anyone who wants last year's release has to have kept a copy.

This site does that once, for everyone. Each release becomes a dated version at a URL that never changes. Each version carries its schema, its provenance and a diff against the release before. The publisher's own file sits beside it.

What it does to the data

Cells are typed. Headers are renamed to snake_case, with the original header kept in the schema. The encoding is made UTF-8. Blank cells become null. A cell the publisher suppressed, such as "<5", becomes null with a flag that says so. Rows are never added, removed, ranked, joined or summarised.

Licences

Each dataset is republished under the licence its publisher chose, and every file carries the attribution the licence asks for. A dataset whose licence does not allow derivative works is listed as blocked and never built. A dataset with no licence stated waits until the publisher confirms one.

The data licences are separate from the site's code, and stay that way.

Corrections

If a value is wrong, it is almost always wrong in the publisher's file as well, because this site publishes what the publisher publishes. Send those to the publisher, whose contact is on each dataset page.

If the serialisation is wrong, for example a column typed badly or a row missing, tell National Digital. We fix it, publish a new build, and record the correction in the version's notes. Versions are never deleted or rewritten. The only exception is a legal takedown, which leaves a tombstone with the version's hash in place.

Privacy

The site sets no cookies. Page views are counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is served from this site's own provider, stores nothing in the browser and does not follow anyone across sites. There is no other tracking. Votes in the backlog are counted once per browser per day using a salted hash that is not kept beyond the day. Nobody is asked who they are.

Security

The disclosure policy is at /.well-known/security.txt.