Data Availability and Use: Response to the Draft Report

This submission responds to the Productivity Commission’s Data Availability and Use Draft Report, supplementing Research Australia’s July 2016 response to the inquiry’s Issues Paper. Research Australia maintains that many public sector datasets are an underused national resource and that better access would make health and medical research (HMR) more efficient, improve the efficiency of health care and support new health products and services. It supports the Commission’s risk-management approach to data release and most of its draft recommendations, including comprehensive data registers, best-practice de-identification guidance from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, ending the requirement to destroy linked datasets and linkage keys, accrediting more data linkage units, free or marginal-cost access to minimally processed data, National Interest Datasets and a Data Sharing and Release Act. It proposes that research funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) or National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), or approved by a Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC), be taken to be in the public interest, and that all NHMRC Administering Institutions be treated automatically as trusted users without project-specific approvals. It supports a National Data Custodian only if it is properly resourced and empowered. Research Australia opposes linking research funding to mutual recognition of HREC approvals or to institutions’ data-sharing records, arguing this would burden merit-based grant processes, and suggests the NHMRC and ARC pursue other measures. It also lists high-value Commonwealth, state and private datasets, such as PBS, MBS and hospital admission records.