As an accountant sets out the baseline data for a business, so the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) sets out the baseline data for Australia. It compiles the national accounts, measuring national income, expenditure and production. Its other measurements cover everything from inflation and unemployment, to health, to the state of the natural environment.
As the US-based Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute argued in a 2017 joint paper, such basic data seems vital to a nation’s functioning: “required for the proper exercise of citizenship and for holding public officials accountable”.
An independent agency, the ABS sits a little apart from the Canberra policymaking structure and, usually, garners little attention. But that has changed a little under the ABS’s current head, David Gruen. He has managed to give the national accounting agency an unlikely reputation as an innovator.
Into the family business
As Gruen himself tells it, he just followed his interests. A fascination with maths and physics led him into a science degree, work as a research scientist, and then a Cambridge PhD in biophysics. But as he matured, he says, his interests broadened.
“I thought, ‘there’s more to life than just becoming an expert in something that only a very small number of people care [about] one way or another’,” he recalls.
So before really starting his career, Gruen retrained in his late twenties – in economics.
It might seem an odd change. But he was answering the call of the family business.
Gruen’s father, Fred, arrived in Australia during World War II aboard the infamous Dunera internee transport ship. He then became one of Australia’s most celebrated economists. A great teacher, he rose to be professor of economics at Monash and the ANU, championed the lowering of Australia’s tariff walls, and became an adviser to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.
As all this went on, David enjoyed “a pretty happy kind of settled family life”, growing up on sheep farms run by his mother, Ann. Economic policy featured regularly in kitchen-table discussions.
“Part of growing up was kind of being exposed to conversations about public policy,” he acknowledges. So while the young Gruen turned to his new trade with plenty to learn, he knew what he was getting into. And of course he could handle the mathematics, which was then becoming a bigger element of economics training.
While Gruen was still studying economics, other factors were also pulling him towards a career in economic policy. Younger brother Nicholas, another kitchen-table sparring partner, had started advising the Hawke Government on economic policy. And while studying, David met his partner of four decades, Jenny Wilkinson. After her own career in government economics, Wilkinson now heads the Commonwealth Department of Finance.
Having won his second doctorate, Gruen followed Wilkinson to the Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney. From Macquarie Place the pair moved to Canberra, where Gruen worked in increasingly senior roles at Treasury and then the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
He took a very laid-back route to success.
“The story of my life is very much one of […] following my interests, and allowing them to take me to all sorts of places that I didn’t anticipate when I started my journey,” he says. Numbers may be a serious business, but the Gruen family has never given the impression of taking the business of them too seriously. Parents Ann and Fred, he says, “would have subscribed to the idea that you spend a lot of time working, so it’s important to enjoy what you do”.
Australia’s statistician
The outside observer might be a little surprised, then, that Gruen left policymaking behind for a very different role. In late 2019 he was named as the new head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics – formally, “the Australian Statistician”.
The ABS was at a low point when Gruen walked in. It had still not lived down a 2016 Census website accident, when a misconfigured router led to the Census website being taken offline for two days from Census night, delaying the national population count.
But Gruen has made an outsized success of the role, drawing plaudits that are rare for the heads of statistical agencies.
“Up until David’s tenure, not much changed,” says Angela Jackson, lead economist at consultancy Impact Economics and chair of the Women and Economics Network. “In terms of the nature of the releases, and the type of data that the ABS looked to release, and the type of information, there just wasn’t that innovation […] It’s pretty clear that there’s been a major cultural shift.”
Gruen succeeded by grasping an unlikely opportunity to recast the bureau’s reputation: COVID-19.
Accounting for COVID
Gruen arrived at the ABS with a classic leader’s question on his mind.
“What should be my legacy?” he recalls thinking. “I mean, that’s perhaps being overly dramatic. But nevertheless, what things was I going to focus on? And then COVID turned up.”
Gruen seized on the advice of President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel: never let a serious crisis go to waste, but instead to use it as an opportunity to do things you couldn’t have otherwise done.
“It just seemed to me that this was an enormous opportunity,” Gruen says. Data on the state of the economy suddenly had a new and immediate value. And as a long-time student of using data in policymaking, he was the ideal person to ensure the ABS delivered it.
In the months that followed the first COVID outbreak, Gruen’s ABS proved itself anew, to the bureaucracy and everyone else.
Gruen succeeded, says Angela Jackson, by pushing the ABS to find “innovative ways to give Australians a better idea of what’s going on in their own country, in a timely way”. The ABS created new, faster surveys showing COVID’s impact on households, produced new monthly inflation figures, and found new sources of economic insight.
“It’s been fantastic,” Jackson sums up.
“The benefit of being the leader is that you can convene people,” says Gruen. “You can make the call […] that we’re going to do some of these things without having to convince the people above you that it’s a good idea. So I was comfortable in that role […] And we were very much the initiator in the early days of COVID.”
On the last day of February 2020, Australia reported its 25th COVID case, the US recorded its first death, and China’s COVID deaths rose to 2,835. Gruen called a top-level ABS brainstorming meeting.
“We said, ‘what can we do faster?’,” he recalls. COVID was already disrupting the ABS’s program of face-to-face surveys, so it had staff available to tackle the new tasks. By mid-March it was asking 1,200 small businesses what COVID effects they had seen.
That was enough, Gruen explains, to find out the industries and business sizes that were feeling the greatest impacts. On 26 March 2020, the ABS published its findings.
For an organisation used to working in set formats and to schedules created months in advance, this burst of innovation to guide policymakers was a dramatic change.
“There was a huge premium on doing things fast, even if they weren’t as accurate as would be our normal suite of products,” Gruen says of his greatest achievement to date at the ABS. “It was a shock to the institution.”
Piggybacking on the digital revolution
Even as the ABS published that March 2020 survey data, Gruen and his team were thinking about the possibilities of another recent development in national statistics – the ability to digitally combine its own data with outside sources.
“The digital revolution has created a data revolution,” says Gruen, “because all the digital platforms that we use generate data, and that data is very valuable.”
Like statistical agencies around the world, he says, the ABS is using new information sources, integrating data in a form made possible by the current generation of computers – “piggybacking off the digital revolution”.
In April 2020, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) began sending the ABS de-identified Single Touch Payroll data, giving it a rich new source of wage and job data about most of Australia’s more than 10 million employees. That spawned a new Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages publication. Eighteen months later, BAS data similarly allowed the ABS to start producing a monthly indicator of business turnover. And in February 2022, using bank transaction data, it added a new monthly measure of household consumption, from petrol to dental costs. Such consumption covers about half of the Australian economy.
“We were being quite entrepreneurial,” Gruen says. “And I guess the benefit of having come from [the policymaking bodies] was that I had a pretty good idea of what policymakers would want if we could deliver it.”
New techniques will keep providing the ABS with new data. For instance, it now runs the Business Longitudinal Analysis Data Environment (BLADE), combining its own data with information from the ATO, Intellectual Property Australia and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. In cooperation with other federal and state agencies, it’s also building data assets on people with disabilities and on criminal offenders. And it has established the ABS DataLab, a data-sharing platform for government and academic researchers, which protects the individuals behind the data from identification.
This data-sharing enables insights to be drawn from enormous amounts of data – it has let economists see, for example, that unemployed people who withdrew some of their superannuation under COVID exemptions stayed unemployed longer than those who did not.
The well-regarded Thodey Review into Australia’s Public Service back in 2018 and 2019 argued strongly for this sort of innovation in Federal Government data delivery.
“I see part of my role as kind of being a spokesperson for some of the innovations that are going on in the public service on data,” says Gruen, “and also, obviously, in the ABS.”
Another chapter?
Gruen’s role at the ABS has taken him out of the leadership of Australian policymaking. Might he return to it? Just a few years ago, the idea would have been ridiculous; he is, after all, 68. But as he well knows, the ABS’s life tables show the average ACT-dwelling 68-year-old male now lives into the second half of his 80s. Meanwhile, his dynamic presentation suggests a man with more to contribute. So some people still talk about him as a potential Reserve Bank Governor when Philip Lowe steps down.
“Who knows?” Gruen says of his next role. “I’m continuing to enjoy myself, and health-willing […] you know, Anthony Fauci [former Chief Medical Adviser to the US President] just resigned, retired at 80. So people do go on for quite a long time in this modern world.”
