Documents held by the Australian Bureau of Statistics concerning person-level record linkage in the Multi-Agency Data Integration Project (MADIP) / the ABS "Person Linkage Spine," which integrates…

Written by Claude Haiku 5.5 from the extracted text on 20 Oct 2026. It can miss or misread redacted and scanned pages. Check the source before relying on it.

The release comprises meeting minutes from the Data Integration Oversight Forum (November 2025, June 2024 and others), Methodology Design Committee minutes and agendas (December 2024), a June 2024 presentation titled "Introducing Splink", a Methodology Design Committee paper making the case for updating ABS linkage methods, and the June 2025 Person Linkage Spine methodology paper. The material concerns the Person Linkage Spine, which combines Medicare Consumer Directory, DOMINO Centrelink and Personal Income Tax data. The central decision was replacing the deterministic DMAC tool with the probabilistic Splink package, which the Spine used for the first time in June 2025. Reported results include a Spine of 39.87 million persons, an increase of 0.86 million (2.21 per cent), linkage agreement of about 98 per cent between Splink and DMAC, and a runtime of about 1.5 hours against more than 28 hours for DMAC on the Survey of Income and Housing. Discussion covers year-on-year comparability, bias in the roughly 2 per cent of differing links, and public engagement on social licence, with the Privacy Impact Assessment update flagged. Some passages are redacted.