David Wayne Kalisch (born 9 August 1960) is an Australian economist and public servant. From 2014 to 2019, he was the

Australian Statistician The Australian Statistician is the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. On 18 June 1906, the first ''Statistician of the Commonwealth of Australia'' was appointed to carry out the provisions of the ''Census and Statistics Act 1905''. Later ...

in charge of the

Australian Bureau of Statistics The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is the independent statutory agency of the Australian Government responsible for statistical collection and analysis and for giving evidence-based advice to federal, state and territory governments ...

(ABS).

Early life and education

Kalisch was born in

Adelaide Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...

, South Australia, and was educated at Brighton High School before studying for a Bachelor of Economics degree at the

University of Adelaide The University of Adelaide (informally Adelaide University) is a public research university located in Adelaide, South Australia. Established in 1874, it is the third-oldest university in Australia. The university's main campus is located on N ...

.''Who's Who in Australia 2016'', ConnectWeb.

Public service

Kalisch joined the

Australian Public Service The Australian Public Service (APS) is the federal civil service of the Commonwealth of Australia responsible for the public administration, public policy, and public services of the departments and executive and statutory agencies of the G ...

in 1982, holding various positions including senior executive roles from 1991. In 2006, he was appointed Deputy Secretary of the

Department of Health and Ageing The Australian Federal Department of Health and Ageing was an Government of Australia, Australian government Government department, department that existed between November 2001 and September 2013. The department was created after th ...

. From 2009 to 2010, he served as a commissioner on the

Productivity Commission The Productivity Commission is the Australian Government's principal review and advisory body on microeconomic policy, regulation and a range of other social and environmental issues. The Productivity Commission was created as an independent ...

. In 2010, he was appointed as chief executive officer of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a statutory agency responsible for gathering statistics on health and welfare in Australia. Following his term as Australian Statistician, Kalisch continues to contribute to public service as a consultant undertaking a range of work for public service agencies.

Australian statistician

In December 2014, Kalisch was appointed as the

, the senior bureaucrat in charge of the national statistics agency, the

. The position had been vacant for nearly a year when Kalisch's appointment was confirmed by Treasurer

Joe Hockey Joseph Benedict Hockey (born 2 August 1965) is a former Australian politician and diplomat. He was the Member of Parliament for North Sydney from 1996 until 2015. He was the Treasurer of Australia in the Abbott Government from 18 September 2 ...

. In February 2015, Kalisch spoke to ''The Australian'' newspaper, where he stated that the ABS needed more funding to upgrade its computer systems and software. While lobbying the federal government for the funds, he also outlined the possibility of charging businesses for statistical data, and developing data linkages between the

census A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses incl ...

or social statistical surveys, and government data such as benefits, Medicare and taxation records. In December 2015, the ABS announced it would be retaining names and addresses from the census indefinitely "for the purpose of richer and more-dynamic statistics". Former Australian Statistician

Bill McLennan William Patrick McLennan (26 January 1942 – 19 March 2022) was an Australian statistician who was Director of the Central Statistical Office (CSO) of the United Kingdom and Australian Statistician, head of the Australian Bureau of Statistic ...

called the decision "the most significant invasion of privacy ever perpetrated on Australians by the ABS", and questioned the legality of enforcing name collection. Kalisch wrote an opinion column in Fairfax newspapers, saying he had made the decision to enable the ABS to produce better statistics on economic and social outcomes. David Kalisch led the ABS' efforts to improve its gender diversity, almost doubling the number of female senior leaders in a few months and became a Male Champion of Change (to support gender equality) in 2016. On the night of the census, 9 August 2016, the census website was taken down and was not restored for nearly two days. Kalisch apologised on behalf of the Bureau for the outage, stating that the site had been subject to a "malicious"

denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

and had been taken down to prevent exfiltration of census data. Later investigations revealed a misconfigured Internet router that had not been tested was the underlying cause, and that no data had been stolen. IBM paid significant compensation for its role in the outage As Australian Statistician, on 15 November 2017 Kalisch announced the result of the

Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey The Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey was a national survey designed to gauge support for legalising same-sex marriage in Australia. The survey was held via the postal service between 12 September and 7 November 2017. Unlike voting in ...

which had been conducted by the ABS. The innovative approach taken including learnings from the 2016 Census lead the ABS to win the 2018 IPAA ACT Citizen-Centred Innovation Award and be named a finalist in the Prime Minister's Excellence awards for the Postal Survey. At the end of his term on Thursday 28 November IPAA ACT hosted an event where Kalisch delivered a keynote presentation called Leadership Learnings from the ABS: The Lows, The Highs and Everything in Between. Kalisch was elected Fellow of the

Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) is an independent, non-governmental organisation devoted to the advancement of knowledge and research in the social sciences. It has its origins in the Social Science Research Council of Austr ...

in November 2021 together with 36 others including the medical historian

Catharine Coleborne Catharine Coleborne (born 27 October 1967) is an Australian medical historian and academic administrator. She is the Head of School and Dean of Arts at the University of Newcastle and a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. ...

Nisvan Erkal Nisvan Erkal FASSA is an economist of Turkish-Australian nationality. She is a professor of economics at the University of Melbourne and she is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Erkal has studied a range of subjects inc ...

, the linguist

I Wayan Arka I Wayan Arka (born 1962) is an Indonesian-Balinese linguist, lecturer, scholar and researcher at Udayana University (UNUD) in Bali, Indonesia and the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. Arka completed his Bachelor of ...

, and the anthropologist Lyn Parker.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kalisch, David 1960 births Living people Australian economists Australian public servants University of Adelaide alumni Fellows of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia