Australia (AU) — internal licensing notes

Not mentioned in datahub-next#941 — no known licensing flag on this country, but note issue #941 §4 separately requires an attribution string for G-NAF-sourced data (see below — not yet confirmed shipping). Source: matthewproctor.com/australian_postcodes (community, public domain) — itself an aggregation of Australia Post postcodes + ABS Local Government Area codes + Geoscape G-NAF coordinates. Chosen over Australia Post's own file (commercial-licensed, not redistributable) and plain G-NAF alone (no LGA tier).

Attribution string issue #941 requires if G-NAF is used (not verified shipping on this product):

Incorporates or developed using G-NAF © Geoscape Australia licensed by
the Commonwealth of Australia under the Open Geo-coded National Address
File (G-NAF) End User Licence Agreement.

Plus the EULA restriction that addresses must not be used to generate mailing lists unless each is verified deliverable via a secondary source.

Session finding, 2026-08-19 — reconstructed from nothing

No build script for AU survived anywhere — a prior source-research note said it was "Built in custom_au/", but that folder doesn't exist on disk and was never committed to git in either repo touched this session. Only the final delivery output survived. Reconstructed fetch_source.py + build_base.py by comparing rebuilt output against that survivor field-for-field until it matched. Self-contained — no external repo dependency, pure relative paths.

Verified: exact row count match (3,175/3,175 — grouping the 18,559-row raw source by postcode yields exactly 3,175 groups). 4 of 5 spot-checked rows byte-identical; the 5th differs only because the upstream community source has since updated which locality sorts first for that postcode — not a logic bug, the source is individually-dated per row and drifts over time. Not guaranteed byte-identical long-term given the source's live nature.

No licensing review of the G-NAF attribution requirement was performed — flagging it here since it surfaced in the same audit (datahub-next#941 §4) that covers this product.

CLOSED — 2026-08-24

Confirmed the attribution string above matches the official "Adapted Material" wording verbatim (verified via WebSearch against data.gov.au's published preferred-attribution text — WebFetch to the primary EULA PDF returned 403, so the mailing-list restriction text below is a paraphrase of the confirmed substance, not a verbatim quote). Two live defects found and fixed by hand (no committed script builds these files — see scripts/README.md):

1. datapackage.json declared licenses: [CC-BY-4.0]. Wrong — G-NAF is licensed under the bespoke G-NAF EULA, not a Creative Commons licence. Relabelling it CC-BY-4.0 drops the attribution wording and the mailing-list restriction entirely. Corrected to custom:g-naf-eula + custom:public-domain (community LGA/PO-box fill).
2. datapackage.json also carried a sources array — forbidden by this project's standing directive (source attribution belongs in ATTRIBUTION.txt and the README only). Stripped.

Added au/README.md "Sources and licence" section and standalone au/ATTRIBUTION.txt (now in R2 and inside au.zip) carrying: the verified G-NAF Adapted-Material attribution string, the paraphrased mailing-list restriction, and public-domain credit to Matthew Proctor for the community fill layer. _meta/catalog.json's AU entry rebuilt to include ATTRIBUTION.txt.

CORRECTION — 2026-10-06 (pc-9qt): no G-NAF content

The G-NAF lineage above is wrong. It came from an unverified source-research note.

• matthewproctor.com/australian_postcodes doesn't mention G-NAF, Geoscape or PSMA. Its lat/long are "the points provided in the Australia Post database, and those derived from adjacent postcodes". Its Lat_precise/Long_precise come from the Google Maps API (2020/21).
• The live au.csv (3,175 rows) was compared with the current Proctor CSV.
  • All 3,172 rows that have coordinates match Proctor's plain lat/long within 0.001°. Only 160 match the Google columns, which coincide there.
  • LGA name and code match on all 3,172 rows, and so does place_name.
• So the G-NAF EULA attribution and the mail-use restriction don't apply. The licence is now CC-BY-4.0 for the ABS LGA component, attributed with ABS's wording for derived material ("Based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data"). Proctor's postcode list is credited as public domain.
• The R2 copy still carries the 2026-08-24 G-NAF ATTRIBUTION.txt. Nothing is uploaded before the SST merge.
• Proctor attributes its coordinates to Australia Post's database, and Australia Post's own file is commercially licensed. User decision 2026-10-06 (pc-93s): accept Proctor's public-domain position. Coordinates stay as they are, and no Australia Post attribution or licence is added.