A data-sharing scheme that allows government departments to share information about Australians with other departments and with universities will not lead to a repeat of the robo-debt disaster, the commissioner overseeing the new scheme has said.

Australia’s National Data Commissioner, Gayle Milnes, said the robo-debt automated welfare-overpayment recovery scheme, that involved the Australian Taxation Office sharing data with Centrelink, had raised so much public concern that it led to numerous safeguards in the new data sharing scheme, including that all shared data must remain anonymised and “can never be used for compliance purposes”.