CheckMate is a weekly newsletter from RMIT FactLab which recaps the latest in the world of fact checking and misinformation, drawing on the work of FactLab and its sister organisation, RMIT ABC Fact Check.
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CheckMate April 8, 2022
This week in CheckMate (formerly CoronaCheck), we take a look at independent MP Bob Katter's claim that "every kid in Australia" was given a rifle in the aftermath of World War II.
We also examine suggestions that Treasurer Josh Frydenberg used an edited image of himself featuring an offensive symbol to garner support, and debunk a claim made by MP Craig Kelly about supposed voter fraud.
Did Bob Katter go off half-cocked?
Independent Queensland MP Bob Katter has a novel idea for protecting Australia from potential foreign threats: give children guns.
In a number of media appearances last week, Mr Katter put forward his plan to arm 13-year-olds, arguing that such a scheme would be reminiscent of his own youth.
"As a kid at 12, I was handed a giant .303 rifle as big as I was at the time," Mr Katter, who was born in 1945, claimed in an interview with Sky News.
"Every kid in Australia had a rifle, and it was in the school armoury."
But Mr Katter's claim misses the mark.
Prior to the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, firearm legislation was controlled by state governments, a number of which restricted gun usage among children long before the 1950s.
New South Wales, for example, banned children under the age of 14 from using guns in the Firearms Act of 1936, as did Mr Katter's home state of Queensland in its Firearms Act of 1905, with the latter extending such restrictions to those aged under 18 in the Firearms License Act of 1927.
Experts confirmed that Mr Katter's assertions were incorrect.
Asked whether every child in Australia would have had a gun in the 1950s and every school an armoury, Philip Alpers, the founding director of GunPolicy.org, answered: "No and no."
Nick Brodie, author of ‘Under Fire: How Australia's violent history led to gun control', told CheckMate there was "no evidence to support the contention that every child had a gun" during the period identified by Mr Katter.
Pointing to the Queensland legislation (listed above), Mr Brodie said that "it was widespread social concerns about children having and misusing firearms which led to these laws in the first place".
He added that while school armouries did exist, they would not have been in every school.
"While schools sometimes had relationships with cadet corps, local rifle clubs, etc, firearms training was not part of the ordinary school curriculum of the 1950s," Mr Brodie explained.
"Occasional gun-safety instruction courses did start to appear during the later 1950s, partly sponsored by arms industry corporations responding to changing public attitudes regarding firearms and their misuse."
'Evidence' of image tampering on Frydenberg photo doesn't stack up
As Treasurer Josh Frydenberg gears up for a serious election battle with independent challenger Monique Ryan, both candidates have had posters in their electorate of Kooyong vandalised with swastikas.
Taking to Twitter to share an image of a billboard on which a swastika had been painted on a photo of his face, Mr Frydenberg, who is Jewish, wrote that the vandalism was "obscene" and "a reminder of a dark past".
In response, some Twitter users suggested the image had been Photoshopped to include the offensive symbol, with a number of widely shared tweets claiming that "pixelation" around the swastika indicated it had been digitally manipulated.
But as misinformation researchers at First Draft discovered, the pixelation, or presence of artefacts, in the image was likely caused by the type of image compression used.
"Frydenberg's photo, posted on Twitter, appears to be a JPEG file," First Draft said, explaining that this meant some of the image content would be selectively reduced, causing sharp contrasts between adjacent pixels to occur.
Similar pixelation could be seen elsewhere in the image, the researchers noted.
"While some have pointed out that the difference in skin tone near the swastika is thus evidence of manipulation, this appears to simply be a characteristic of the JPEG compression."
Meanwhile, the Australian Electoral Commission debunked claims that the photo's EXIF data — which can show when an image has been altered — proved that doctoring had occurred, pointing out that all images uploaded to Twitter were stripped of such metadata.
Craig Kelly revives unfounded voter fraud claim
A claim by United Australia Party leader Craig Kelly that voter fraud might have tipped a result in the 2016 federal election has been rejected by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), which said the seat in question had the fewest potential cases of multiple voting in the country.
During an interview posted to YouTube on March 18, Mr Kelly said the Liberal National Party lost the Queensland seat of Herbert by around 23 votes, but that "there were more than 23 people they found that had multiple-voted".
"So multiple voting could have cost [the sitting MP] his seat," he said, arguing it showed the need for stronger electoral safeguards such as voter ID checks.
But that was not what the Australian Federal Police found when it investigated this allegation in the weeks after the election.
The 2016 result in Herbert hinged on just 37 votes, with the AFP investigating 42 instances of alleged multiple voting.
As the agency told the Senate in 2017: "The AFP determined there was insufficient evidence to identify any breaches of Commonwealth law, and advised the AEC of the outcomes in advance of the due date for the return of writs".
An AEC spokesperson told CheckMate that, prior to contacting the AFP, the commission sent 50 voters an initial notice about potential multiple voting, which was the "smallest number" of such notices sent in any electorate in that election.
Of the 42 flagged for further investigation, 33 were explained by "potential polling place anomalies" such as electoral roll marking errors, the AFP told the Senate.
Of the remaining nine, five were "potentially attributable to voter confusion in the form of identified medical, mental health or language issues".
The AFP found no explanation for the remaining four cases but said "there was no evidence that the individuals had intentionally voted on multiple occasions".
In any event, nine cases would have been insufficient to swing the result either way — even if everyone had voted twice and all for the same candidate.
CoronaCheck: One Nation's COVID-19 'inquiry' rounds up the usual suspects
Last week saw One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts present the results of his "Covid Under Question" event to the Senate in a speech accusing various government bodies — from the federal drugs regulator to the national statistics agency — of a massive coverup in which they allegedly hid the extent of deaths and harm caused by COVID-19 vaccines.
Billed by Senator Roberts' website as a "cross-party inquiry", Covid Under Question was in fact a one-day event purporting to investigate government responses to COVID-19 but featuring many people known for spreading misleading information about the pandemic.
Notably, it was not a parliamentary inquiry, despite being attended by six state and federal parliamentarians from One Nation, the United Australia Party and the Coalition, including George Christensen, Craig Kelly, Senator Alex Antic and Senator Gerard Rennick.
Among those giving evidence was Dr Peter McCullogh, who has wildly claimed that the pandemic was planned, that COVID-19 infection confers "permanent immunity" and that a Queensland vaccine trial "turned everybody in the trial HIV positive".
It also featured at least one member of the World Council for Health, a group whose claims about vaccine harms have been debunked by AAP Fact Check, with one expert describing their evidence as a "garbled mixture of misinformation".
And, of course, unproven COVID-19 treatments received plenty of airtime, with the event featuring, in the words of PolitiFact, "one of the strongest advocates of ivermectin in the US".
It is not the first event to mirror formal democratic or legal inquiries in response to the pandemic.
In recent months, popular videos circulating on Telegram claiming to depict a grand jury trial into "crimes against humanity" have been investigated by fact checkers from AfricaCheck, PolitiFact, Lead Stories and USAToday, all of whom found the group had no legal power.
Scott Morrison misleads on global emissions comparison
As school children gathered in front of Kirribilli House recently to demand further action on climate change, Prime Minister Scott Morrison had a message for them.
"Australia has reduced its emissions by more than New Zealand, by more than Canada, by more than the United States, by more than Japan, by more than many countries in Europe," he said, explaining that Australia was "reducing its emissions by around 20 per cent".
But RMIT ABC Fact Check this week found that claim to be misleading.
Most problematic was Mr Morrison's use of a 2020 figure for Australia ("around 20 per cent"): none of the countries with which he compares Australia have formally submitted 2020 data to the United Nations, which does not enable a fair comparison.
Furthermore, the 2020 figure includes the effect of the pandemic, which experts said contributed to a large drop in emissions worldwide and had little to do with government policy.
If a like-for-like comparison were able to be made using 2020 data for all countries, it is possible Australia would rank worse than the countries Mr Morrison listed.
Indeed, preliminary data for 2020 from the US shows a greater reduction than Australia under these parameters, while 2019 data shows Australia was behind many other countries not named.
Furthermore, the parameters used by Mr Morrison advantage Australia in international comparisons.
Fact checking Labor's budget response
While the Morrison Government used last week's budget to spruik its credentials in the lead up to the election, Labor has responded with attacks on the Coalition's record.
This week, Fact Check took aim at a number of claims from prominent Labor figures.
Opposition Treasurer Jim Chalmers, for example, was found to be incorrect when he told a National Press Club gathering that the government had delivered "the worst set of books ever presented before an election" — debt and deficit in Australia were far larger following both World Wars.
Anthony Albanese, on the other hand, was closer to the mark when he noted that debt had doubled under the Coalition before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Looking to a key election issue, Mr Albanese's claim that the government was responsible for "record low wages growth" was muddied by a lack of consistency in historical records. Data from 1997 onwards, however, did show that wages growth under the current government has been the lowest in recent decades.
Other claims put under the microscope by Fact Check related to inflation and the cost of living.
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell, with thanks to Jack Kerr and Siena O’Kelly.
Got a fact that needs checking? Tweet us @ABCFactCheck or send us an email at factcheck@rmit.edu.au
