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 November 25, 2022
This week, CheckMate details why a claim by One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts about a recent "staggering decline" in Australian births doesn't add up.
We also explain why images shared online purporting to be from a Barbecues Galore ad campaign don't cut the mustard, and round up all the claims checked by RMIT ABC Fact Check in the lead-up to tomorrow's Victorian election.
Senator quotes 'incomplete' figures to suggest decline in Australian births
One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts has used Twitter to share a video in which he claims to have identified a "staggering decline" in Australian births, suggesting that this was due to COVID-19 vaccines.
According to the senator, the official data reveals that births fell by a "startling" 70 per cent in December 2021, compared to July.
"Guess what significant event lines up with roughly nine months prior to this data[?]" he tweeted, alluding to the start of Australia's vaccine rollout.
"The government claims I've got my facts wrong but the data is published on the [Australian Bureau of Statistics] website for all to see," Senator Roberts wrote on his website, linking directly to a set of ABS births data.
So, what's going on?
The ABS data cited by Senator Roberts indeed shows that, after an uneventful first 10 months, registrations of births (by date of occurrence) were lower in the last two months of 2021.
Compared with roughly 25,000 births in June and 23,000 in October, it seems there were only 18,000 births in November then just 6,700 in December.
However, that same dataset cautions that these numbers are "incomplete due to [the] lag in registration" of births.
It adds: "This is particularly noticeable in December (and to a smaller extent November) as births in these months are more likely to be registered in the following year."
Indeed, data provided to CheckMate by the ABS shows that its December birth estimates are typically revised upwards — significantly. Between 2018 and 2020, the average increase was 16,500 births.
These updates will not occur until the next annual data release.
And while Senator Roberts pointed to the monthly births data by date of occurrence, the same ABS data release (from October 2022) includes another measure of births, by date of registration.
Viewed this way, the number of births registered in 2021 was almost identical to the five-year, pre-pandemic average (2015-19).
When the ABS released its figures last month, it announced that Australia's fertility rate had "bounce[d] back" after a record low in 2020.
Birth and fertility rates have been a recurring theme in anti-vax misinformation, which CheckMate has addressed in previous editions, including here and here.
The Australian government, along with the Royal Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, continues to advise that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for people who are pregnant or considering pregnancy, and that being pregnant and unvaccinated carries greater risk of severe illness from the disease.
Fact checking the Victorian election
RMIT ABC Fact Check was busy this week tackling various claims ahead of tomorrow's Victorian state election.
First up was Victorian Greens leader Samantha Ratnam, who took to Twitter to claim that, since the introduction of poker machines three decades ago, "Victorians have lost $66b at the pokies, and we're currently on track for record losses this year".
In reality, Fact Check found the correct figure to be even higher.
While official data shows that, in nominal terms, Victorians lost $65.4 billion on the pokies in pubs and clubs since 1992, that amount blew out to $89.7 billion when adjusted for inflation. Further, that data does not include losses incurred at Crown Casino, which houses 10 per cent of the state's poker machines.
However, inflation-adjusted data also shows that losses have been in decline since the early 2000s.
Meanwhile, the Liberals have continued to remind Victorians about the government's handling of the pandemic, including the 262 days Melburnians spent under strict stay-at-home orders.
According to Opposition Leader Matthew Guy, residents endured "the world's longest lockdown", which, his party argued, made Melbourne the "most locked-down city in the world".
But Fact Check found that such claims were not clear cut, given the difficulty in comparing lockdowns in different parts of the world.
Nevertheless, Iquique, in Chile, spent more days locked down in aggregate, suffering through 287 days of stay-at-home restrictions compared with Melbourne's 262.
And Buenos Aires spent 234 consecutive days locked down compared to Melbourne's longest stretch of 111 days.
In the Philippines, certain residents of Manila — including children, seniors and those they lived with — were locked down for more than 450 days, while many of the nation's schools suspended in-person classes for more than two years.
Fact Check also scrutinised arguments over Victoria's "debt disaster", including a claim by Shadow Treasurer David Davis that net debt was "set to increase to $165.9 billion by 2025".
This was not only "the biggest debt of any state in Australia", he said, but also "more than the total of New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania combined".
According to Fact Check, Mr Davis's claim was gilding the lily — as were similar Liberal claims, including that Victoria was "now" $167.5 billion in the red.
Victoria's net debt at June 2022 was just shy of $100 billion. It is not projected to reach $165.9 billion until June 2026, one year beyond Mr Davis's claim.
Nonetheless, Victoria's existing debt sits head and shoulders above any other state or territory in nominal terms. It is also larger than the combined total of NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, and is expected to remain so by 2026.
Considering net debt as a share of the economy, Victoria and the Northern Territory are neck and neck in 2022, with other states still far behind. By 2026, Victoria's debt is projected to be larger than that of any other single state.
Noting the unreliability of the four-year projections, Fact Check concluded that the Liberal Party could have made the same argument sticking to more current figures, rather than reaching for higher numbers which may never come to pass.
Finally, as covered in last week's edition of CheckMate, Fact Check found that a claim made by Victorian Labor that Mr Guy had "cut a billion dollars from health" was "still wrong".
No, Barbecues Galore didn't run an ad campaign with the slogan 'almost as many cookers as the Liberal Party'
A viral series of photos that purports to show an ad campaign from Barbecues Galore suggesting the retail chain has "almost as many cookers as the Liberal Party", is fake, according to the Twitter user who published the images.
The photos were posted to Twitter by Adrian Elton, whose user profile says he is a Melbourne-based designer and musician. They show a number of digital billboards, owned by QMS Media, that feature Barbecues Galore branding, a photo of a barbecue and the slogan apparently poking fun at the Liberal Party.
"Love it when a brand takes a stand!", he tweeted on Monday afternoon. "Spotted all over Melbourne this morning.
"Of course, as they're digital billboards it's hard to know whether or not the system was hacked? But if they're legit, BBQs Galore deserves a mighty salute!"
"Cooker" is Australian slang for "a crazy person", according to Wiktionary, an online dictionary run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs Wikipedia.
The photos were widely shared on Twitter and re-posted to Facebook where users' comments suggest people believed the billboards were genuine. "Well played, Barbeques Galore Australia!," one Facebook post cheered. "Too funny."
Within 24 hours, Mr Elton's tweet had racked up more than 1,000 retweets and attracted 4,500 likes, before he confessed in a tweet that he had created the images using Photoshop.
Barbecues Galore CEO Angus McDonald confirmed the ads were not commissioned by the BBQ retailer.
"We are aware of the parody advertisements circulated yesterday, but I will leave it to the political commentators to give candidates in the upcoming Victorian election a good grilling,'' Mr McDonald told CheckMate.
Mr Elton's confessional tweet said: "Like 'The Cat In The Hat' that cleans up the house after he's had his fun, I just wanted to confess, that I indeed done did it.
"100% apologies to #barbequesgalore — hope you didn't have to deal with any irate cookers!"
His tweet was accompanied by an image of his computer screen showing one of the images open in the Photoshop app.
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell, with thanks to Sonam Thomas
Got a fact that needs checking? Tweet us @ABCFactCheck or send us an email at factcheck@rmit.edu.au
