Fact-Checking The Fact-Checkers, Part 2

There's a popular saying in the poultry industry (and elsewhere): "don't count your chickens before they're hatched". Andrew Robb, shadow Finance spokesman, and PolitiFact didn't follow that advice, with the inevitable result: egg all over their counting fingers.

PolitiFact bravely asserts: Government revenues are "up 7 per cent" despite the budget deficit. This refers to an email newsletter sent by Robb on 7th May 2013, a week before the Budget. The figures in the email were based on the data contained in the 2012-13 Budget Papers, specifically Statement 10: Historical Australian Government Data (Table 2).

This stated that taxation receipts were estimated to be $309.7 billion in 2011-12 and $343.1 billion in 2012-13, in other words an increase of 10.8%. (Or "around 11%", according to their decimal-place-hating calculator.) PolitiFact then adjusted the latter figure downward by $12 billion to take into account the then-current guesstimate of the revenue shortfall.

So they got a revised figure $331.1 billion, which represents a 6.9% increase. (Near enough to 7%, I guess. What's 0.1% here or there? About $300 million in this context, but hey - it's not real money!)

The problem was that as of 7th May 2013, the date of Robb's newsletter, he was working with old figures: the estimates from the 2012-13 Budget delivered on 8th May 2012. And some plucked-from-whichever-orifice guess at how much the revenue shortfall had been in the meantime.

So... fast-forward a week to yer actual 2013-14 Budget delivered last night, 14th May 2013. This year's model of Statement 10: Historical Australian Government Data (Table 2) is presented. It shows that actual taxation receipts in 2011-12 were $309.9 billion, and they were estimated to be $326.3 billion in 2012-13.

That's a 5.3% increase - and a shortfall of $16.8 billion compared to the 2012-13 Budget estimate. In other words, 40% more than the $12 billion pick-a-number-any-number.

When you're a week out from the Budget, why not just wait until the actual numbers are right in front of you? It saves cleaning up all that messy yolk afterwards.

5.3/7.0 = 75.7%, so I rate PolitiFact's article "75.7% true".

Who Fact-Checks The Fact-Checkers?

So now there is an Australian version of the PolitiFact website. Unfortunately they seem to have gotten off to a shaky start.

Here's their first article. It questions a claim made on a page on the Labor Party's website that

Labor has delivered strong protections for conditions like overtime and penalty rates that can’t be stripped away.

The claim that those conditions "can't be stripped away" is false. Laws can and do get created, modified and repealed all the time. It's what Parliaments do for a living. So, for stating a bald fact at least, PolitiFact gets one point.

That was the first of three links on PolitiFact's page. The second links to a media release from August 2011 by Senator Chris Evans, the then-Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Jobs and Workplace Relations. From it, they quote the following:

The Labor Government introduced National Employment Standards and modern awards that can’t be stripped away, including penalty rates for working weekends, late nights, public holidays and overtime pay.

So far, so good. Now we know where the "can't be stripped away" claim comes from. However, in the next paragraph Evans says:

Tony Abbott has a simple choice: he must either immediately rule out any changes to National Employment Standards and modern awards or admit that the Coalition’s policy is in fact to allow basic entitlements like penalty rates to be cut.

That paragraph contradicts the preceding one. It implies that the entitlements can be stripped away by, for example, a suitably villainous conservative government.

So which is worse: Evans' contradiction, or PolitiFact quoting him out of context by omitting the second paragraph? Weighing up the former against the latter, I'm awarding them half a point.

Then it gets worse. The third and last link is to a speech made by Dave Oliver to the National Press Club on 6th February 2013. PolitiFact reports him as saying:

The Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary, Dave Oliver, declared weekend penalty rates were locked in "forever".

Err, nooo, he didn't say that at all. What he said was:

That’s why we’ll be asking the government to enshrine penalty rates for weekend work - in legislation, to protect it forever.

That is flat-out misrepresentation. Deliberate or accidental, I don't know - but it was either ignored or missed by whatever internal fact-checking system PolitiFact have in place.

Giving them the benefit of a doubt and assuming it wasn't intentional, I'll deduct just half a point. With a bonus stern wag of the finger and an admonishment for not checking, well, their facts.

So, with a final score of 1/3 I'm awarding them a 'Whooops!'.

 

Why does Labor keep shooting itself in the foot like this?

(First, a disclaimer: I am a former Labor voter who now votes for the Greens. I'm not entirely happy about this, but Labor has drifted so far to the conservative side on issues such as asylum seekers that I find it difficult to support them directly.)

On to the issue du jour: Sam Dastyari's latest gaffe in relation to Labor's dealings with the Greens.

It bugs me severely that someone like Dastyari is so out of touch with what is going on in Australian politics. I mean: branding the Greens as "an extremist party, not unlike a left-wing version of Pauline Hanson's One Nation"? Shirley you can't be serious!

Now, ignoring the use of an emotive term like "extremist", I understand the parallel Dastyari is trying to make. The Greens have pulled votes away from Labor on the progressive side in much the same way as One Nation pulled votes away from the Coalition on the conservative side. And it's true that Tony Abbott won back the One Nation voters for the Coalition with a very effective hatchet job.

But the Coalition also accommodated One Nation by adopting some of their policies in modified form, leading to things like the so-called Pacific Solution. My suggestion to Labor is that if they want to win back some Greens voters, they should try to find an accommodation between their policies and those of the Greens - and ease up on the shrieking about "extremist".

Anyhow, back to the issue at hand:

Senator Milne yesterday responded to Mr Dastyari's accusations of extremism in her party by accusing Labor of aligning themselves with the real extremists by preferencing Family First ahead of the Greens.

Labor preferencing Family First ahead of the Greens - that always works out well, doesn't it? Two words: Steve Fielding. Geesh; don't they ever learn?

Further along in the article, David Bradbury is quoted as saying:

I didn't receive any preferences from the Greens at the last election [...]

That is just flat-out wrong, as a glance at the distribution of preferences for his seat at the 2010 election shows. The Greens candidate's preferences flowed to him by a ratio of 2:1 compared to the Liberal candidate. In other words those preferences made the difference between his winning the seat by 45 votes, or 0.05%, and winning it by 1865 votes, or 2.24%.

Labor's antipathy towards the Greens - I just don't get it. They'll never be part of a formal coalition with Labor, but they're the closest thing Labor will ever have to allies in the various Parliaments across the land.

Bob Brown has stated: "We don’t want to keep the bastards honest, we want to replace them." In my opinion this would be a good thing in principle, but not in practice. Given the essentially two-party nature of Australian politics, it would require a major shakeout of our system - the creation of a proper social-democratic party, as Labor used to be, comprising the Greens and the more progressive elements of Labor as it currently stands.

Unfortunately this would leave the conservative, mainly Catholic, Labor Right faction as a rump similar to the DLP (Democratic Labor Party, remember?) in the 1950s. That had the effect of keeping Labor out of government at the Federal level for nearly twenty years. With Tony Abbott, who is no Bob Menzies, waiting in the wings to be Prime Minister - no, my suggestion isn't a good idea. For now, anyway.

So, Labor, how about a bit of good old-fashioned compromise with the Greens? Please?

End of rant.

Update. I'm guessing that what Bradbury was trying to say was that the Greens candidate didn't explicitly direct her preferences to him. That is rather different from "I didn't receive any preferences from the Greens at the last election". Whatever: the fact remains that he got 66.4% of the Greens' preferences - without the Greens directing their voters to cast their votes that way.