Budget speeches are prone to flourishes and embellishment. Treasurers are always keen to spruik the achievements of the government, especially with an election pending.
But with so many figures flying at you in a single evening, it's difficult to sort fact from spin.
And so it was with Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's budget speech on Tuesday night. Using statistics, Mr Frydenberg sought to present the government's record in the best possible light ahead of an election.
But some of his claims were lacking the critical context you need to interpret them.
The Treasurer's time travelling trick
There's a devil in the detail which allows politicians to make their spending records look larger than they really are.
The trick is inflation. Put simply, the cost of goods and services rises over time, and that devalues the worth of money the government is spending.
Take for example, Mr Frydenberg's claim about aged-care spending:
Indeed, in nominal terms, this accords with estimates in the budget papers for spending on aged care, which Fact Check takes to include residential care, home care and veterans' care (among other things) but to exclude spending on the aged pension, some concessions and other forms of income support.
In Labor's last full year in office, 2012-13, estimates of this spending were $13,693 million. By 2020-21, it had doubled to $26,979 million.
But in 2020-21 dollars, Labor's last year of spending is actually $15,738 million; the Coalition's most recent estimate is only 1.71 times larger.
And health care costs should also take account of another figure that rises over time: population. The number of people using aged-care services has increased markedly.
Fact Check could not find a consistent series on federal government spending per aged-care resident per day going back to Labor's last year, but between 2014-15 and 2019-20, it rose from $163.77 to $196.29, an increase of 19.9 per cent.
Once again, accounting for inflation, spending in 2014-15 equalled $177.30; the government's funding per resident per day in 2019-20 is only 1.1 times larger than this figure.
Given this, it's unlikely the government has doubled real spending per aged care resident per day between Labor's last year in office and the present.
Analysing apprenticeships
This same dynamic was on display when Mr Frydenberg made this claim about trade apprentices:
Putting aside the fact that apprentice numbers have been significantly boosted by temporary pandemic-era wage subsidies since 2020 — having previously fallen by 27,000 over the first seven years of the Coalition — this boast fails to account for six decades of population growth.
As Fact Check has previously explained, a fair comparison of apprentices over time requires that the numbers be expressed as rates: for example, as a share of the employed population or of the working age population (aged 15-64).
Viewed this way, Mr Frydenberg's claim to record "levels" doesn't stack up.
In 2021, apprentices made up 1.6 per cent of the employed population compared to a peak of 2.3 per cent in 1982. And they made up 1.3 per cent of the working age population compared to 1.5 per cent in 1974.
Rates were also lower under the Coalition compared with every year under the last Labor government, despite September 2021 data showing there were indeed 218,500 trade apprentices in training, around 3,000 higher than the previous 2012 peak.
Pharmaceutical benefits
Large numbers, like those in Mr Frydenberg's trade apprentices claim, often seem impressive but are less so when held up to further scrutiny. And so it was with the Treasurer's claim on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme:
The Treasurer's claim was met with some scepticism by medical experts contacted by RMIT ABC Fact Check, with the consensus that new listings were far outweighed by amended ones.
"Simply put the number reflects a range of changes that is made to PBS listings, only some of which reflect new innovative drug listings," said the director of the Menzies Centre for Health Policy at the University of Sydney, Andrew Wilson.
Those changes can include everything from price cuts to new methods of administering a drug, experts said, while a medicine approved for multiple uses would also have multiple entries on the PBS register — and its approval for more uses would expand this further.
"The claim relies on the fact a single medicine can have literally dozens of PBS item numbers," said Paul Cross, a former ministerial advisor under the Howard Government.
While all the amendments were important, he said that counting them all as individual listings "does exaggerate the government's performance because the industry simply does not produce a new medicine every day".
Professor Wilson said: "It has been an extraordinary period of growth in truly innovative medicines, many very costly, and new listings on the PBS reflect these, but these still remain the minority of new listings on the PBS."
Bulk-billing rates
Even when a rate is used in lieu of a raw figure, extra information is sometimes needed to aid interpretation.
Mr Frydenberg's claim that "bulk-billing rates are at a record high," is another area where his numbers match up with reality, but might not mean what you think they do.
Mr Frydenberg did not specify whether this claim related to bulk-billing rates for all Medicare services, or just for GP visits (which government ministers have referred to in the past when making similar claims). Nonetheless, on both measures, the rates are at a record high.
However, it's important to note that an increase in bulk-billing rates does not necessarily mean more people are seeing their GP, or receiving other healthcare services, for free.
According to the Royal Australian College of GPs' 2020 Health of the Nation Report, a single GP visit may see a patient bulk-billed for some services but not others, skewing the figures.
Additionally, experts have previously explained to Fact Check that some groups of people are more likely to be bulk-billed, such as concession card holders, visit the GP more often than those who aren't bulk-billed. This means that the rate of bulk-billed services does not directly translate to the bulk-billing rate for individuals.
The Health of the Nation Report noted that in 2018-19, 86 per cent of GP services were bulk-billed, but only 66 per cent of patients had all their GP services bulk-billed.
Does Labor really tax more?
Eager to attack the Opposition's economic credentials, Mr Frydenberg used his speech to argue that "[w]hen Labor starts spending, they simply can't stop".
However, the historical tax-to-GDP data contained in the budget — which measures the Commonwealth tax take as a share of the economy — tells a different story.
Over the past 30 years, taxes have been higher on average under Coalition governments.
Under the last Labor government, the average tax-to-GDP ratio was 21.3 per cent, which was lower than the current government's 22.1 per cent, recorded over the eight years to June 2021. That ratio becomes 22.2 per cent if the government's estimate for the financial year about to end is included.
Is Job-ready up to the job?
The Treasurer claimed there were:
But how does it stack up?
This claim aligns with a promise made by the Government all the way back in 2020 when it introduced its Job-ready Graduates package, which resulted in a shake-up of university funding.
But while the Government has repeatedly claimed that the package would result in 30,000 new Commonwealth-supported university places in 2021, there is no publicly available data confirming that this did indeed happen (the latest data on university places, published in February, relates to 2020).
In fact, an analysis by higher education funding policy expert Mark Warburton in September last year found that the package hadn't "provided the level of subsidy over the next several years to create the promised extra student places to support Australia's economic recovery".
Mr Warburton said that the government had "not delivered on its [Job-ready Graduates] rhetoric" which he labelled as "hollow".
"If successful… this policy would increase the average cost of subsidy per place," he wrote in the Conversation.
"And that would reduce the number of subsidised places that universities could provide within their maximum subsidy level."
Jobs for women
A key theme in Mr Frydenberg's speech was that the Coalition's economic plan was delivering for the economic security of Australian women.
Experts told Fact Check this statement lacked important context.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has been publishing monthly labour force figures since February 1978, including workforce participation rates and the unemployment rate. The experts said this was the most authoritative source to assess Mr Frydenberg's claim and recommended using seasonally adjusted figures.
In 1974, the year nominated by Mr Frydenberg, the bureau published quarterly seasonally adjusted figures.
In a media release accompanying the most recent figures, for February 2022, the ABS noted that the seasonally adjusted female workforce participation rate of 62.4 per cent was the highest on record.
It said the 3.8 per cent unemployment rate for women was the lowest since May 1974.
The ABS data shows that when the Coalition took office in September 2013, female participation in the workforce was at 58.7 per cent. Meanwhile, male participation was at 71.2 per cent. Male participation has since fallen to 70.7 per cent.
Between September 2013 and February 2022, the female unemployment rate dropped from 5.7 per cent to 3.8 per cent.
Over the Coalition's term, the male unemployment rate also decreased from 5.7 per cent to 4.2 per cent.
But as the numbers published by the ABS include both part-time and full-time work, academic dean and professor of economics at the Griffith Business School, Fabrizio Carmignani, said it was important to distinguish between those who opted to work part-time by choice, or because they were unable to find work.
To account for this factor, the ABS also publishes an "underemployment rate" that refers to the proportion of people that had some employment but sought more.
On this basis, female underemployment also improved over the Coalition's term, but recorded a less impressive drop from 9.5 per cent in September 2013 to 7.9 per cent in February 2022. Meanwhile, the rate for males dropped from 5.7 per cent to 5.3 per cent.
In his speech, Mr Frydenberg attributed gains in female employment to the policies of the Coalition, telling parliament there were "more women in work than ever before" and that "this is not luck. Our economic plan is working".
But can the Coalition really take credit?
Associate professor at the Australian National University's Centre for Social Research and Methods Ben Phillips told Fact Check that while government policy had some influence on job creation, there were also many other external factors outside of government control that contributed to a rise in employment generally.
"Most of [the increase in employment] is out of control of the Government. The Government helps set up the environment and the general conditions," he said. "But beyond that, there are very large global forces at play beyond the reach of government — a lot of it of course is really driven by the private sector and how well they operate and how productive they are and the business cycle."
Furthermore, Dr Phillips observed the rise in female participation in the workforce was part of "long-term ongoing trends that have been going on since about the 1960s" beyond the government of the day.
While government policies relating to education and childcare can help to encourage women to enter the workforce, there were also broader long term societal changes at play — such as the changing role of women as the primary caregivers of children, he said.
Lastly, there is the impact of COVID-19 on the economy to consider.
While unemployment initially spiked following the imposition of restrictions beginning in early 2020, many of the gains in female employment have occurred under a unique set of circumstances of unprecedented government stimulus and closed borders.
As for border closures, contrary to some claims otherwise, a recent analysis undertaken by the Grattan Institute shows the closure of borders, and in turn, the annual flow of migrant workers had little impact.
However, it also showed that economic stimulus in response to COVID-19 from both the Government and the Reserve Bank of Australia was the most important factor in driving economic growth and boosting employment.
Principal researchers: Matt Martino, David Campbell, Ellen McCutchan, Jack Kerr and Sonam Thomas
