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 22, 2022
Good morning,
In this week's CheckMate, we investigate whether the prime minister broke an election promise by failing to establish a federal anti-corruption commission during the just-ended parliamentary term.
We also look at whether Ukraine is really one of the world's richest nations, and debunk a claim by United Australia Party leader Craig Kelly that the government's vaccine advisory panel is recommending vaccines be administered "opportunistically" to sedated patients.
Plus, we round up the latest fact checks of the week, including those stemming from Wednesday's leaders debate.
Did the Coalition break its promise to establish a corruption watchdog?
During a campaign stop last week in Launceston, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was challenged on his record of delivering promises made during the 2019 election campaign.
Asked if his failure to establish a federal anti-corruption body amounted to a broken promise, Mr Morrison responded: "Well, no. It's not."
"I have honoured my proposal," he said, arguing the issue lay not with the government but with a lack of "bipartisan support" from Labor.
"We put forward our proposal in detailed legislation and it has not been supported by the Labor Party," he added.
But the evidence suggests that Mr Morrison did break his promise.
Roughly five months before the May 2019 election, the Coalition issued a statement promising to establish a "well-resourced, centralised and specialist centre that will investigate criminal corruption across the Commonwealth".
It then used its pre-election April budget to commit "$104.5 million over four years from 2019-20 … to establish a Commonwealth Integrity Commission", which a footnote in budget paper 4 said would be created "as a new entity commencing 1 January 2020".
However, by November 2020 the government had released only a draft bill to create the new agency, and that bill never made it to parliament.
As for Mr Morrison blaming Labor for its lack of support, that's not the full story.
The Coalition held a majority in the lower house throughout the last term of parliament, meaning it could have passed bills in that house without Labor's support. In the upper house, it had to find an extra three votes.
Certainly, those could have come from Labor's 26 senators but, equally, they could have come from any of the 14 Greens and other crossbench senators.
Notably, Labor supports the creation of an anti-corruption commission but with greater powers than those proposed by the Coalition. The shortcomings of the Coalition's proposed model were explored in an article published by RMIT ABC Fact Check.
In the Senate in November 2021, Labor, the Greens and every member of the crossbench except for One Nation (whose senators were absent) voted in favour of an independent bill to establish a federal integrity commission. However, the legislation was blocked by the Coalition.
In the lower house, the entire crossbench, Labor and the Greens also voted in favour of debating an identical bill, but that motion was defeated too, despite Tasmanian Liberal MP Bridget Archer crossing the floor to support it.
Is Ukraine one of the world's richest nations?
Back in the upper house, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts' description of Ukraine as "one of the richest countries in the world" is at odds with data from the World Bank, CheckMate has found.
Senator Roberts made the remark at the end of a speech on April 1 in which he urged his colleagues "to question what we're being told" about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and promoted a "different perspective" or "third view" on the war.
"So I'd just ask people to question. I question how the Ukraine — I'm told by [Greens] Senator Steele-John — is $129 billion in debt to the IMF, when it's one of the richest countries in the world," Senator Roberts said in the speech, which he posted online and shared to his Facebook page.
"How is that possible? So I ask questions, and I take a third view."
But that assertion is not correct.
The World Bank considers Ukraine a "lower middle income" country.
In 2020, it recorded a national GDP of around $US155 billion, placing it at number 54 on that year's global GDP rankings — two places ahead of Qatar but a number of spots behind Bangladesh and the Philippines.
However, as John Tang, an associate professor of economics at the University of Melbourne, told CheckMate, economists often preferred to use per capita measures to assess the wealth of a country.
On a per capita basis, Ukraine's GDP falls well below the World Bank's "high income" threshold, and is also below the GDP per capita for countries such as El Salvador, Mongolia and Samoa.
"Ukraine is $US3,725 in 2020, which puts it in the lower-middle income category," Dr Tang explained.
"The war has definitely lowered that but it's unclear by how much."
Leaders' debate round one: here are the facts
Scott Morrison went head-to-head with his Labor opponent, Anthony Albanese, in the first televised debate of the election campaign this week, and RMIT ABC Fact Check was ringside to sort fact from fiction.
Fact Check found, for instance, that Mr Albanese's suggestion that "the cost of everything is going up but your wages aren't" was only partly correct: real wages are falling, but so too are some costs, such as healthcare, communication and clothing and footwear.
Mr Morrison, on the other hand, was found to be comparing apples to oranges when he said that the pandemic-induced economic downturn was "30 times worse than the GFC".
Experts have previously noted that such a claim was "confusing, misleading and most likely wrong".
Fact Check also scrutinised claims about asylum seeker deaths at sea, government debt, the federal integrity commission and COVID-19 vaccines in Fiji.
Fact checking Shadow Defence Minister Brendan O'Connor on defence spending
With increased instability in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, defence spending has become an election issue.
Questioned on ABC TV's Insiders about Labor's defence spending during its last term in government, Shadow Defence Minister Brendan O'Connor claimed it was similar to that of the Howard government.
"But let's be clear — and I think it does matter, the facts do matter — that when we compare the Howard years with the Rudd-Gillard years, both … governments spent 1.7 per cent to 1.8 per cent of GDP on average," he said.
RMIT ABC Fact Check this week found that to be a fair call.
Fact Check extracted defence spending figures from the Defence Portfolio Estimates Statements and Defence Annual Reports.
The figures showed the Howard government spent an annual average of 1.77 per cent of GDP on defence, compared with 1.72 per cent for the Rudd-Gillard government.
CoronaCheck
No, Craig Kelly, the health advice is clear: sedatives should not be used to enforce vaccination
United Australia Party leader Craig Kelly spent his Easter holidays campaigning for re-election with a pitch to voters that mischaracterises official information related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.
In a video posted to YouTube on April 18 and shared across other social media platforms, Mr Kelly set his sights on an advice sheet published by the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) about the "use of sedation for COVID-19 vaccination".
He took aim at one sentence in particular, which he said indicated "the future that you'll face" should a Labor or Liberal government be elected on May 21.
"Vaccines may also be administered opportunistically while patients are undergoing sedation for unrelated procedures," the advice reads.
By Mr Kelly's reckoning, that flies in the face of free and informed consent, and constitutes a "direct violation of the universal declaration of bioethics".
It could even mean "a fourth, a fifth, a sixth booster shot will be administered to you opportunistically", he added.
However, Mr Kelly's suggestion that sedatives could be substituted for consent misrepresents ATAGI's advice, which explicitly states that sedation "should not be used as a measure to enforce compliance with vaccination requirements".
"Informed consent must be obtained prior to each dose from the patient themselves, or, where the patient does not have capacity to give consent, from the parent, guardian or substitute decision-maker," it reads.
Indeed, the purpose of the advice is to help clinicians administer a jab in such cases where someone has "severe anxiety or needle-phobia and developmental or behavioural disorders" — and even then only after other options have been exhausted.
In this context, "opportunistic" vaccination means injecting a patient who has already given their consent and is then under sedation for a separate medical procedure, thus avoiding "the need for a separate episode of sedation", the document explains.
Mr Kelly went on to falsely claim Queensland Chief Health Officer John Gerrard had revoked his state's ban on the prescription of the drug hydroxychloroquine in order to contain the spread of COVID-19 in the community, supposedly because the evidence for its effectiveness against the disease was "now overwhelming".
But when UAP Chairman Clive Palmer made that same claim, RMIT ABC Fact Check found that it misrepresented the reasoning behind the change.
As Dr Gerrard explained, the ban was lifted because supply constraints no longer existed, not because the drug should be used to treat COVID-19 (which, he added, the scientific evidence did not support).
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell, with thanks to Jack Kerr.
Got a fact that needs checking? Tweet us @ABCFactCheck or send us an email at factcheck@rmit.edu.au
