CheckMate is a weekly e-newsletter from RMIT FactLab which recaps the newest in the world of truth checking and misinformation, drawing on the work of FactLab and its sister organisation, RMIT ABC Fact Check.
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CheckMate May 13, 2022
In this week’s version of CheckMate, we convey you an investigation into the forces behind Advance Australia, the conservative lobby group going after impartial ACT candidate David Pocock.
We additionally examine in with Mosaic, FactLab’s election misinformation monitoring crew, and share the stats on voter fraud in Australia.
Why does not Advance Australia like former Wallabies captain David Pocock?
Conservative lobby group Advance Australia has impartial ACT Senate candidate David Pocock in its sights, with Facebook promoting information revealing that the group’s offensive towards the former rugby star is disproportionate to its campaigning towards another candidate.
Advance Australia made waves early in the election with cellular billboards depicting Chinese President Xi Jinping casting a vote for Labor, and though the group often assaults Labor and the Greens, it describes itself as “an independent movement that lives for mainstream Australia” that’s not aligned to any political occasion.
The group has type with regards to misinformation, with South Australia’s electoral commissioner not too long ago discovering the group had breached the state’s electoral legal guidelines by publishing “misleading and inaccurate” materials, which stays on-line.
The evaluation by FactLab’s Mosaic crew, which drew on information compiled by Queensland University of Technology’s PoliDashboard, found that in March and April the group ran 88 “unique ads” concentrating on voters particularly states and territories.
Canberrans have been on the receiving finish of twenty-two of these (25 per cent), all of which attacked Mr Pocock both alone or alongside different candidates.
To put that in context, Queenslanders have been focused with 16 adverts (18 per cent) and all have been about nationwide points. Meanwhile, only one different candidate was singled out in extremely geo-targeted materials: impartial MP Zali Steggall, who featured in 4 of the 19 adverts concentrating on NSW voters, or roughly 5 per cent of the whole sponsored by Advance Australia.
Unique adverts refers to the ads’ distinct budgets, and it’s doable for adverts with equivalent content material to depend as a number of distinctive adverts.
Advance Australia has run quite a few adverts — on-line and offline — depicting Mr Pocock as an undercover Greens candidate, sowing confusion about his political affiliation and echoing a theme widespread to its current campaigns: that voters aren’t being informed the full story.
So, why goal Mr Pocock?
Policies apart, the impartial is working for one in every of the ACT’s two senate seats, one held by Labor and the different by the Minister for International Development and the Pacific, Zed Seselja, a Liberal who opinion polls recommend is preventing for his political survival.
Advance Australia has hyperlinks to various individuals near Senator Seselja, together with his former colleagues and household.
For instance, Australian Security and Investments Commission (ASIC) paperwork present that Vicki Dunne, who served as shadow lawyer normal when the senator was chief of the Canberra Liberals, grew to become a director of the organisation in February 2021.
Liz Storer, who as soon as helmed the group, was reportedly a former adviser to Senator Seselja.
Separately, Advance Australia’s Facebook account is co-managed by the conservative marketing campaign consultancy Whitestone Strategic.
That agency’s present secretary and sole director is Stephen Doyle, a reputation shared by Senator Seselja’s brother-in-law and former chief of workers who, the senator informed parliament, had “played a particularly important role in my political journey”.
Advance Australia and Whitestone Strategic additionally record the identical Adelaide addresses on their ASIC information. Seemingly belonging to an accounting agency, these addresses have been utilized by numerous different conservative teams.
They embody an anti-euthanasia group run by one in every of Senator Seselja’s sisters, in addition to Marriage Alliance, a lobby group based by the senator’s “former right-hand man”, Tio Faulkner, who can be a director of Binary Australia (Gender Awareness Australia).
Actually, voter fraud is negligible
Echoing calls from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation occasion for the introduction of obligatory voter ID checks, social media customers have repeated doubtful claims about the integrity of Australia’s federal electoral processes.
“[A] person can easily vote more than once and postal votes are not as secure as they should be,” reads one common Facebook publish.
“There’s nothing stopping an individual walking into every polling booth in their electorate or any other electorate and voting more than once.”
But as RMIT FactLab found this week, voter fraud isn’t a major problem in Australia, with fewer than 0.03 per cent of votes solid in the final election deemed to be potential a number of votes.
So, what checks are in place?
At polling cubicles, voters are requested for his or her full title and handle, and whether or not they have already voted. If they reply no, they obtain their poll papers and their names are “marked off” a replica of the electoral roll.
Immediately after the election, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) digitally cross-references these rolls towards a grasp record to examine for a number of mark-offs.
As Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers informed a 2019 parliamentary committee:
“[W]e examine multiple marks in every electorate to make sure that there’s never a situation where if there was multiple voting, it was greater than the margin in the election itself”.
Were that to occur, he stated, the AEC “would then go to the Court of Disputed Returns and seek for that result to be overturned and we’ve never had to do that”.
A spokesman for the fee informed FactLab the AEC additionally had “a longstanding and robust partnership” with Australia Post that included “integrity measures in the postal system being applied for the carriage of … completed postal ballot papers”.
In addition, he stated, candidate- and party-appointed scrutineers may also be current in the tally room to look at “every aspect of the vote”.
People convicted or suspected of casting a number of votes could also be pressured to finish a provisional poll in future polls that’s solely included in the depend as soon as their title has been validated towards the electoral roll.
The AEC can refer circumstances of a number of voting to the Australian Federal Police, with convictions attracting a most penalty of 12 months’ jail and/or a high quality of as much as $13,320.
An replace on FactLab’s election misinformation monitoring challenge, Mosaic
Mosaic, which is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, is RMIT FactLab’s election misinformation monitoring challenge.
This week, the crew at Mosaic found that a video shared broadly on Twitter displaying a fiery confrontation between Labor chief Anthony Albanese and reporters has been doctored to make the journalists’ questioning seem extra aggressive.
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Some of the footage included in the video, which has been considered greater than 150,000 occasions, reveals journalists jostling to quiz Prime Minister Scott Morrison at a information convention held just a few day earlier.
The researchers additionally revealed a deep dive into what Australians are trying to find with Google in the lead-up to the May 21 election.
Of 5 points analysed by Mosaic, aged care gave the impression to be the most urgent concern for voters throughout the nation, although defence-related queries have been the hottest in the ACT and the Northern Territory.
In one other Election Watch article, the crew detailed the emergence of unauthorised posters attacking Labor MP Ged Kearney in the Melbourne voters of Cooper.
Meanwhile, a declare made by controversial Liberal candidate Katherine Deves that gender reassignment surgical procedure for transgender teenagers was outlined as “mutilation” in the NSW Crimes Act was found by Mosaic to be incorrect.
Professor Cameron Stewart, a specialist in well being, legislation and ethics at Sydney University, stated: “Gender reassignment is not directly discussed in the NSW Crimes Act. That Act criminalises female genital mutilation, but appropriately authorised treatments involving gender reassignment are expressly excluded from that definition.”
CoronaCheck
No, Pfizer paperwork don’t present its COVID-19 vaccine is unsafe for pregnant girls
Screenshots purportedly revealing that Pfizer firm paperwork warned towards vaccinating pregnant and breastfeeding girls towards COVID-19 really present outdated tips from UK regulators earlier than sufficient information was out there on the new vaccine.
In truth, COVID-19 vaccines are actually really helpful for girls who’re pregnant or breastfeeding.
The screenshots, allegedly taken from a cache of Pfizer paperwork launched beneath the US Freedom of Information Act, present a doc which states that the Pfizer vaccine is “not recommended during pregnancy” and “should not be used during breastfeeding”.
But as truth checkers at Reuters found, the screenshots have been taken from tips revealed by Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in December 2020.
“They do not indicate the shots are unsafe during pregnancy or while lactating but highlight a lack of data at the time of publication,” the truth checkers stated.
According to an MHRA spokesperson, new information was subsequently collected supporting the up to date recommendation that these pregnant or breastfeeding ought to get vaccinated towards COVID-19.
“Over 104,000 pregnant people have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine in England and Scotland and no concerns of the safety of the vaccines have been raised,” the spokesperson informed Reuters.
Has the Morrison authorities gagged debate in parliament greater than another?
Independent federal MP Helen Haines has taken to Twitter to criticise the Coalition authorities’s use of so-called “gag motions” to stifle debate in federal parliament.
“This government has moved to gag debate more than any other government in history — more than 340 divisions across the life of the parliament,” she stated.
But RMIT ABC Fact Check this week found that declare to be an exaggeration.
Fact Check analysed calendar yr information (the solely readily accessible data on gag orders) since 1901 in two methods, defining a “government” by both the period of the parliament they led or the whole time the occasion held energy.
According to uncooked numbers, the Morrison-led parliament got here out forward of all others, having used “closure motions” 332 occasions since the Coalition’s 2019 election victory.
However, as a fairer means by which to match governments, Fact Check calculated a yearly common for every parliament and for every authorities’s interval in workplace.
Viewed this fashion, Gough Whitlam’s Labor authorities took out high spot for each.
The Morrison authorities (since 2019) ranked second amongst parliaments, whereas the Coalition authorities (since 2013) ranked third for total years in energy, coming in behind the Coalition authorities of Malcolm Fraser.
It’s essential to notice that these measures are imperfect, as calendar yr information doesn’t neatly line up with authorities and parliamentary phrases.
Fact Check runs a rule over this week’s leaders’ debates
With lower than two weeks to go till the election, Mr Morrison and Mr Albanese confronted off twice in televised debates in current days, sparring over the whole lot from gender equality to reasonably priced housing.
Following Sunday’s confrontation, Fact Check investigated claims made by each leaders on defence spending, wages progress, apprentices, bulk-billing charges and the proposed powers of a federal corruption and integrity fee.
Perhaps the most contentious situation of that debate, nonetheless, was the Northern Territory authorities’s leasing of the Port of Darwin to Chinese traders.
According to Mr Morrison, “the federal government had absolutely no authority over that sale whatsoever”, however Fact Check found that was not the full story.
Wednesday night time’s showdown, on the different hand, noticed the leaders flip their consideration to girls’s financial progress.
However, claims made by each males have been missing some important context.
Mr Albanese, for instance, claimed Australia had “fallen to 70th in the world for women’s economic participation and opportunity”. Experts, nonetheless, have beforehand defined that the rating in query doesn’t paint a full image of the assets and alternatives out there to girls in Australia.
Meanwhile, Mr Morrison’s declare a few narrowing of the gender pay hole ignored the incontrovertible fact that the hole tends to shrink throughout financial downturns when wage progress slows in industries that are typically dominated by males.
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell, with because of Jack Kerr
Got a incontrovertible fact that wants checking? Tweet us @ABCFactCheck or ship us an e-mail at [email protected]
We looked into the lobby group taking on rugby star turned would-be senator David Pocock. Here’s what we found & More Latest News Update
We looked into the lobby group taking on rugby star turned would-be senator David Pocock. Here’s what we found & More Live News
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We looked into the lobby group taking on rugby star turned would-be senator David Pocock. Here’s what we found & More News Today
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