The Liberal Party is running a snappy advertising campaign on TV and social media called “Look at the facts”. Overprinted at the top is the claim “Australia’s recovery is leading the world”
The 30-second video makes nine assertions. According to my count, one is correct, two are substantially deceptive and six are blatant lies. Here’s my examination of each claim.
‘Australia’s recovery is leading the world’
The first graph depicts “GDP compared to pre-COVID”, indicating this refers to economic growth. But claiming Australia is still a leader on this metric is quite false.
For country comparisons, economists use annual GDP growth, which is recorded for all advanced economies four times a year. We have the numbers for the 2021 December quarter for the 59 very highly developed countries listed by the UN’s Development Program (UNDP). These include all OECD members and most International Monetary Fund advanced economies. Australia’s modest 4.2% annual GDP growth ranks 43rd out of those 59 economies. Nowhere near leading the world.
The UK, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and Greece are all above 6%. Ireland, Israel, Malta, Chile, Slovenia, Croatia, Turkey, and others are above 9%.
The fine print in the Liberal chart says “Dec 2019 to Dec 2021”. Hmmm. So it picked an odd two-year time interval for which there is no readily available global database. Why? Could it be that its December 2019 starting point was a particularly disastrous low, with Australia in a per capita recession — before COVID?
Even if we take that weird two-year interval, Australia still lags badly. Yes, Australia’s GDP rose 3.39% from December 2019 to December 2021, so that figure is accurate. But the others appear fabricated.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis clearly shows the US rise was 10.6%, not 3.2%. Similarly, data for France shows GDP increased 4.27% over the two years, not 0.9%. UK data shows a 5.91% lift since 2019, not a decline.
Damningly, the chart leaves out all advanced economies with higher growth than Australia’s. These include Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Taiwan, Chile , and Turkey.
Of course, we can see why it would go with the falsehood “Australia’s economy is leading the world”. The truth — Australia ranks 43th out of 59 advanced economies — doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
But why would it falsify the data when it knows the economics writers at The Australian Financial Review and The Australian will eviscerate it for the blatant deceptions? Oh, wait…
‘Through the pandemic, we’ve had fewer deaths … than almost any advanced country’
That was once true, but not since the bungled vaccine rollout and the disastrous mismanagement of federal nursing homes.
Video: Real wages should be ‘on the increase’ as the unemployment rate remains low (Sky News Australia)