The national broadcaster has aired another interview riddled with falsehoods to deceive voters as an election looms, as Alan Austin reports.
ABC NEWS USED ITS REACH again last week to bolster the false narrative pushed by all the mainstream newsrooms — that the Coalition manages the economy better than Labor.
In a segment on Tuesday’s 7.30 Report, the dreadful state of poverty in Australia was laid bare so all viewers would be shocked, appalled and profoundly angry.
With the connivance of the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), the program reported that 22% of Australian renters are now living below the poverty line and 50% of renters in social housing are in poverty.
Additionally, unemployed workers are experiencing multiple deprivations at five times the rate of the general population, adults on parenting payments have four times the rate, and young people on JobSeeker are 14 times more likely to be going without a substantial meal a day.
Just horrendous!
CEO of ACOSS, Cassandra Goldie, lamented that:
"This report paints a very grim picture in terms of deprivation for large numbers of people on low incomes across the country...What this report shines a light on is people who are going without some very basic essentials of life, things like food, housing, medical attention when you need it, be able to get your teeth fixed, these kinds of really basic community standards about what we consider to be essential to live with basic dignity.”
Malicious misreporting
Very little of that is true, if any.
The dire situation was reported as happening today – when, in fact, it was several years ago – well before the Albanese Government implemented the poverty-reduction measures now in place.
The data was from an ACOSS survey published last Wednesday with the cumbersome title 'Material deprivation in Australia: the essentials of life / a poverty and inequality partnership report'.
The foreword, page 8, says:
'This report uses data from three waves of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey to analyse changes in deprivation over the three time periods spanning eight years.'
But which eight years?
The executive summary, page 10, says:
'In this research, using data collected from 2014, 2018 and 2022 HILDA surveys, we identify 23 items ... We then report the results of the 2022 HILDA survey ...'
Assuming data collected in 2022 relates to 2021, then clearly the eight-year period is 2014 to 2021.
The current Albanese Labor Government was elected in May 2022.
Hence those terrible statistics describe the previous Coalition administration.
This should have been declared. It wasn’t. All the discussion was in the present tense.
Pretty reprehensible falsification of the news.
Progress in the last two and a half years
We know from multiple analyses in the alternative media, including here at IA, that the Albanese Government has lifted many citizens out of poverty.
The weekly minimum wage was raised from $776.20 in 2021 to $915.90.
The fortnightly single youth allowance for living away from home is up from $462.50 in 2021 to $639.00. The single-age pension was similarly lifted to $1,047.10 a fortnight.
Household wealth is 23.7% higher than three years ago. The share of gross national income going to workers has lifted from 49.0% in June 2022 to 52.6% in the June quarter this year.
Social benefits paid to needy Australians have averaged 6.24% of gross domestic product (GDP) over the last four quarters. That contrasts with 5.75% in 2018 and 2019.
JobSeeker claimants have now been below 5.5% of the labour force for more than a year, the lowest on record.
This was 6.6% when Labor took office.
Calls to the National Debt Hotline for emergency help numbered 13,006 in October this year, down from 14,646 in October 2019 and 16,199 in 2018.
Retail spending on luxuries, including cosmetics, dining out and overseas travel is now at an all-time high relative to total retail spending and to GDP.
This means all the disastrous statistics in the ACOSS report are outdated and incorrect – except as an historic record of the abject failure of the Coalition.
Treasurer Chalmers keeps kicking goals
November was another successful month for economic progress and poverty alleviation. Total private and public construction hit a 10-year high with investment at $289.5 billion for the year to September.
Inflation was 2.1% for the second consecutive month.
That’s within the Reserve Bank’s optimum band for the third month. See chart below.
Electricity costs fell 35.6% in the 12 months to October — the largest annual decline ever recorded in the CPI.
Petrol prices fell 11.5% over the year.
Unemployment was 4.13% in October, stretching the record number of months below 4.3% to 35. The underemployment rate fell to 6.24% — the lowest in 18 months.
Gross debt last Friday was $912.1 billion — down from $915.4 billion at the end of November last year.
Along with the latest numbers on growth, wealth, wages and the budget – these place Australia near the top of the world again – where it ranked under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
The days languishing near the bottom under the Coalition are gone.
Of course, many families are still struggling, as is the reality worldwide. That is certainly true – and continuing remedial efforts are required.
But the proportion of citizens in poverty is now lower than at any time in history. The crisis of ever-increasing costs and falling real wages is over.
What remains now is coping with the consequences of eight years and eight months of Coalition corruption and incompetence.
Tragically – with an election looming – this mainstream misreporting will increase.
This risks returning the inept Coalition — which will cause poverty and deprivation to deepen again.
Alan Austin is an Independent Australia columnist and freelance journalist. You can follow him on Twitter @alanaustin001.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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