RMIT ABC Fact Check was a partnership between RMIT University and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr Wilkie's claim is an allegation of criminal conduct that is untested in a court of law. A number of communiques calling for Australian government officials to be investigated for crimes against humanity, as defined b…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr Frydenberg's claim is misleading. He points out that more than 60 per cent of taxpayers declaring a capital gain in a given year were on taxable incomes of less than $80,000. However, this paints a distorted picture.…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr Bowen's claim is in the ballpark. What counts as "recent" is debatable, but given the typical pace of change in the housing market, Fact Check has assessed the last ten years of ownership rates. None of these rates m…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: The Greens' claim is close to the mark. While the policy paper was unclear on just which measure of the MCG it used, the common practice of using a football field to measure logging activity provides a reasonable basis …
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr Dutton is drawing a long bow. According to the proposals, in order to be able to advise on the transfer of refugees to Australia for medical treatment, a doctor would first need to be registered — neither Mr Brown no…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Yes, Ms Plibersek's claim checks out, but there's more to it. There are more than twice the number of Labor women in Parliament than there are Liberal women, in both raw numbers (44 vs 19) and proportional terms (46.3 p…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr Robert's claim is misleading. He suggests Australia's least well off will bear the brunt of the pain. To make his case, Mr Robert relies on the taxable income of people claiming excess franking credits as a cash refu…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr Kelly's claim checks out. In the four decades to 2014, Tuvalu's total land area grew by 73 hectares, or 2.9 per cent. The expert behind this research told Fact Check the nation's islands were continually adjusting, a…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Ms Vanstone's claim is misleading. Latest federal government figures suggest that although greenhouse gas emissions have fallen over the past 10 years, emissions started trending upwards again about four years ago. The …
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Ms Thorpe's claim doesn't check out. Data is not collected on the rate of all child removals. Given the lack of data, experts told Fact Check that the rate of admissions to out-of-home care collected by the Australian I…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Yes, Dr Leigh's claim is correct, but there's more to it. The Government's monthly financial statements show net debt has doubled over the Coalition's two terms in government — from $174.6 billion in September 2013, whe…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr Andrews's claim is a fair call. Victoria's share of total Chinese investment in Australia has increased since 2014. However, as the figures relied on by Mr Andrews demonstrate, investments can be "lumpy", with signif…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Ms Hennessy is wrong. Under the Coalition, health spending grew from $7.4 billion in 2009-10 to $8.7 billion in 2014-15. The average annual increase over the five years was $264 million, while the cumulative extra spend…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Yes Mr O'Brien is correct, but there's more to it. The state tax take has, in nominal terms, increased by about 35 per cent over four years, underpinned by strong collections of stamp duty, payroll, land and motor vehic…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr Frydenberg's claim is misleading. Experts contacted by Fact Check took issue with Mr Frydenberg's use of taxable income to define wealth, due to the very nature of negative gearing, which is a tax deduction that redu…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: There's more to the story than Mr Judah's claim suggests. Mr Judah and the Liberals have been driving their campaign truck adorned with crime statistics across the Bentleigh electorate, including the suburbs of Bentleig…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr O'Donohue's claim is misleading. The figure he cites covers substantially more than the period Labor has been in office, so cannot be used to assess the record of just one government. There is also no agreed definiti…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Senator Hanson is wrong. The overwhelming majority of asylum seekers currently on Nauru have been deemed to be refugees by the Nauruan Government in accordance with international law and the United Nations refugee conve…
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Ms O'Dwyer's claim is not the full story. She is entitled to claim that wages have grown, in nominal terms, by about 30 per cent over a decade, outstripping inflation of about 20 per cent over the same period. However, …
RMIT ABC Fact Check says: Mr Katter is wrong. His initial election as an independent in 2001, and re-election in 2004, was preceded by the re-election of two other independent MPs, whom he mentioned — one more than a decade earlier. In 1990, for…