Fact check, False

A few weeks ago the Snopes website “fact checked” a social media claim that a photo of a woman and child sitting next to a black woman crouched on the floor was of a young Elon Musk and his mother in South Africa with their black maid who wasn’t allowed to sit on the furniture.

It wasn’t a photo of the Musk household and Snopes proved the claim was demonstrably false.

So, what was the Snopes verdict for this false claim? “Miscaptioned”.

Snopes could have simply debunked the claim but instead went on to insinuate the Musk family might have done something wrong anyway because he grew up in South Africa during apartheid and, despite evidence Musk’s family were progressives, opposed to apartheid and that he had black friends and objected to the use of racial slurs, “this does not preclude Musk's childhood home from experiencing similar situations to the one in the above photograph”.

In other words, although this wasn’t the Musk family, there’s no evidence they didn’t also force their black servants to sit on the floor. This isn’t fact checking but a politically biased assertion.

Recently ABC Fact Check showed its own political bias by “fact checking” Prime Minister Albanese’s claim that 80 to 90 per cent of Indigenous Australians support the Voice.

The ABC verdict? “Yes, but more to it”.

Much more to it, actually.

Albanese repeatedly claims over 80 per cent of Indigenous people support the Voice. Writing in The Australian he even said support is “nearly 90 per cent”. The official Yes pamphlet also claims the Voice is “backed by over 80% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.

ABC Fact Check’s report demonstrated this claim is false.

The claim is based on an Ipsos poll in January of 300 Indigenous people finding support for the Voice at 80 per cent (+/- 7.3 per cent) and a YouGov poll of 738 Indigenous people in March finding support at 83 per cent (+/- 2.3 per cent).

My comment on these polls is that it really depends on which 300 or 738 Indigenous people you talk to; meaning, I don’t believe support for, or awareness of the Voice, is uniform across different Aboriginal population groups. Numerous journalists visiting remote Aboriginal communities with similar population sizes, including the ABC, have found most people know very little about it or haven’t even heard of it. And I’ve personally spoken to well over those numbers of Aboriginal people from all over Australia and have found the vast majority don’t understand the Voice, haven’t heard of it, are deeply cynical about it or oppose it.?

The experts ABC Fact Check spoke to confirmed my belief these polls are unrepresentative. They said getting a representative sample of Indigenous people is “notoriously difficult” and these samples “might very well have been skewed towards the more metropolitan and upwardly mobile end of the scale, and correspondingly deficient in respondents from remote communities".

One suggested this deficiency wasn’t a serious a concern because most Indigenous people don’t live in remote communities. But this ignores the fact that a far greater proportion of Indigenous people live in remote and regional Australia than non-Indigenous people: 17 per cent of Indigenous people live in Remote or Very Remote areas compared to less than 2 per cent of non-Indigenous; 44 per cent of Indigenous people live in Regional areas compared to 26 per cent of non-Indigenous. Only 38 per cent of Indigenous people live in Major Cities to where these poll samples were skewed.

More importantly, the situation of Aboriginal people in remote and regional Australia is very different to the situation of those at the “more metropolitan and upwardly mobile end of the scale”. Aboriginal people in remote communities are the poorest, with the lowest economic participation and worst health and social indicators of all. These are the very people the Yes campaign says the Voice will be a magic solution for, yet they’re invisible in the data quoted to claim they support it.

ABC Fact Check also enquired about the third known poll of Indigenous opinions on the Voice sourced by GetUp! which found 45 per cent of Indigenous people hadn’t heard of or knew nothing about Voice and 25 per cent were voting No. This isn’t consistent with the other polls. GetUp! told ABC Fact Check this research was “built by First Nations people for First Nations people”, with respondents sourced with geographical, gender, age and educational spread “that would most accurately weight/represent our community”.

ABC Fact Check’s experts concluded the Ipsos and YouGov polls don’t support a claim of over 80 per cent Indigenous support for the Voice because of the difficulty in getting a representative sample, the polls being now significantly aged and the Ipsos poll being “rather flimsy". They couldn’t confirm the actual level of Indigenous support but said the lopsided results gave them confidence of “strong Indigenous support” and “most likely above 50 per cent”, at least when the surveys were conducted.

They added “there was no scientific evidence for the proposition that a majority of First Nations Australians did not want a Voice.” Do all fact checking reports use double negative assertions?

Twist and spin it as much as you like, the experts have confirmed the Ipsos and YouGov polls “should not be relied upon as strong evidence of a specific level of support such as over 80 per cent.”

Yet these polls were the only evidence for this claim.

The only way the ABC was able hand down a verdict of “Yes, but…” was by framing the question as whether “surveys show” 80 per cent Indigenous support for the Voice. If the question had been whether “there is” 80 per cent support, the verdict would have to be “No”. ?Or maybe “Miscaptioned”.

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Nyunggai Warren Mundine AO DUniv (Hon. Causa) is Director, Indigenous Forum, Centre for Independent Studies . This article was first published in The West Australian on 15 August 2023.