Fact Check signs off today after 11 years at the ABC. Here's our guide to being your own fact checker

Fact Check is closing down, but politicians will continue to make claims. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

It was almost 12 years ago that the first formal fact check was published on the ABC News website, an analysis of a claim about Australia's debt by then-prime minister Kevin Rudd, which the fledgling fact-checking unit found to be accurate.

The intervening years saw growing public policy challenges brought about by climate change, the Black Summer bushfires, a global pandemic and the Voice to Parliament referendum triggering an epidemic of misinformation, supercharged by social media.

RMIT ABC Fact Check scrutinised myriad claims concerning these topics and more.

After hundreds of verdicts and almost 200 editions of the CheckMate misinformation newsletter, RMIT ABC Fact Check — a partnership between the ABC and RMIT University — is drawing to a close.

While you will no longer see political fact checks appearing on the ABC News website (at least, not in the same format), one thing remains certain: politicians will continue to make dubious claims, quote facts out of context and draw long bows.

As we've noted previously, politicians don't necessarily speak outright falsehoods or tell lies.

Rather, they seek to present data and events in the best possible light to further their agendas.

They shift start and end dates, omit and over-inflate data, leave out key context or simply make invalid, apples-and-oranges comparisons.

So, on this last day of operation, RMIT ABC Fact Check leaves you with a cheat sheet on what to look out for and how to be alert to misinformation. Here are the most common types of dubious claims.

When is a cut really a cut?

Early on in Fact Check's tenure, Labor politicians alleged the Abbott government had made deep cuts to both schools and hospitals.

But when the unit looked at the issue, the reality proved different. While the Coalition had committed to spend less than Labor had been promising when last in government, the amount was higher in real terms (accounting for inflation) year on year, so it could not be said to equate to a cut.

Years later, the shoe was on the other foot, with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton alleging Labor had cut the nation's defence budget.

Again, Fact Check found that planned spending was rising year on year in real terms. The claim was found to be misleading.

There are many instances of this type of claim being levelled from both sides of politics. So, watch out for the word "cut" — it might actually involve a two-edged sword.

Ignoring inflation

Speaking of inflation, it's something you'd expect politicians to understand.

Forecasts about inflation are printed in every budget and underpin its assumptions. And, of course, it plays into where the Reserve Bank of Australia sets interest rates.

Strangely, politicians sometimes neglect to take it into account when making claims.

A key claim, which politicians of both sides have repeated over many years, is that one party or the other is responsible for the most government debt or biggest budget deficit.

A key moment in this tit-for-tat was when then-foreign minister Julie Bishop in 2015 complained of the previous Labor government's "record debt and deficit", a claim repeated in a fashion soon after by then-finance minister Matthias Cormann.

By 2022, following the COVID-19 pandemic, the claim had crossed the aisle, with then-opposition leader Anthony Albanese levelling the same allegation at the Coalition. His newly minted finance minister Katy Gallagher repeated it shortly after the ALP won office.

But neither of the two previous governments produced a record amount of debt or deficit because what these claims didn't take into account was that money is not worth the same value over time.

Even though both parties may have produced the largest debt or deficit in nominal terms, when accounting for the size of the economy and the passage of time, this was overshadowed by the numbers racked up during World War II.

So, beware the word "record". It might be anything but.

[debt graph]

Apples and oranges

Often, politicians will make comparisons that seem valid at first glance, but fall apart when examined more closely.

Scott Morrison fell into the trap of making misleading comparisons when, as prime minister, he claimed the COVID-19 recession was 30 times larger than the global financial crisis, with experts telling Fact Check the two downturns were fundamentally different in nature and shouldn't be compared.

In the months leading up to the 2022 election, Mr Morrison and treasurer Josh Frydenberg made a series of claims to the effect that Australia had achieved greater reductions in carbon emissions than other comparable nations.

But the claims compared Australia's 2020 numbers — skewed favourably by the onset of the pandemic — with other countries' figures for 2019. Fact Check found the claims to be misleading.

Shortly after his election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese claimed that Australia had been "the largest non-NATO contributor" to war-torn Ukraine.

This, once again, fell into the comparison trap, with different types of contributions ranking non-NATO countries differently in nominal terms, and a fair comparison based on the size of economies pushing Australia back further.

In the end, Mr Albanese's claim didn't stack up, based on the data available at the time.

When assessing politicians' claims, it pays to make sure they're comparing like for like.

Crazy, over the top and baseless

And then, from time to time, claims emerged which garnered attention for being colourful, but lacking accuracy.

The most notorious of these was perhaps independent MP Bob Katter's 2017 response to a journalist's question about marriage equality.

Heading the eponymously named Katter's Australian Party, the Queenslander declared that people were "entitled to their sexual proclivities, let there be a thousand blossoms bloom", before his demeanour darkened and he said he would spend no more time on the topic.

"Because, in the meantime, every three months a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in north Queensland."

After analysing the data, Fact Check found Mr Katter to be wrong, its analysis snapping up the award for most absurd fact check at the 2018 Global Fact summit.

Meanwhile, former treasurer Joe Hockey's assertion that an increase in fuel excise would not affect the poor because "the poorest people either don't have cars or actually don't drive very far in many cases" caused a furore, and was found to be misleading.

And former opposition leader Bill Shorten was found to be over the top in claiming former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had announced a tax cut for millionaires and a tax hike for workers.

During the 2019 election campaign, Mr Morrison made a sensational claim that an electric vehicle "won't tow your trailer. It's not going to tow your boat. It's not going to get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family."

But Fact Check's analysis showed a range of EVs at the time had adequate capacity to do just that, with experts noting that more models were destined for the market. The was found to be in need of a tune-up.

Finally, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson's claim that a lot of people had been dispossessed of their land because of the Mabo native title decision was found to be baseless.

The misinformation epidemic

There has been a surge in misinformation in the public sphere in recent times with two key events attracting a deluge of low-quality information: the pandemic and the Voice to Parliament referendum.

The first of these generated our most popular fact check ever: a claim from then-NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, who said that Sydney's Delta lockdowns in 2021 were the "harshest measures any place in Australia has ever faced".

Ms Berejiklian was found to be wrong in a fact check whose readership was perhaps inflated by aggrieved Melbourne residents who had been through prolonged lockdowns.

However, whether Melburnians were subjected to the world's longest COVID-19 lockdowns was not clear cut, despite the assertions of Mr Frydenberg, among others.

In March 2020, in response to the slew of pandemic-generated misinformation and a demand among audiences for quickly verified content, Fact Check launched the CoronaCheck newsletter, later renamed CheckMate.

Early editions focused on COVID-19 content, such as debunked "cures" including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

It repeatedly debunked dubious correlations between deaths and vaccines, including those contained in the notorious film Died Suddenly.

And it took claimants to task for the misuse of COVID-19 and vaccine statistics, such as when Senator Hanson used UK death statistics to claim more vaccinated people were dying from the virus than those who were unvaccinated. Experts told Fact Check that it was misleading to use raw figures to interpret the data, rather than rates.

Later, CheckMate tackled the Voice infodemic, debunking claims about $30 billion being disbursed by the National Indigenous Australians Agency, secret agendas, the Voice's proposed powers, and a pervasive myth about a flora and fauna act.

The current epidemic of misinformation can be expected to continue and intensify online, even as the pandemic and the Voice debate recede from our memories.

The key takeaway when confronted by viral claims is to maintain a sceptical approach, remembering that correlation does not always equal causation, and to listen to genuine experts when interpreting data.

More accurate than you think

There were also instances where, upon investigation, claims were found to be correct or at least close to the mark.

For example, when Mr Turnbull said that renewables plus storage was the cheapest form of new energy, Fact Check found it was a fair call, based on the CSIRO's GenCost report from the time.

Then-shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed before the 2022 election that the Coalition government had taxed, borrowed and spent more than Labor, which was also found to be correct.

And when Senator Hanson claimed that Australia's population growth was mostly due to migration, and that it was underpinning the federal budget, Fact Check determined that she was close to the mark.

It goes to show that even when claims appear to cut across a dominant narrative, they can sometimes turn out to be closer to the facts than we might at first think.

Farewell

On the Thursday following Labor's first budget in October 2022, Mr Dutton rose to his feet and attacked the government for its management of the economy in his budget reply speech.

And then he did something unexpected. He referenced a fact check to help make his case.

"As for Labor's claim about ‘$1 trillion dollars of debt', even the ABC's Fact Check didn't support the claim," he said.

(Fact Check had just days earlier found the new treasurer's claim that the Coalition was responsible for a trillion dollars of debt to be exaggerated.)

Over the years, many politicians have used the unit's work to make a political point, including Mr Albanese.

That politicians of all stripes, who often took issue with our verdicts when they did not go their way, still sought to use them to attack their opponents speaks to the value of political fact checking and the good record of the unit.

In 12 years of publishing fact checks, not a single verdict has been overturned following a complaint, despite the almost constant pushback by claimants and their supporters.

Fact Check was not here to be a cop on the beat but, rather, to inject facts into a national debate which was all too often devoid of them. Our mission was to inform audiences and provide them with the context they needed to interpret what they were hearing from our political leaders and public figures.

The team has received a flood of thanks and well wishes following the recent announcement that the ABC and RMIT University were going in separate directions in the fight against misinformation. We wish both organisations well in this pursuit — it is more important than ever — and we are grateful that audiences found our work useful.

The ABC will shortly be launching a new in-house verification reporting team, ABC News Verify, so watch this space.

But if you're looking for political fact checks, you should look no further than our friends at AAP Fact Check, who do excellent work.

From all the RMIT ABC Fact Check team, thank you for reading, and goodbye.