It’s not for nothing that my Third Law of the Media is Always assume that “fact-checkers” are trying to bullshit you. There is no better proof of this law than Australia’s very own taxpayer-funded leftist propaganda outfit public broadcaster, the ABC. Take any random ABC “fact-check”, and it’s almost guaranteed to be a farrago of lies and straw-man arguments.
Even when they’re “fact-checking” leftist politicians who aren’t quite far-left enough for them.
On a recent episode of ABC’s Q+A, Labor MP Michelle Ananda-Rajah faced off with the Greens spokesman for housing and homelessness, Max Chandler-Mather, with the former stating that the Greens were “standing in the way” of progress on the issue of social housing.
In doing so, Dr Ananda-Rajah highlighted the problem of homelessness, claiming: “We have, tonight, 122,000 people sleeping rough.”
“Eighty per cent of those are women,” she continued. “Where women go, children follow. One in seven of those are 12 years or less; they are children, they are babies.”
Oh, no! The lefties are fighting! Surprise, surprise, the ABC takes the side of the loony watermelon leftist from the Greens.
Dr Ananda-Rajah is wrong.
Big surprise, ABC.
What follows is the standard “fact checker” gambit: if you can’t put up a convincing straw man, nit-pick on obscure technicalities, instead.
While official figures show that 122,494 people were experiencing homelessness on census night in 2021, only 7,636 of those people were “sleeping rough” as defined by experts.
Now, you and I are lucky not to be burdened by “expertise”, so we tend to think of being “homeless” and “sleeping rough” as the same thing.
Pah! This is why you’re not an “expert”! It takes a real expert to come up with bilge like this:
In 2012, the ABS developed a “statistical definition” of homelessness, which is informed by “an understanding of homelessness as ‘home’-lessness, not ‘roof’-lessness”.
According to the ABS, a person is considered homeless if their living arrangement:
Is in a dwelling that is inadequate; or
Has no tenure, or if their initial tenure is short and not extendable; or
Does not allow them to have control of — and access to — space for social relations.
So, what is “sleeping rough”?
Among the six “operational groups” used by the ABS when counting the number of people experiencing homelessness is “people living in improvised dwellings, tents or sleeping out”.
Which, to you and I, sounds a whole lot like “homeless”.
But at least the ABC is right that Ananda-Rajah is indeed unequivocally wrong on her second claim: “Eighty per cent of those are women”. This is outright false: the majority of homeless and “sleeping rough” are and always have been men.
Males make up the majority of both the total count of people experiencing homelessness (57 per cent) and those sleeping rough (66 per cent).
There were 208 children aged under 12 sleeping rough on census night (3 per cent). However, children did indeed make up one in seven people experiencing homelessness.
Still, the ABC’s latest dodgy “fact-check” brings up an important point. Activists are constantly bandying about figures on “homelessness” to push whatever barrow it is that they’re pushing.
Except that we now know that “homelessness” is not exactly what we thought it was. What most of us picture when we think of “homeless” is far less prevalent than some activists apparently want us to think.
Australia was the only OECD nation that included severe overcrowding and boarding houses in its estimation of homelessness.
“The report argued that homelessness and overcrowding are not the same thing,” Professor Chris Chamberlain said.
ABC Australia
Still, even the figure given for out-and-out homelessness — “sleeping rough” in the “expert” definition seems absurdly low. Something the ABS admits, saying that the nature of “sleeping rough” means that it’s near-impossible to get an accurate figure.
And anyone whose seen the tent cities springing up in even regional cities in Tasmania, and families putting up in remote camping spots, would surely find it hard to believe that there are just slightly under 8,000 such people in the whole of Australia.
“Homeless” or “sleeping rough”: call it what you will, there’s surely far too much of it going around.