This year marked a decade since fact checking became serious business in Australia, and if 2023 proved anything, it's that misinformation isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
In this edition of CheckMate, we round up some of the year's key claims that puzzled the punters and kept fact checkers on their toes — from political point scoring to the outright absurd.
No prizes for guessing which event triggered a tsunami of claims. The Voice to Parliament referendum topped the billing, with a suggestion by Coalition senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price that there were "no ongoing negative impacts" from colonisation forming the basis for this year's most-read edition of CheckMate.
Rising costs and 'broken' promises
On the political front, the federal government faced intense pressure to keep a lid on living costs, as voters struggled amid price rises and a lack of affordable housing.
As Fact Check found in August, it was a fair call to say rents were increasing at their fastest rate in 35 years, in quarterly terms, as claimed by Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather.
Seeking to take the pressure off renters, Treasurer Jim Chalmers used the May budget to deliver a boost of up to 15 per cent for Rent Assistance welfare payments, in what was fairly described as "the largest increase in more than 30 years".
He was later caught claiming that full-time workers were $3,700 "better off" since Labor came to power, however, with Fact Check finding that — after inflation — real average earnings fell by roughly $2,000 over the government's first year.
(This wasn't the first time the treasurer ran into trouble, after claiming the previous Labor government was only responsible for a "tiny fraction" of budget debt.)
But while it was fair to say Australia's "core inflation" was higher than that of all G7 member nations, as claimed by Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor, that was no excuse for blaming the government for things it hadn't done.
That is to say, Labor did not break an election promise by introducing either a "fuel tax" or a sneaky new "beer tax", despite claims by Jason Wood, the Shadow Minister for Community Safety, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson also jumped on the broken promises bandwagon, baselessly asserting that Labor had pledged to keep immigration "steady" at 235,000 people per year, despite no evidence of any such pre-election target. (The government has since announced it is taking steps to cut back Australia's immigration intake).
Given all the financial pain being felt by households, some suggested Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was spending too much time out of the country.
But has Mr Albanese travelled any more than his predecessors?
Not according to CheckMate's analysis, which put him neck and neck with Tony Abbott, while Scott Morrison set the fastest pace for foreign jaunts early on in his prime ministership.
Speaking of promises …
This year also saw the return of Fact Check's election Promise Tracker, which tracks 66 key pledges made by Labor ahead of the 2022 election.
So far, the government has delivered 21 election promises.
These include lowering the cost of Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme scripts, increasing childcare subsidies, making the cashless debit card voluntary, requiring 24/7 nurses in aged care facilities and legislating a national anti-corruption body.
Meanwhile, the government has broken two pledges, both on the basis of missed deadlines.
The remainder are either in progress (38) or stalled (5).
And if you're wondering how the government plans to pay for its promises, you can rest assured it hasn't announced plans to raid your superannuation funds.
Indigenous issues in the spotlight
Of course, special mention must go to the Voice to Parliament referendum, which triggered a flood of suspect claims about Indigenous issues.
Topics ranged from globalist conspiracies to baseless claims of rigged elections and coming land grabs, not to mention exaggerations and personal attacks.
The campaign also featured one of the year's most pervasive piece of misleading information: that Indigenous programs receive upwards of $30 billion per year from the government.
This claim, popular on social media and supercharged after comments from singer Kamahl, conveniently ignores that the total for Indigenous-specific programs was closer to $6 billion (in 2015-16), with the remainder going to general spending such as health, education and defence — much like the $556 billion spent on the rest of the population.
The year started out with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton linking the demise of the cashless debit card to rising crime in Alice Springs, despite the card still being in use there.
Later, having stepped to the forefront of politics during the Voice campaign, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians Jacinta Nampijinpa Price made several problematic claims.
These included suggestions that the gap in outcomes for Indigenous people was "more about place than race" and that, most controversially, there were "no ongoing negative impacts" from colonisation. That claim was rebuked by numerous experts and studies.
Meanwhile, Mr Albanese's claim that young Indigenous men were more likely to go to jail than university was deemed to be a fair call, based on the range of data available.
Fact Check also waded into the debate over past referendums, adding important context to historian Geoffrey Blainey's claim that Aboriginal people had been "counted" in every federal census before 1967.
Certainly, they were enumerated in each of these censuses — though their numbers were then excluded from the final population counts and, therefore, on one reading, the Australian polity.
Never waste a crisis
Whether it was riots in France, the war in Gaza or even the Titan submarine misadventure, a steady run of global news events provided ample opportunities for being misled online, with each crisis accompanied by clips and images that were frequently false or taken out of context.
There were, of course, conspiracies too — though it's safe to say the US government did not cause the earthquakes in Türkiye or wildfires in Maui using radio waves or "directed energy weapons".
But did birds fall from the sky after a toxic spill in the US? Not quite, though they did in 2018 (possibly due to a batch of fermented berries). And no, there was no Ebola outbreak at this year's Burning Man festival in Nevada.
Vaccination claims linger
While the COVID-19 pandemic might be a speck in the rearview mirror for many Australians, some remain focused on the alleged fallout from vaccinations.
Early this year, social media users revived a decade-old conspiracy to claim the government was immunising Australians without their consent by "spraying a vaccine into the air".
That claim was false and was based on a fundamental misreading of what it means to release genetically modified organisms into the "environment".
Then, in June, United Australia Party national director Craig Kelly seized on data from NSW public hospitals to argue that an apparent fall in births was due to a "certain not-so-safe, effective or necessary vaccine".
There was, however, no evidence to link vaccines to the decrease, which experts warned may amount to nothing anyway, given the data was incomplete and subject to change.
Indeed, recently released data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows no precipitous fall in births for NSW or Australia.
Other social media users have recently shared claims that a "genetic vaccine" has been quietly added to Australia's childhood vaccine schedule, echoing rhetoric from early in the pandemic.
These claims, however, did not align with reality: the vaccine in question relies on the same technology as other vaccines currently in use, which are not DNA-based.
There were plenty of other dubious COVID-related claims, too, on mask safety, ivermectin, legal cover for vaccine injuries and supposed "revelations" about mass deaths in New Zealand.
Worry like it's 1984
It seems that, these days, an Orwellian dystopia is never far off.
During the NSW state election campaign, for example, then-education minister Sarah Mitchell claimed that Labor's proposal to use phone-jamming technology in schools would allow a third party to "literally … track your child and where they are".
But, as CheckMate found, that was not a feature of the technology, which would simply prevent phones in a particular classroom from connecting to their local network during school hours.
Next, when the Queensland government introduced a bill to ban the display of hate symbols, some political pundits wrongly suggested the changes could see Australians jailed for three years "for posting what's deemed 'offensive' on Facebook".
In fact, experts said, such penalties did not relate to causing "offence" on social media but to serious vilification that threatened or incited harm — the threshold for which had not changed.
Fears of government overreach were dialled up to 11 when it came to "15-minute cities".
Variously described as "climate lockdowns" and "prison", this eco-friendly urban planning concept not-so-terrifyingly suggests that cities should be designed to ensure that residents have everything they need within a convenient 15-minute walk.
The alarm was sounded after a local government in the UK approved a trial of traffic restrictions to reduce unnecessary driving.
Far from confining people to their neighbourhoods, however, the restrictions applied to specific parts of particular roads, with private cars limited to 100 free trips on these sections per year.
And where fears of overreach appear, they are closely followed by conspiracies about globalist elites (read: the United Nations, World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab or billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates).
These conspiracies bled into this year's Voice referendum, such as when Labor luminary Kim Beazley was falsely accused of foreshadowing a totalitarian republic.
Globalist conspiracies have also worked their way into the climate change debate, as was shown by a recent report in the lead-up to COP28.
The coming climate?
In Australia, the climate debate has often centred on the transition to renewable energy.
For example, when the Liddell Power Station in NSW was shut down this year, Nationals senator Matt Canavan was quick to claim this had led to a "lack of power" in the state.
However, experts explained that the notices issued by the market operator and cited by the senator simply signalled to the market that more generation would soon be required. Such notices were common, they said, adding that the forecast lack of supply could not be linked to the closure.
The Coalition and others also singled out a renewable energy farm in Queensland for allegedly "killing koalas", on the basis that its biodiversity management plan allowed for the use of "blunt force trauma".
Putting aside the fact that the Coalition approved the plan while in government, CheckMate could find no evidence that any koalas had been killed.
Crucially, the management plan also explained in detail how euthanasia was the last step in a long list of measures to avoid harming the animals.
Reporting by the ABC and the Guardian points to the weaponisation of environmental concerns to derail the transition to renewables. And with a new pledge to "transition away from" fossil fuels having been inked at COP28, climate change misinformation can be expected to continue ramping up.
Whatever comes next, former Sunrise host David "Kochie" Koch will surely be relieved if it's not about him.
For more fact checks and articles covering everything from medicine shortages to Robodebt deaths and Australian weapons sales, head to our page on the ABC website.
Edited by David Campbell
Got a fact that needs checking? Tweet us @ABCFactCheck or send us an email at factcheck@rmit.edu.au