Australia’s chief statistician, David Gruen, has defended the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ public debunking of far-right claims of “mass migration”, as he said the independent agency “stands ready to respond” to “egregious misrepresentations” of its data.
The biennial World Stats Day on 20 October comes amid a rising tide of mis- and disinformation around the world that has propelled often anonymous statistical bodies and their officials into the public eye.
While regimes in countries such as China and Russia have long massaged official data to match political agendas, Donald Trump’s brazen sacking of America’s labour statistics chief after claiming jobs figures were “rigged” shocked public officials across the world, including in Canberra.
Gruen, who was appointed head of the ABS in 2019, said reliable data was a pillar of an informed debate and good policymaking.
“It degrades the democracy if the stats agency is not independent.”
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While wary of compromising this independence, he said the ABS was prepared to step in when statements being made in the public arena using agency data was “flat-out contradicted by the statistical evidence”.
The ABS took the relatively unusual step on 22 August of issuing a press statement publicly contradicting rightwing claims which misused overseas arrivals figures in order to make “inaccurate conclusions” to support inflated claims of mass migration. The figures count people coming in and out of the country, but not necessarily staying.
The Institute of Public Affairs, a rightwing thinktank, in turn accused the Albanese government of “weaponising” the ABS in order to “censor” its views.
Gruen rejected those claims, saying the decision to release a clarifying media statement was made by ABS experts within the division responsible for issuing the data.
“To claim that we were censoring anyone is an odd claim, because nothing’s being censored. We went on publishing all the same data. We simply were making a statement about its appropriate use.”
Indeed, the IPA has since continued to make the same claims of “record” migration levels, despite the ABS migration data showing a clear downward trend.
Gruen said this recent episode highlighted the “trade-offs” of inserting the bureau into hotly contested policy areas.
“You don’t want to be seen to be taking sides; I mean, you are taking sides in the sense that you’re trying to take the side of truth, and you’re trying to take the side of explaining what the statistics say and what they don’t say,” he said.
“Provided we can be clear about and open about what our statistics say, there is a sense in which we want to leave it to others to do the interpretation and draw conclusions, if you like.
“But we don’t want those conclusions to be flat-out contradicted by the statistical evidence.”
