The Handy Malleability of Malinformation

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have the worst health statistics, compared to the general population of their country, of any indigenous peoples in the world. From 2015 to 2017 (the most recent period for which indigenous life tables have been calculated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics), indigenous life expectancy at birth was 71.6 years for males and 75.6 years for females. That represents a life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians of 8.6 years for men and 7.8 years for women (there being no non-binary people when it comes to health statistics). These gaps are almost certainly a legacy of colonialism: after all, the ABS is one of the few government departments that does not “pay its respects to Indigenous Elders past, present and future” or “acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia”. The organisation is, by implication, racist—and its statistics are just one more example of the continuing violence of colonialism.

Salvatore ‘The Philistine’ Babones appears in every Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe

Don’t blame the statistics; blame the statistician. If the woke new world has taught us one thing, it is that maths is racist, and the white supremacists at the ABS have published some indigenous numbers that would turn a Greens senator red. For example, it turns out that the life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians narrowed by nearly one-quarter between 2005–07 and 2015–17. That’s pretty impressive for a period when indigenous Australians lacked a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament and executive government. Unbeknownst to the members of the First Nations National Constitutional Convention who met at Ayers Rock in 2017 to decry the “torment of our powerlessness” in their “Statement from the Heart”, their torment was in fact demonstrably declining. And their numbers were rapidly increasing.

The neocolonialist bigots at the ABS (all right, maybe that’s going too far) tell us that Australia’s indigenous population increased by 73 per cent between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, implying a compound annual population growth rate of 5.6 per cent. Assuming that rates of Aboriginal migration to Australia are quite low (the Love and Thoms cases notwithstanding), this implies a rate of natural increase that is substantially higher than that of any United Nations member state. If current trends continue, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population of Australia will overtake that of Australia as a whole within eighty years—at which point, everyone will be indigenous (and then some). That’s true even after accounting for Labor’s post-election decision to boost immigration after all. Big Australia will not be multicultural. It will be indigenous.

In short, official statistics show that things are finally looking up for indigenous Australians. And if we learned anything from Jacinda Ardern (Harvard Kennedy School Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow, Hauser Leader in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and former Supreme Leader of New Zealand), we learned that the government should always be our “single source of truth”. If you can’t trust a structurally racist government statistical bureaucracy, who can you trust?

As every Quadrant reader knows, there are lies, damned lies and statistics—or to use the present-day terms of art: misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. In this new dispensation, an honest mistake is mere misinformation. An intentional untruth is damned misinformation. And the most nefarious information of all—the kind for which Quadrant is infamous—is malinformation: true facts that have the capacity to cause harm. Malinformation like that contained in the Hunter Biden laptop, the transsexual Nashville Christian school shooter’s manifesto, and the January 6 Capitol security camera footage, is real, and all too dangerous for prime time. Or even the overnight slot. Such sources of malinformation are not news at all. Merely acknowledging their existence is a form of hate speech. Hate speech that happens to be true, but in the new dispensation, truth is no defence.

Thus when the racists at the Australian Institute of Criminology (inexplicably: also no acknowledgment of country) released the 2021-22 Deaths in Custody report, the highly-cited chart demonstrating that the rate of indigenous deaths in custody has long been roughly half the rate for non-indigenous Australians was removed from the website. It’s still there in the PDF report, page 17 (Figure 3), but without the precise numbers (which might accidentally be cited by the ABC). The relevant statistics are now buried on pages 51 and 52 in Appendix Table D5—far out of reach of even the most intrepid television news intern. Oh, and the new chart includes contextualising information to make it clear that although the rate of indigenous deaths in custody is much lower than that for non-indigenous Australians (malinformation), the rate of indigenous deaths relative to their overall concentration in the Australian population remains higher (ben-information? eu-information? Ardern-information?).

Also gone from the 2021-22 report is the chart showing that the single largest cause of indigenous deaths in custody is … crashing your car while attempting to avoid police custody. In other words: joy rides gone wrong. In the era of Black Lives Matter, this is definitely malinformation. No one should know that had indigenous Australians peacefully obeyed police orders to halt their stolen vehicles last year, the rate of indigenous deaths in “custody” would have been less than one-third the non-indigenous rate. Among indigenous people who die in actual custody (prison), most die of natural causes (more malinformation). It must be noted, sadly, that several indigenous prisoners commit suicide almost every year—albeit at a rate roughly half that of non-indigenous prisoners. Kudos to the Klansmen at the AIC for letting that dangerous fact slip through.

All things considered, the most effective way to reduce the rate of indigenous deaths in custody may be simply to parole prisoners when they get sick. They’re going to die anyway; why have them die in prison? May as well let Medicare take the blame. Enterprising justice ministers, take note: online access to Quadrant policy advice is well worth the online subscription price of just $98 a year. Or go all-in on a print subscription, and you’ll get your policy prescriptions on the first of every month, delivered straight to your home or office. At $118 a year, the combined print-and-digital subscription is designed “for avid readers of leading ideas from Australia’s brightest”. Subscribe now, and Keith will throw in two pages a month of exceptional American philistinism at no extra charge.

The great thing about the term “malinformation” is that it is so very malleable. Misinformation and disinformation can be fact-checked; malinformation can only be values-checked. Thus although the 73 per cent increase in Australia’s indigenous population over the last decade is eu-information in the hands of the mainstream media, it is malinformation in the hands of the Philistine. The eu-narrative promoted by the ABC, SBS, the Conversation and the ABS itself is that increasing social acceptance of indigenous Australians and the prospect of being “recognised” by a constitutional “voice” have reduced the fear associated with coming out as indigenous. The corresponding mal-narrative that the rapid increase in people self-identifying as indigenous is spurious and driven primarily by the new white (and Asian?) fashion for discovering Aboriginal roots is found only in Quadrant.

In its article analysing the boom in indigenous self-identification, the ABS offers eight distinct arguments in favour of the eu-narrative. It does not deign (dare?) to mention the mal-narrative. Yet the circumstantial mal-evidence is overwhelming: the new indigenous people live mainly in the capital city suburbs and rarely speak indigenous languages. In greater Sydney, only 479 indigenous people report speaking indigenous languages at home, while 61,814 primarily speak English at home and 1716 indigenous Sydneysiders report that they primarily communicate in a foreign language (neither English nor indigenous). That’s right: far more indigenous people in Sydney speak foreign languages at home with their families than speak indigenous languages. Statistics for Melbourne tell a similar story.

An important corollary of the mal-thesis that an increasing number of essentially non-indigenous people are rushing to claim indigenous status (we’re looking at you, Bruce Pascoe) is that indigenous health statistics would show rapid improvement—as indeed they have. With careful research, it might be possible to tease out and cordon off this effect, but the peer review system does not admit the (mal-) possibility that indigenous self-identification could be anything other than genuine. That assumption may lead to an incorrect conclusion that the indigenous health gap is disappearing, but such conclusions are themselves malinformation, and thus unlikely to be reported. Every right-thinking person knows that indigenous health can only be improved by indigenous sovereignty. A racist might point out that life expectancy in sovereign Papua New Guinea is only sixty-six years, but that’s malinformation, and can safely be ignored.