Danna Vale, Leadership, Statistics….
This makes me ill in so many ways, but I’m going to stick to just two of them here.
According to this story in today’s smh government backbencher (and let’s not forget, former minister) Danna Vale has publicly commented
“I have read…comments by a certain imam from the Lakemba Mosque [who] actually said that Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years’ time,” said Mrs Vale, MP for the southern Sydney seat of Hughes.
“I didn’t believe him at the time. But…look at the birthrates and you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence by 100,000 abortions every year…You multiply that by 50 years. That’s 5 million potential Australians we won’t have here.”
Where is leadership?
This is a horrible and racist thing to say. Firstly to simply refer to the inflammatory comments of “a certain [un-named] imam” and imply from this that these are the thoughts, feelings and policies of all Muslims in Australia is irresponsible in the extreme, particularly given recent events. And let no one forget that Danna Vale is the member for Hughes, an electorate which takes in large parts of “The Shire”, though not Cronulla itself.
And that a member of parliament would refer to “5 million potential Australians”, which comes from the (misguided) assumption that Muslim women don’t have abortions and the (vile) assumption that Muslims aren’t even Australian, is pretty horrible as well.
But what I shall be going back to the newspaper looking out for today is a statement by our prime minister, pointing out that trolls like this are unacceptable. I’d like him to prove me wrong, but my guess is I’m going to be waiting quite some time.
“I don’t believe those statistics”
You see this 100 000 abortions number bandied around all the time in Australia. It’s a nice big scary number that makes anyone with a heart feel vaguely squeamish, yes, myself included. The only problem with it is that by any reasonable assessment it is almost certainly far wide of the mark.
The problem is that statistics on abortions per se are not collected in Australia. As this research brief from the Parliament of Australia Parliamentary Library outlines, the figure is generally taken from statistics on two particular procedures which map to items on the Medical Benefits Schedule. The big problem is that these procedures can be carried out in the context of a pregnancy termination or as the result of miscarriage or fetal death, or other gynecological conditions not even related to pregnancy. And there is no way of looking at those statistics and determining how many are in fact abortions: the data simply isn’t there. Three researchers are quoted, with their estimate for what proportion of Medicare claims for these item numbers are for abortions varying between 25% and 90%.
The brief goes on to talk about other methods of coming up with this figure, all of them problematic. Oh, and the number mentioned most often in this brief is 75 000, not 100 000, but what’s 30% inaccuracy when no journalist is ever going to bother to pull you up on it?
Oh, and I had to draw on the years of study for my Masters in Communications (or whatever it is journalists do these days) to find that brief: I googled “100 000 abortions” and Australia. It’s the first hit, can’t miss it 
Update
Amanda Vanstone, good for her!, has come out and hammered Danna Vale about her intemperate comments, saying:
“I mean, I just don’t know where this idea has come from. It’s just not possible … I might remind everybody that unless you’re a full-blood indigenous Australian, you’ve got migrant blood in your veins and the only thing we’re talking about is how long ago did your lot come versus my lot.”
Hear bloody hear.
John Howard yet to comment, despite a number of calls for him to do so.
