Right wing media commentator Andrew Bolt launched his new interview show The Bolt Report on Channel 10 on May 8 with a classic display of the use of phony statistics.
Interviewing Afghan refugee Riz Wakil, Bolt claimed that a five-year long survey of Afghan migrants showed “something like 94% are on Centrelink benefits, only 9% actually are employed”.
Writing on May 16, CBS Business Net's Phil Dobbie said that despite his best efforts he could not unearth the source of Bolt’s statistics. However, he looked at OECD data and found that while Afghan migrants are suffering unemployment it is not at anything like the rate that Bolt claims.
The OECD said there were nearly 10,000 Afghanistan-born adults in Australia in the last census. Thirty-two percent of them were working. This compares to 58% of the overall Australian adult population.
The reasons for this are easy to spot. Afghani migrants are twice as likely to be employed if they have secondary education; but less than half of them have it.
While education helps there are still gaps. Dobbie said: “Forty two percent of secondary educated Afghanistan-born residents have a job, compared to 74% of secondary educated Australian born people.” Gender issues are also present: “Only 11% of Afghan women without secondary education were employed, compared to 30% of men.”
It is touching that Bolt is so concerned about Afghan migrants, even if he can’t get his figures right. “At the time of the last census," Dobbie said, “those born in Afghanistan accounted for 0.07% of the entire adult population”.
So even a 94% unemployment rate in such a small part of the population would not affect broader society.
Bolt himself is the son of Dutch migrants to Australia, but does not apply his statistical approach to his own background. “As we all know, you can do anything with statistics,” Dobbie points out.
“For example, a male migrant from his parent’s homeland is only 1.3 times more likely to be employed than an Afghan male. Perhaps we need to stop Dutch migration too.”