Saturday, June 11, 2016

What you can do when you hide abortion statistics

This is interesting. Seems the Australia government has been making stuff up. Government officials there have said that smoking rates have gone down in Australia since the government introduced plain packaging on cigarettes. But that isn't actually true. Smoking rates have actually gone up in Australia:
"The most recent national survey of smoking rates published by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 2014 does not appear to indicate plain packaging helped accelerate the 22-year downward trend. Instead, it suggests youth smoking may have increased over the 2010­–13 period it covers, with reported daily smoking among 12 to 17 year olds climbing from 2.5 to 3.4 per cent. 
Indeed, despite all the publicity surrounding the introduction of the new packs, the survey found the percentage of Australians citing health warnings as a reason for smoking less or quitting fell from 15.2 per cent in 2010 to 11.1 in 2013. 
Separate data collected across four of Australia’s six states suggest smoking rates actually increased between 2012­–13. 
“The Australian government finds itself in an embarrassing situation having trumpeted its policy only to find that despite all the rhetoric that tobacco prevalence didn’t fall,” says economist Sinclair Davidson, an economist at Melbourne’s RMIT University and a plain-packaging critic.
Now on the other side of the world, namely here in in Ontario, where we have the Kathleen Wynn government, Ontario hides anything and everything related to abortion. Suppose that, Ontario Liberal politicians decided to make something up about abortion? For instance, what if they announced that abortion rates had gone down in Ontario? We would have no way of knowing if that was true or not, would we?

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