Nothing exemplifies the government’s dishonest spin more starkly than their switching to per capita measurements and back again, depending, not on which is the most relevant measure, but on which obfuscates the truth the best.

The Department of Environment and Energy produce a Quarterly Update of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.

The June 2015 report all of a sudden started including per capita emissions in its summary. Why? Because emissions had increased in the first year after the abolition of the carbon price and they didn’t want you to notice so they said “Emissions per capita were at their lowest levels in 25 years.”

As many people have pointed out, that is because population has increased, not because emissions have decreased.

Plus it is entirely irrelevant as the carbon budget to stop catastrophic climate change doesn’t care how many of us there are, just how much pollution we are pumping into the atmosphere.

But when it comes to GDP, you will never hear the government mention per capita because if they did, they would have to admit that we have not had 28 years of uninterrupted growth and that we were in per capita recession from the second quarter of 2018 until the first quarter of this year.

Population increase is, once again, the thing that is masking the truth. GDP has grown continually mainly because of population growth but individuals have, on average, gone backwards lately which is a far more relevant measure of how our economy is going.

Another way the government tries to muddy the waters is by changing base years for comparison when talking about emissions reduction. Take this beauty from their latest report:

“Australia’s emissions for the year to March 2019 have declined 14.0 per cent since the peak in the year to June 2007 and were 0.5 per cent above emissions in 2000 and 11.7 per cent below emissions in 2005.”

When it came to our Paris commitment, by changing the base year to 2005 we made the numbers look a lot better without having to do a damn thing – 0.5% above 2000 levels equates to 11.7% below 2005 levels. Hey presto!

We have also heard Scott Morrison stir up anger in the community by talking about how much each of us is paying to foot the welfare bill – per capita is back in favour.

But they won’t mention how much we are spending on defence whose 2019-20 budget amounts to $105,853,573.77 per day. That’s over $1,500 a year for every person in Australia.

Don’t let the satisfied smirks distract you.

Australia, you are being conned.