ABC creates Promise Tracker unit to monitor Abbott government’s pledges
The ABC has built out its fact checking department launching a new Promise Tracker, monitoring the progress of the 66 key pledges made by the Coalition before last year’s general election.
Led by Fact Check editor Russell Skelton the new website will look “forensically” at the progress of the key promises made by Prime Minister Tony Abbott and colleagues before the election, with John Barron to deliver regular updates on their progress on TV and radio.
So far the tracker shows 44 of the pledges are “in progress” whilst 12 of them have been delivered upon.However, six are categorised as having been broken, including a pledge not to cut funds to the ABC or SBS.
Whilst it is a first of its kind in Australia it is similar to US site PolitiFact’s Obameter which tracks the progress of the US President. The Fact Check department was launched in the run up to last September’s poll to check the accuracy of claims made by candidates.
Skelton said: “There was so much emphasis in the campaign on how the Coalition would do things differently and keep trust with the electorate.
“The public perception is that a lot of promises have been broken. But when you go through it forensically, the perception is different to the reality.”
The interactive timeline shows the progress on issues, with the majority of those in progress or delivered on coming in May’s federal budget.
Barron delivered his first update from the new service last night on ABC’s 7pm news bulletin.
I applaud the ABC for its continued investment in this area of data visualisation and data journalism. This is an incredibly important field of content development, let alone information analysis, and I for one would like to see the concept pushed harder, with the impact of these policy outcomes (via kept and broken promises) also visualised to emphasis factors such dollars invested (or lost), community impact (a tough one to express without avoiding subjectivity) and even the ramifications on future or concurrent policy initiatives.
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saw it last night, looked good.. they won’t have enough space to list their broken promises is my main concern ..
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A clever way to be unbiased at the politically exposed strata.
As Andrew notes above, quantifying the positive and negative impacts of the kept and broken promises would be an interesting exercise.
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If they’d had it up and running for the previous Federal Government, it would have gone totally into melt-down!
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Two questions (I already know the answer to):
a) Why now, when we’ve got a conservative government?
b) Will it continue when Labor eventually gets back in, be it the next election or beyond?
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Probably not the cleverest government relations strategy ever devised! What’s wrong with just shoving a burnt stick in Malcolm’s eye?
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Agree with a couple of comments about re: visualisation. As a ‘news skimmer’ as many of us are becoming, nice quick and easy refernce.
@ the print guy, 44 ‘in progress’, 12 ‘delivered’ upon and 6 ‘broken’, not sure those stats back up what you’re saying unless I’m missing something? Or does ‘In progress’ mean it could still be broken because I read that as they are in progress of being delivered?
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ABC working hard for no further cuts.
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Robbo (3.15) the ABC fact checking started under the previous government and has continued under the Right-Wing government we have now.
As for how long it continues, I would expect that would be determined by how popular it proved to be.
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Track all the ‘facts’ you want. But once the people lose trust it’s over Julia oh and you too Tony.
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The ABC PromiseTracker is not a ‘first if its kind’ as stated in this article. Australian based http://www.PromiseLocker.com launched in March 2013 and has been recording, tracking and sharing election promises since before the last WA state election. Ultimately PromiseLocker is a more sustainable model because it allows promises made by any politician, anywhere to be crowd-sourced by millions of people, instead of a few major policies being tracked by a one or two journalists.
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