The claim

"Our constituents are the poorest, that's one thing we do know and so we are always looking out for them," Deputy Leader of the Nationals Barnaby Joyce told ABC TV's Q&A.

Do the Nationals really represent the nation's poorest electorates as Mr Joyce says?

The verdict

Mr Joyce's claim checks out.

Experts agree that there is no "gold standard" in measuring poverty.

Fact Check was unable to find one dataset that definitively measures poverty in relation to electorates.

However, three separate datasets all indicate that the Nationals' electorates are on average poorer or more disadvantaged than those represented by Labor and the Liberal Party.

How to assess the claim

Roger Wilkins, principal research fellow at the Melbourne Institute which publishes the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, told Fact Check that Mr Joyce's claim could be interpreted narrowly, in terms of income, or more broadly, by taking account of additional indicators of disadvantage.

"For example, a person who is in poor health, has a disability, generally has higher income needs than someone who's in good health, so if you were looking at disadvantage you'd want to take into account things like prevalence of disability as well as income, if you wanted to look at where people are located who have the most need, it is a function of not just their income, but their health and the like," Associate Professor Wilkins told Fact Check.

Sorry, this video has expired Watch Barnaby Joyce make the claim on Q&A.

Ben Phillips, principle research fellow for the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) at the University of Canberra says that there's no accepted gold standard of measuring poverty.

"They're all probably far from perfect really," he said.

So to assess Mr Joyce's claim, Fact Check used poverty line income data from NATSEM and disadvantage data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and from the Dropping off the Edge 2015 report, commissioned jointly by Jesuit Social Services and Catholic Social Services Australia.

Most of this data was not immediately available in relation to the electorates, so Fact Check used statistical methods provided by the ABS to match the data to electorates.

Electorates held by Nationals MPs

The Nationals typically represent seats in rural or regional areas. ( Carmen Brown )

Since the 2013 election, the Nationals have held seven electorates in NSW, which includes Mr Joyce's seat of New England, two electorates in Victoria and six in Queensland.

Liberal MP Ian Macfarlane recently announced his intention to defect to the Nationals party room, which would make his Queensland seat of Groom a Nationals seat.

However, Fact Check tests claims against the data available at the time they are made, and as Mr Joyce made the claim on September 28, 2015, Mr Macfarlane's seat will be considered a Liberal seat in this fact check.

Measuring poverty by income

NATSEM has conducted research to analyse the prevalence of child poverty in areas throughout Australia to "provide important evidence relating to the current and future wellbeing of Australia's children".

The report, co-authored by Mr Phillips in 2013 for UnitingCare, entitled Poverty, Social Exclusion and Disadvantage in Australia, used data from the 2011 Census and from the ABS Survey of Income and Housing to determine the number of children in poverty, as well as the total number of people in poverty, in each local government area (LGA) in Australia.

However, Mr Phillips told Fact Check some LGAs were "too unusual" in a statistical sense and a result, most of the LGAs in the Northern Territory electorate of Lingiari, held by Labor, were excluded from NATSEM's analysis.

For this reason, Fact Check was unable to include Lingiari in this analysis.

Fact Check translated the results of NATSEM's report to the electorate level, using methods from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

However, the electorates of Canberra and Fraser (both represented by Labor MPs) were excluded by the ABS, due to problems with their size.

The results show the Nationals are well-represented in the top 10, and even in the top 20, but analysing whether their electorates are on the whole poorer than those represented by other parties is not as simple as that.

Analysing the data

Jake Olivier, Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales' School of Mathematics and Statistics, says there are several ways to look at this data in relation to Mr Joyce's claim.

"It wouldn't make a lot of sense to just look at sheer numbers and poverty strictly, because the Nationals don't have as many electorates as [the Liberals and Labor]," Associate Professor Olivier told Fact Check.

Associate Professor Olivier took Fact Check's scaled analysis of NATSEM's LGA poverty data, and put it into a box plot, which is "a visual display of the general distribution of the proportion in each electorate who are in poverty".

Smaller parties and independents, which hold only one electorate each, were excluded from the analysis, because "you can't really make comparisons if there's only one data point".

Box plot comparing the range of poverty experienced across electorates represented by the ALP, Liberals and Nationals. ( Associate Professor Jake Olivier )

"If you look at the box plot, the Nationals are pretty much above Labor and Liberal ... the median for the National Party is 16.48% and to put that in a bit of perspective, that's larger than the third quartile for any of the other [major parties]," Associate Professor Olivier said.

"From a proportional perspective, there are more in poverty in Nationals electorates than there are in the other two."

Using the data supplied by Fact Check, Associate Professor Olivier estimated that around 15 per cent of constituents in National Party electorates fall under the poverty line, compared with 13 per cent for Labor and 12 per cent for Liberal.

"If you want to talk statistical significance, there's a statistically significant effect between the differences," he said.

Measuring poverty beyond income

The Australian Bureau of Statistics produces data on disadvantage for areas in Australia (the Index of Relative Socio-Economic Disadvantage or IRSD) based on information from the census.

"It takes into account not just income, but also other dimensions of disadvantage ... the proportion of people working in low-paid occupations, the proportion of people unemployed, one-parent families, disability, people who don't speak English well, educational attainment," Associate Professor Wilkins said.

The ABS takes small geographical areas and gives each a score in the index: the lower the score, the more disadvantaged the area.

It then divides the areas into ten groups based on their score relative to the whole of Australia, with group one being most disadvantaged and group 10 being least disadvantaged.

The ABS publishes these results by electorate, but this is not sufficient to analyse which electorates are the most disadvantaged.

Associate Professor Wilkins calculated the mean, or average, grouping of each electorate for Fact Check.

The lower the score by this measure, the higher the disadvantage.

Associate Professor Olivier put these figures into a box plot and estimated the average score for the Nationals, Labor and the Liberals.

In this instance, a lower position on the box plot indicates a higher level of disadvantage.

He said that the results suggested that electorates represented by the National party have a lower score - showing greater disadvantage - on average than Labor and the Liberals.

A box plot comparing the average IRSD scores of each party. ( Associate Professor Jake Olivier )

This map shows the ranking of electorates based on Fact Check's analysis of NATSEM data and the ABS Index of Socio-economic Disadvantage.

Dropping off the Edge

Tony Vinson, co-author of the Dropping off the Edge 2015 (DOTE) report says that the best markers of disadvantage throughout Australia are "rates of adult criminal convictions and prison admissions [which] are consistently to the fore together with unemployment, no household access to the internet, lack of post-school qualifications, young adults (17-24 years) not engaged in full-time work or education/training, and juvenile offending".

His report uses data from the 2011 census, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Social services, NAPLAN and state government agencies to rank areas within states by their level of disadvantage.

Professor Vinson told Fact Check that comparisons across state lines are not possible due to "some generally minor administrative differences employed by state authorities in the classification of data".

"The listing of the overall vulnerability scores at least makes possible consideration of how many places within an electorate appear, say, among a state's 40 most disadvantaged places."

In Queensland, DOTE classifies the 40 most disadvantaged areas using the ABS's statistical local area (SLA) geographical definition, which according to the ABS are "Local Government Areas (LGAs) or part thereof".

In NSW and Victoria, the report classifies disadvantaged areas using postcodes.

Fact Check once again used ABS methods to re-proportion these result to the electorate level.

Associate Professor Olivier took Fact Check's data, and put it into what's called "a zero-inflated negative binomial model" to estimate the proportion of each electorate that lives in one of the 40 most disadvantaged areas of each state.

The proportion column contains the estimated proportion of the electorate for each party in each state in one of DOTE's 40 most disadvantaged areas.

The confidence interval columns give an estimate of where the true proportion might fall, within the lower and upper proportions.

New South Wales Victoria Queensland 95% confidence interval 95% confidence interval 95% confidence interval Party Proportion Lower Upper Proportion Lower Upper Proportion Lower Upper ALP 0.156 0.072 0.339 0.120 0.078 0.185 0.092 0.053 0.158 Liberal 0.093 0.031 0.277 0.131 0.065 0.264 0.136 0.092 0.199 National 0.243 0.091 0.644 0.271 0.089 0.823 0.240 0.150 0.384

Using the same method, Associate Professor Olivier also calculated the odds of an electorate having no one who lives in one of the top 40 disadvantaged areas.

In NSW he found that the odds of having no one in a Liberal electorate who lives in one of these disadvantaged area is 7.9 times that of a National electorate.

For Labor, the ratio is smaller at 1.9.

In Queensland the ratios are 1.3 and 3.3 for Labor and the Liberals respectively.

As Victoria doesn't have any Nationals electorates without postcodes on DOTE's list of the top 40 most disadvantaged, this comparison could not be made for that state.

However, he said that there was significant overlap with the confidence intervals in this analysis, and that "virtually none of the comparisons are what may be considered statistically significant."

Whilst there are weaknesses in the analysis of the electorates with regards to the poverty line and disadvantage indicators, Associate Professor Olivier said the results always seem to point towards the Nationals' electorates being poorer or more disadvantaged.

"It doesn't matter which data it is, no matter how it's analysed, it's always in the direction that the Nationals have more of the disadvantaged or poor," he said.

Sources