The claim

Federal MP Bob Katter's response to a question about the same-sex marriage survey has turned heads across the nation, and around the world.

In a doorstop interview this month, Mr Katter said people were "entitled to their sexual proclivities, let there be a thousand blossoms bloom" before his demeanour darkened and he declared he would spend no more time on the topic.

Sorry, this video has expired Watch Bob Katter make the claim

"Because in the meantime, every three months a person is torn to pieces by a crocodile in north Queensland," he said.

Does Mr Katter's claim check out?

RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict

Mr Katter is wrong.

Experts told Fact Check there was no evidence to support the claim that crocodiles were killing people every three months in Queensland.

Long-term figures from the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection show a rate of one fatal crocodile attack every three years from 1985 to now.

These figures accord with data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which is only available to 2016.

The department's data shows fatal crocodile attacks in Queensland have increased in recent years, but not to the rate Mr Katter claims.

In the past 10 years there were six deaths, a rate of one every 20 months. There was one death per year in the past three years.

And even if Mr Katter was only considering very recent deaths in making his claim, the two most recent fatal attacks occurred in March and October of this year, seven months apart.

Crocodiles in Australia

Fact Check considers the phrase "torn to pieces" to mean a person has died.

Australia is home to two species of crocodile — the freshwater crocodile and the saltwater crocodile, also known as the estuarine crocodile.

Saltwater crocodiles are far more dangerous to humans than freshwater crocodiles. ( ABC News: Xavier La Canna )

Management of human–crocodile conflict has largely been focused on education and awareness programs such as Crocwise, which is implemented across the north of Australia.

In a statement sent to Fact Check, a spokesperson for the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection said freshwater crocodiles posed considerably less risk to humans than estuarine crocodiles.

"There is no known case in Queensland of any person being killed by a freshwater crocodile," the spokesperson said.

Accordingly, Fact Check has assessed Mr Katter's claim in relation to attacks on humans by estuarine crocodiles.

Mr Katter's party, the Katter's Australian Party, supports greater controls over crocodiles, and introduced legislation into the Queensland Parliament in May 2017.

The then member for Dalrymple, Shane Knuth, said the Safer Waterways Bill aimed "to eliminate from our waterways all crocodiles that pose a threat to human life while protecting crocodiles from becoming endangered as a species".

Mr Katter's recent claim means he has revised a previous assertion in Federal Parliament that crocodiles in north Queensland were killing almost one person a year.

Dying from a crocodile attack

Adam Britton, a senior research associate at the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University, told Fact Check there were certain circumstances where the cause of death in a suspected crocodile attack may be ambiguous.

"Sometimes you can't be certain about how a person has died, and it's necessary to make assumptions," Dr Britton said.

Croc country, as defined by the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection. ( Queensland DEHP )

"There are certain things a coroner can look for, like the amount of tearing of the skin or whether the water in a person's lungs is clear and from the surface of the water, or murky and from the bottom, which would imply they have been dragged down."

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Queensland Coroner's Court told Fact Check a death by crocodile attack would be categorised as "violent or unnatural" — a category which includes drowning and water-related deaths.

The spokesperson also specified that a medical cause of death includes two parts — the disease or condition leading directly to death, and then any other significant conditions which contribute to the fatal outcome.



In the case of a crocodile attack, the first part of a medical cause of death may be drowning, while the second part may include crocodile attack.

The basis for the claim

When asked to provide evidence supporting his claim, Mr Katter's office sent Fact Check a list of recent crocodile attacks in Australia.

The list was derived from an article from AAP, which did not include sources for its data. On the list supplied to Fact Check, one recent attack appears to have been added by Mr Katter's staff.

"Bob has worked out his claim based on an average over time," an email to Fact Check said.

The list referred to 14 attacks occurring from May 2013 to October 2017. Of these attacks, only four took place in Queensland, three of them fatal.

Using these figures, the average rate of Queensland crocodile attack deaths is one every 18 months.

Where official statistics are found

The Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection publishes an official register of saltwater crocodile attacks in the state.

The department told Fact Check it verified crocodile attacks based on a number of sources, including direct reports via its hotline, police advice and coroner reports.

"EHP also investigates media reports of crocodile attacks and, when the circumstances can be independently verified, these are included in EHP's database," the statement said.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics also publishes crocodile attack fatalities as part of its causes of death data, which is released yearly.

While Mr Katter referred specifically to north Queensland in his claim, both the department's register and the ABS data cover the whole of the state of Queensland.

Professor Craig Franklin, from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland, told Fact Check estuarine crocodiles lived primarily in North Queensland and the location of attacks reflected that.

Fact Check therefore considers it is appropriate to use state-wide data in analysing Mr Katter's claim.

What the official statistics show

The Department of Environment and Heritage Protection register starts in 1985. Between then and now there have been 33 crocodile attacks in Queensland, 11 of them fatal.

The department's data shows there has been one attack every year over the 33-year period, and one death every three years.

While this is nowhere near Mr Katter's claim of a person being torn to pieces every three months, the data does show an increase in the rate of both attacks and fatalities over recent years.

According to the register there were 16 attacks in Queensland in the 20 years from 1985 to 2004, four of them fatal.

In the 13 years since 2005 there have been 17 attacks, seven of them fatal.

The statistics do not support Mr Katter's claim, whatever time period is selected.

The rate of crocodile attacks over the past decade is one every 10 months, and the rate of fatalities is one every 20 months. Looking at the figures from the past five years, the rates are the same.

Over the past three years, the rate of attacks is one every six months, and the rate of fatalities is one every year.



In 2017 there have been three attacks, two of them fatal. These most recent fatal attacks occurred seven months apart, in March and October.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the ABS told Fact Check that according to its Causes of Death data there were nine crocodile attack deaths in Queensland between 1985 and 2016.

This is the same number as shown on the department's register for that period. The register's total of 11 deaths since 1985 includes two deaths in 2017.

A 2017 research paper published by the CSIRO, Patterns of human-crocodile conflict in Queensland: a review of historical estuarine crocodile management, contains earlier figures.

The paper, whose authors include four staff from the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, said estuarine crocodile attacks on humans (non-fatal and fatal) have been reliably recorded by the State Government since 1971.

It found that between 1971 and 2015, there were 35 recorded crocodile attacks, 12 of which were fatal.

While confirming that attacks have risen in recent years, the paper said a far greater proportion of attacks were fatal between 1971 and 1995 than between 1996 and 2015.

"There has been a significant increase in the overall rate of crocodile attacks recorded over time with a mean of 1.3 per year since 1996, most of which were non-fatal (84%)," the report said. "Prior to 1996, the mean rate of attack was 0.4 per year (1971–1995), with most attacks being fatal (80%)," it said.

The department's figures show that since 2016, there have been a further four attacks, three of them fatal, giving a total of 39 attacks and 15 fatalities since 1971, at a rate of an attack every 14 months and a death every three years.

A non-fatal attack occurred at Cape Tribulation in far north Queensland on November 28, 2017. Fact Check assesses claims based on information available at the time the claim is made, and as this attack happened after Mr Katter's claim it has not been taken into account.

Sorry, this video has expired Footage of a recent crocodile attack in far north Queensland

Population changes

According to the CSIRO paper, the human populations of the two largest cities in north Queensland, Townsville and Cairns, increased by 25 per cent between 2005 and 2015.

The report also noted the population of estuarine crocodiles in Queensland had increased since becoming protected in 1974, though experts told Fact Check there had been limited crocodile population surveys for a number of years.

The CSIRO researchers found increasing human and crocodile populations in the Northern Territory to be related to an increase in attacks.



The Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection also commented on the issue of population changes when it made a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into the May 2017 Safer Waterways Bill introduced by Katter's Australian Party.

The submission found increased human populations in north Queensland led to more people interacting with crocodiles.



"The rapid and significant expansion of the human population, the popularity of water-based activities in croc-country, and the suspected recovery in the crocodile population have resulted in an increased likelihood of crocodile sightings and physical interactions between humans and crocodiles," the submission said.

Dr Britton told Fact Check that despite increasing populations, the risk crocodiles posed to humans was decreasing.

"It looks to us as well that the risk is actually going down per person. As you get more people moving into these areas and the population is increasing, even though the crocodile population is also increasing, the relative risk to people is not going up," Dr Britton said.

What the experts say

Dr Britton said Mr Katter's claim was "wildly inaccurate".

"The statement [Mr Katter] made, that someone is being ripped apart every three months, is just not true," he said.

"On average, the number of croc attacks in Queensland is actually extremely low."

Dr Britton said there would always be a risk posed to humans by crocodiles but education, awareness and management policies implemented by Australian governments had been successful in minimising this risk.

"You only have to look at other countries where saltwater crocodiles are present to see that the number of attacks per capita is vastly higher than here in Australia because they don't have a particularly well-developed, or even any kind of management program that keeps people safe," he said.

"So when Bob Katter is out there trying to tell people that the policies aren't working, I think he's completely missing the point and completely ignoring all the great work that's happening here to try and mitigate the risk."

Dr Britton said Mr Katter's repeated push for crocodile culls was potentially dangerous.

"If Mr Katter is implying to people that if you remove a crocodile from an area that it's suddenly safe to go swimming, you might actually see more people being attacked by crocodiles," he said.

"They're ignoring the advice that we're giving them about being safe around crocodiles."

Professor Franklin, who has been studying crocodiles since 1990 and currently runs the largest crocodile tracking program in the world, told Fact Check Mr Katter's statement was "incorrect".

"The evidence would say that information is incorrect — it's false," Professor Franklin said.

"Attacks are so few and so irregular that to look at patterns is difficult — statistically it would be very difficult to make or draw a conclusion."

Professor Franklin added that most attacks were the result of human misadventure, and that a crocodile cull was not the answer.

"It's a sad situation, but the take-home message is we need to do more to educate people."

The Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection declined to comment specifically on Mr Katter's claim.

"EHP cannot comment on Mr Katter's remarks other than to provide its own verified data," the department said.

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