246
votes
Accepted
Is it illegal to own a rabbit in Queensland unless you're a magician?
From Queensland's Department of Agriculture and Fisheries brochure Can I have a pet rabbit?,
Why are pet rabbits illegal in Queensland?
Rabbits are Australia's most destructive agricultural ...
- 2,844
129
votes
Accepted
Is this a satellite image of Australian bushfires?
No, this is not a real satellite image of Australia. This is a heatmap of the areas affected by Australia's brushfires compiled using composite satellite images from NASA between December and January ...
- 1,534
121
votes
Accepted
Is this a real photo of Australia?
No, it is not a real photo. It is computer rendering created by Anton Balazh, a graphic artist who lives in St. Petersburg, Russia
This graphic is available in his portfolio on Shutterstock:
...
- 4,658
112
votes
Accepted
Do drop bears exist?
I'm going to take a wild guess, and say the first time you heard of drop bears was from a recent Pharyngula post that mentioned them. I'm guessing a few people were introduced to the concept by that ...
- 140k
61
votes
Accepted
Are raptors in Australia intentionally spreading brush fires to smoke out prey?
This is a new paper published in a peer reviewed journal. It will take time before it garners the positive or negative citations that are the real peer review. In the mean time, our best option is to ...
- 12k
50
votes
Accepted
Does Australia produce unique 'specialty steel'?
The Australia-headquartered corporation BlueScope produces specialty coated steel.
For example see ZINCALUME® steel:
Next generation ZINCALUME® steel’s patented Activate® technology introduces ...
- 104k
47
votes
Were 50°C (122°F) days recorded across Australia during the 1800s?
This is true, but misleading
Temperatures over 50 were routinely measured in Australia in the 19th century, but it was due to the fact that Australia hadn't modernized its weather technology until ...
- 532
34
votes
Accepted
Is this comparison of wedge tailed eagles and bald eagles accurate?
American Bald Eagle - Haliaeetus leucocephalus
Claim #1: One of the smallest Eagles in the world.
False
Length of the American Bald Eagle is 94-106 cm (this is in the length range of 85 - 106 cm for ...
- 22.7k
33
votes
Accepted
Are the Australian bushfires in the same path as a proposed high speed rail line?
TLDR: No.
Initially, I wrote that this was just silly, but now I see it is worse than that. It is tautological.
Map of rail route on the right.
Perhaps the funniest idea of this conspiracy theory ...
- 140k
30
votes
Accepted
Is dancing at private New Year's Eve parties forbidden in WA, Australia?
Indeed, there is a state-government ban on dancing under certain conditions in Western Australia covering the 2021/2022 new year. The relevant legislation states:
These directions come into effect ...
- 7,948
26
votes
Do wombats share their burrows during fires?
Yes, they do share... but not specifically because of the fires or out of a sense of altruism.
According to AFP Fact Check:
University of Adelaide ecologist Dr. Michael Swinbourne told AFP via ...
- 714
22
votes
Accepted
Will the new Royal Adelaide Hospital have a Muslim-only prayer room while other religions share?
No, it's not true
As reported here, the new hospital does have a prayer room with washing facilities, but the prayer room isn't "exclusive" to Muslims. It merely accommodates Muslims, who ...
22
votes
Is this a satellite image of Australian bushfires?
BBC Report on recent Australian fire maps
One image shared widely by Twitter users, including by singer Rihanna, was interpreted as a map showing the live extent of fire spread, with large sections ...
- 321
20
votes
Accepted
Did Tanya Plibersek call ISIS "not a terrorist organisation"?
The claim in the picture is completely and utterly wrong for a number of reasons.
Tanya Pilbersek's maiden speech was in 1998, not 2002.
It does not mention the words ISIS or terrorist, or anything ...
- 57.4k
18
votes
Accepted
Were Boundary Streets in Queensland named as boundaries that Indigenous Australians were not allowed to cross?
This answer focuses specifically on Queensland's capital Brisbane, since its history is best documented, but the general principles would have applied to other towns as well.
1) Is it true that these ...
- 1,454
17
votes
Accepted
Have 5% of Australian Catholic priests been charged with child sexual abuse offences?
This one surprised me.
I had started writing an answer suggesting that this was most likely a misunderstanding of a claim by Professor Des Cahill to a Victorian state inquiry in 2012:
AT LEAST one ...
- 140k
17
votes
Is new nuclear power cheap?
That claim cannot really be proven or disproven, because there is not clear (or objective) what "cheap" means.
Nuclear power is fairly cheap, but it is not the cheapest.
As already mentioned in a ...
- 1,975
17
votes
Accepted
Was 10-year old Australian girl assigned homework to discuss erections and ejaculations with her father?
Short Answer
Erections and ejaculation are normal parts of coed sex education curriculum focused on puberty for puberty-aged kids.
Encouraging students of this age to talk with their parents about ...
- 2,131
16
votes
Have 5% of Australian Catholic priests been charged with child sexual abuse offences?
Referring to RMIT professor Des Cahill's 2012 analysis, the answer is yes to the '1 in 20' figure based on a population of 378 Corpus Christi priests graduating between 1940 and 1966 out of which 14 ...
- 22.7k
16
votes
Does Australia produce unique 'specialty steel'?
There are many specialty steel variants, and no doubt at least some of them are patented by Australian firms and therefore cannot be sourced from other places.
Also, the exact composition of the raw ...
- 3,904
14
votes
Do smoking-related deaths save cost to health service?
TLDR:
The claim does appear to have support from scientific studies.
Details:
The original claimant has tweeted a citation to support her claim:
It's true! Smokers die earlier so cost the health ...
- 401
12
votes
Does preferential voting disadvantage minor parties and independents?
I believe this question is based on a misunderstanding of the poorly-expressed claim (which seems to be plagiarised on many sites).
Compared with the distortions caused by First Past the Post voting, ...
- 140k
11
votes
Accepted
Is the Australia Post CEO the highest paid postal executive on the planet?
No, he ist not the best paid Post CEO.
Frank Appel the CEO of Deutsche Post AG (German Post) has a salary of 5.2 million Euro, which when considering the current exchange rate fluctuations within the ...
- 6,461
10
votes
Do Australian Aboriginal people have low intelligence and sexual control?
Intelligence
Australian Aboriginal people have a lower intelligence
This is a very vague question. What is intelligence? And how do you measure it? Is this question about some sort of innate, ...
tim♦
- 51.4k
10
votes
Accepted
Does Halal certification fund terrorism?
An report by the Australian Senate Standing Committees on Economics in 2015 titled "Third party certification of food" found this allegation to be untrue since there was no evidence of halal ...
- 22.7k
10
votes
Accepted
Did Dr Ulrich Mellinghoff Suggest 140Km/h would be a safer limit on Australian roads?
Does he exist and did he work for Mercedes Benz as a road safety expert? Yes
Here's a picture of him from Cars Guide in 2010
Dr Ulrich Mellinghoff (pictured) heads all safety development for ...
- 7,948
10
votes
Accepted
Are Australia's 5G radiation safety standards at least one hundred times laxer than of 6 other listed countries?
This looks, at best, to be a careless mistake if not an intentional lie. The key problem is that mW/m2 is no longer considered a meaningful standard.
Here are the Australian government's current ...
- 7,194
9
votes
Are supermarket shelves in Australia currently empty because of absenteeism due to COVID?
More or less true, although the issues seem to be specifically with the transport workforce, and mainly in certain parts of the country.
According to this recent ABC article there have been ...
- 828
8
votes
Was the Australian Bureau of Statistics website "attacked"?
It's not clear at the moment, because there is no public evidence that a DDoS of any description occurred in Australia on census night. And the people in a position to possess any nonpublic evidence ...
- 2,529
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible