Independent Senator Fraser Anning has frequently used Twitter to campaign against those migrants and asylum seekers he claims come to Australia "for a life of permanent handouts". He has told Parliament: "Free welfare and public housing attracts the very worst type of migrants: transnational parasites who travel not in search of opportunity, but in search of a free ride at everyone else's expense." In May 2018 he tweeted: "It's no coincidence 56 per cent of Australia's working-age Muslims are not in the labour force." Are more than half of Australia's Muslims, who could be in the labour force, in fact, not in the labour force? RMIT ABC Fact Check found Senator Anning is wrong. An analysis of data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed 43 per cent of working-age Muslims were not in the labour force ' significantly less than the figure of 56 per cent cited by Senator Anning. It also revealed that the high Muslim non-participation rate ' which compares to a national working-age non-participation rate of 24 per cent ' is almost entirely due to the large number of Muslim women who are not working.
Verdict: Wrong