There have been many instances of Kalbar ‘massaging the truth’ about community engagement. A crack up was their claims on page 8 of their 2020-2021 Annual Report to have held community meetings and drop-in sessions throughout the year.
Seriously Kalbar – how big are your noses?
The same page goes on to talk about the VOCANIQ SURVEY
The Vocaniq survey is far from scientific and the company’s claims to be an offshoot of CSIRO brings the reputation of what was once an illustrious organisation into disrepute. Vocaniq works on behalf of mining companies and results of their surveys in other areas indicate that company employees are strongly encouraged to participate and will heavily influence the results – especially in smaller communities.
(Unfortunately the links on their website that are supposed to take you to results of the Kalbar surveys take you to those from a survey for KCGM-Northern Star Resources in Kalgoorlie.)
Vocaniq offers people ‘financial inducements’ to participate – hardly something that will encourage reliable survey results!
Financial inducements for what Vocaniq called their ‘Anchor Survey’ from April to May 2021 included;
- For ‘engaged’ (262 online participants), responses resulted in a $10 donation to the company of the respondent’s choosing, whereas
- For ‘street recruits’ (181 shoppers) the survey takers set up outside ‘Cheap as Chips’ in Bairnsdale (and similar locations in other areas) and gave people $20 in cash to take the survey with the ‘survey taker’ standing over their shoulder guiding them on how to respond.
If those inducements were not enough to show the ‘dodginess’ of the survey, the way the results were presented compounded concerns about the supposed ‘independence’ of Vocaniq.
A very cursory ‘one-pager’ of results from the ‘Anchor Survey’ was presented on Vocaniq’s website (http://voconiqlocalvoices.com/en/results-kalbar/?fbclid=IwAR08L68-SNDOSK0i4jqM-zQ8ejmZmnUVY9LTZm7s9foOd55cUu-dcRywWgQ) and Kalbar held a ‘webinar’ in September 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEPmt3Xd9ww)
that gave a little more detail about the results
Click the image to access the feedback about the April-May2021 Survey
(There is no information about a follow up survey done in October-November 2021 survey despite Jozsef Patarica’s claim in that webinar that the results would be shared with the public.)
What is obvious from the way Vocaniq presented the results is just how easy it is to manipulate visuals to give a different picture of results than the figures warrant.
Without going through the whole presentation a simple example of how Vocaniq/Kalbar tried to pass ‘neutral’ or ‘don’t know’ responses as positive ones clearly demonstrates how easy it is for companies to manipulate interpretations through misleading visuals. The showed Strongly Positive, Positive and Neutral results in shades of blue but showed Strongly Negative and Negative Responses in different – and unrelated – colours. This was clearly intended to mislead about the overall sentiments of respondents in relation to both the benefits of the project and the effectiveness of the regulators.
The picture below shows how easy it is to mislead people when presenting results visually. (We hope the regulators haven’t been fooled.)
Regardless – both the Street Recruited and the Engaged results showed a very high level of distrust of both the regulators and Kalbar.
This is important as busy decision-makers may glance at these figures without considering the data properly and draw some very incorrect conclusions – no doubt exactly what Kalbar want.