Commentary How can Australians have trust in our institutions if governments can be hoodwinked into passing draconian legislation as a result of false, misleading statistics? Last year, debate over controversial sexual consent laws passing through the New South Wales (NSW) parliament was dominated by false statistics on sexual assault that wrongly claimed five times more sexual assaults than what was actually reported and underestimated ten-fold the proportion of such cases determined in court. Those inaccurate statistics, published on the Law Reform Commission website, were widely used to scare parliamentarians and the public into believing that our criminal justice system was failing rape victims. It has now been proved that the commission knew their data was wrong before the legislation was introduced but kept quiet. Within two weeks of the bill being passed, they suddenly published a correction on their website. Was this timing a coincidence or a deliberate tactic to …