The ACT Party has defended a Facebook graphic comparing publicly funded medicines in Australia and New Zealand after a University of Auckland biostatistician called it "visually misleading."

The graphic, posted on ACT's Facebook page, shows two stacks of pills representing medicines funded in each country. Australia's 215 medicines funded between 2011 and 2025 are depicted as a stack of 10 pills. New Zealand's 86 medicines are shown as a stack of two pills. RNZ

Thomas Lumley, a biostatistics professor at the University of Auckland, said the graphic depicts a five-fold difference between the two stacks when the actual ratio is 2.5 times. Lumley said most people would interpret the image as a bar chart and described it as "visually misleading." RNZ

ACT's press secretary for Todd Stephenson denied the post was misleading, calling it "a graphic and not a graph." RNZ

RNZ could not independently verify the medicine figures cited in the ACT post. ACT did not cite a source for the numbers. RNZ

The post is part of a broader ACT campaign on pharmaceutical funding. On 28 July, ACT leader David Seymour posted a video on his official Facebook page saying ACT would make medicines a priority and close the gap with Australia through smarter health spending. ACT MP Todd Stephenson posted a Facebook image the same day showing a pharmacy in which every medicine on its shelves is one that New Zealand patients cannot currently access through public funding. Facebook Facebook

RNZ has reported that New Zealand publicly funded 28 modern medicines from 2012 to 2017, compared with Australia's 90 over the same period. RNZ

ACT is campaigning to close the Pharmac funding gap by proposing to increase the proportion of the health budget spent on Pharmac by one percent per year, with the aim of bringing New Zealand in line with other countries. RNZ

The dispute over the graphic touches on a recurring question in New Zealand political communication: where the line sits between advocacy and misrepresentation, and whether the Advertising Standards Authority has any practical reach over political parties' social media content.

The ASA assesses advocacy, or political, advertising differently from other advertising, making allowance for opinion as long as it is clearly separated from fact. RNZ

There is precedent for complaints about incorrectly scaled visuals in political advertising. In 2019, Dylan Reeve, author of "Fake Believe: Conspiracy Theories in Aotearoa," complained to the ASA about a National Party advertisement on fuel prices that included an incorrectly scaled bar chart. The ASA also received 72 complaints about National's "Triple your taxes" advertisements but did not uphold them, ruling the ad a statement of political opinion. RNZ

The distinction ACT draws between "a graphic" and "a graph" matters in that framework. A graph, in the ASA's treatment, would carry an implied claim to proportional accuracy. A graphic, framed as advocacy, would fall under the broader latitude the ASA gives to political opinion. Whether a pill-stack image presented side by side with numerical labels functions as one or the other in the eyes of viewers is the question Lumley raises, and it is one the ASA's rules do not cleanly resolve for social media posts that sit outside any formal advertising campaign.

ACT's own framing on its website reinforces the political stakes. The party's campaign slogans include "Unlock New Zealand's Potential" and "Party Vote ACT to Lock Labour Out." Its leader, David Seymour, is listed as MP for Epsom and Deputy Prime Minister. Nicole McKee is listed as Deputy Leader and Minister of Courts. The site's most recent news release as of 4 August is titled "ACT drives most business-friendly Government in a generation," authored by Seymour. ACT

The medicine funding gap is a live election issue, and the Pharmac comparison with Australia is a staple of political debate across the spectrum. What is new here is the specific visual contention: a party defending the proportions of an image by categorising it as advocacy rather than data, while a statistician says the image reads as a chart to most viewers and misrepresents the underlying numbers by a factor of two.

For political operatives, the takeaway is straightforward. The ASA's advocacy threshold gives parties wide latitude on social media, and the "Triple your taxes" precedent suggests that even numerical claims framed as political opinion are unlikely to be upheld. But the cost of that latitude is scrutiny from academics and fact-checkers who can point to the gap between what an image shows and what the numbers say. ACT's defence, that the image is a graphic and not a graph, is technically coherent within the ASA framework. Whether it is persuasive to voters who see a pill stack and read it as proportional is a different question.