Stung by the Government’s incessant repetition of its claim that Tony Abbott removed — indeed, “gouged” — a billion dollars from hospitals funding during his time as Health Minister, the Opposition put together a graph last week showing increases in hospital funding under the Howard Government, which MPs took to waving around in question time and which went up on the Liberal website.

The graph’s a nice bit of work, with the y-axis shortened so that what was simple annual indexation of funding is made to look like impressive increases, but the final year included a healthy whack of Rudd Government funding, which the Government quickly cottoned onto.

After media reports about it this morning, the relevant page vanished from the Liberal site, taking the site’s “News” page with it but leaving the front page of the site intact. This was supposedly because the site required “maintenance”. When the site reappeared not long before ten o’clock, there was no evidence of any maintenance — the same graph reappeared:

Abbott Original

Then, 30 minutes later, another version of the graph went up:

Liberal2

This one had a title change and was carefully annotated to admit that, yes, um, the previous graph wasn’t quite right.  When you’re complaining about someone’s lies, it pays to make sure your own facts are in order first.