Not much new in this thread (and I think we had this already once): Organisations that are advocats of a particular cause are never to be trusted when they quote numbers, so Kendall's mistrust is justified. The idea is to quote selectively from a statistic in a far away country and hope nobody does the hard work of really looking closely at the numbers. Freda has done a thorough job regarding Australia. I'll make a more general remark:

If you have a large number of statistics to choose from (Australia is just one of many countries) and you are fairly free in your choice of starting point and end point (so many different years to look at and you can compare one year, two yeras, three years... periods of time), it would be a statistical wonder if you could not find a comparison period in one of the countries of the earth corroborating what you had in mind. These statistics snoopers start with the wanted result and then look for a fitting statistic. These selected stories are not much better than personal experiences ("my uncle Dave gave away his gun and one month later...").

Wolfgang