The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Beckett, Postdoctoral Fellow (Human Molecular Nutrition), School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

Australia has been rocked this week by reports that many products labelled as honey are actually fake or “adulterated” honey.

Capilano, Australia’s largest honey producer, has been accused of selling products mixed with cheaper syrups. But Capilano has hit back, claiming the testing method is unreliable. So what is “fake” honey really made of? And can we be sure of what we’re getting?

Read more: The farmer wants a hive: inside the world of renting bees

What have I been eating?

Honey is a mixture of sugars, mostly fructose and glucose. But honey has particular flavours and properties that come from the flowers and the natural processing the bees do.

Fake honey is generally some honey mixed with other sugar syrups. These syrups come from plants like sugar cane, corn, or rice. They can be cheaper and easier to produce than honey.

While these contaminating syrups aren’t likely to be harmful, they might have different nutrient profiles, sweetness levels, glycemic indexes, and have undergone different processing.

Read more: White, brown, raw, honey: which type of sugar is best?

It is legal to sell honey blends, like glucose and honey, or “honey flavoured sugar syrups” but these need to be labelled so people know what they are paying for.

This isn’t the first fake honey on the market

In 2014 the ACCC fined two companies for selling “Turkish Sugar Syrup” labelled as honey. Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) has been aware for some time of concerns about imported honey – it appears that all the affected products contain some imported honey – and recommends that concerned consumers check for country of origin labelling on honey products.

Fake honey has also been previously detected in the United States and Europe.

But don’t they test honey for purity?

The official test in Australia to check if honey is pure is called the “C4 sugar test.” Plants have different ways of producing sugars, using different chemical pathways depending on the plant and the conditions in which it is grown. Bees collect nectar mostly from flowers of plants in the “C3 cycle”, and much less from plants using C4 pathways to make sugars.

Read more: Science or Snake Oil: is manuka honey really a ‘superfood’ for treating colds, allergies and infections?

The C4 test picks up most fake honey, because most of the cheap sugar syrups used to make fake honey came from C4 plants, like corn and sugar cane. But newer substitutes, like rice, wheat, and beet syrups, come from C3 plants, and so won’t be picked up.

How is this new test different?

The fake honey in this most recent scandal was identified by a method called “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance” (NMR for short). NMR works because all molecules are made up of atoms, and atoms have nuclei at their centres. Nuclei have electrical charges, and many also have a physical property known as spin (the nucleus rotates on its own axis, like the earth).

This means they are sensitive to magnetic fields and the nuclei of each type of atom will move differently when they are applied. Basically, by measuring how the nuclei in the sample respond to different magnetic fields, we can get a fingerprint of what is in the sample. This means it isn’t restricted to just testing for C4 sugars, and it can detect non-honey sugars from any source. This is why some honeys may pass the standard test, but not pass an NMR test.

Read more: A bee economist explains honey bees’ vital role in growing tasty almonds

MNR is a very sensitive technique already used in other parts of the food industry, such as testing fruit juices and wines. In honey, it can distinguish between the different types of sugars and detect other components that give honey its unique flavours. This means it can potentially be used to pinpoint the geographical location of honey. This isn’t the official and international standard test, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t scientifically sound. It is a relatively new method that may be adopted by official bodies in the future.

Some argue that NMR isn’t ideal because you can get different results depending on the lab. This can be because of the different reference databases used. However, NMR has been shown to be able to detect honey adulterated with other sugar syrups in a number of studies including, rice syrup and corn syrup.

What should I do?

You probably don’t need to go throwing away your honey. It might have other sugars in it, but it is still safe to eat. All the honey products implicated in this latest scandal contained some imported honey blended with Australian honey. So read the label, and look for Australian sourced honey to increase the chances you are getting what you pay for.

Read more: Unique pollen signatures in Australian honey could help tackle a counterfeit industry

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics and PLuS Alliance Fellow, UNSW

Tax is just a mater of taking the most from those with the greatest capacity to pay, right? Or is it a matter of taking the most from the people least able to resist? In Australia we attempt to do both, pretty successfully, due in large part to work of Sir James Mirrlees, the most distinguished British economist of his generation who passed away at his home outside Cambridge last Wednesday aged 82.

In 1996, he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on “asymmetric information”. It had long been known that the party on one side of a transaction often knows more than other. A car owner selling it second hand knows more about it than the potential buyer, for example. George Akerlof shared the 2001 Nobel for his legendary paper examining the implications entitled “The Market for Lemons”.

Mirrlees’ contribution was to formalise the problem and apply it to the design of tax systems. He saw it as a problem where individuals know whether they are willing to work at a certain rate of tax but the designer of the tax system does not. And his modelling allowed the income tax system to be progressive, as Australia’s is, rather than flat, as had previously had to be assumed in academic work.

And he did more. His work helped the design of rules for auctions such as those used in Australia to allocate mobile communications spectrum. The award of the 2007 Nobel to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson for “mechanism design” owes much to his work.

His groundbreaking contributions to the theory of moral hazard (which examines the way in which institutions such as banks and individuals take greater risks when they are insured) and the so-called principal-agent problem (where the people who run the company have different interests to the people who own the company) formed the basis of Bengt Holmstrom’s 2016 Nobel.

This work has implications for how to design incentive schemes for everyone from CEOs to school children to journalists. His contribution here was fairly technical, pointing out that the existing formal models of the problem suffered from two previously unrecognised mathematical problems.

His important paper on moral hazzard and the principal-agent problem was left unpublished until 1999. Apparently he had ensured that those who needed to know about it did, and allowed it to as good as vanish in the days before the widespread availability of the internet, leaving anyone who wanted to read it to seek out a physical copy from a library.

As a budding young student in 1996 I did just that, on a trip to Oxford.

Having secured a copy of the paper I was eager to read it, and was part way through it on the train ride back to London when a voice behind me asked “what do you think?” And there he was – the great man – who proceeded to chat with me for the rest of the trip about the intellectual history and technical details of his paper.

For a budding economics nerd it was the moment of a lifetime. And it was a measure of the scholarly seriousness, intellectual generosity, and humility of Mirrlees that he took the time to talk to some random Australian kid.

Mirrlees worked on some of the most profound social questions of our time – how to balance equity and efficiency, and how to provide incentives – and he did it with precision and rigour.

He was the model of a great economic theorist. He will be missed. But his work will live on in the design of Australian and other institutions and will be on reading lists for decades. If the Turnbull government had proceeded with its tax white paper, he would have been a reference point, as he was for the Henry Tax Review for whom he acted as a consultant. He’ll be helping us out for generations to come.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tresa LeClerc, Sessional teacher, RMIT University

As an academic in creative writing, I attend a lot of literary events. One question I can always count on being asked is, “can I write characters of other backgrounds?” This has been a growing concern since Lionel Shriver at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival unleashed a tirade against what she called “censorship” in writing – referring to criticism of her book The Mandibles.

The recent ABC Q&A episode, Stranger Than Fiction, in conjunction with the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, showed the many sides of the “write what you know” debate. Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad and Sofie Laguna argued that space should be given for marginalised groups to represent themselves. Maxine Beneba Clarke pointedly discussed when appropriation can be harmful, as was the case with Shriver’s representation of Latino and African American characters. Meanwhile, Trent Dalton argued that appropriation leads to a good story, which also takes empathy and care.

Read more: Lionel Shriver and the responsibilities of fiction writers

But is taking a walk in other people’s shoes as effective a writing method as many authors believe? To find out, I wrote a novel manuscript about four people from refugee backgrounds. I did it in three drafts, each using a different method. I wrote the first draft while observing and empathising as a volunteer working with asylum seekers, and refugees. I wrote the second after interviews with 15 people from refugee backgrounds (some of whom I had observed) and the third after getting feedback from three of the interviewees about the manuscript. Then I compared the drafts. The findings were very interesting.

Even before I had begun my interviews I had an interesting instance regarding the fallibility of my own memory. I had kept a journal while I was volunteering. As I sat down to write the novel manuscript, I remembered an instance when a young girl, who happened to be in the same public place, approached the group with an origami boat she had made. She offered it to one of the volunteers. It was beautiful – with crayon scribbles on the outside and three different sized paper cranes lined up in a row inside. In my memory, the attendees recoiled and anxiously said, “we hate boats!”

I began to write this into the manuscript, when I remembered the journal. I opened it to the day of the event, and found I’d recorded that the attendees were not anxious at all, nor did they recoil. They were joking and laughing about how they hated boats.

One criticism of stories about refugees is that they tend to show refugees as helpless victims. Was I drawing on existing stereotypes when I remembered this instance? Another possibility is that my feelings about the highly emotional issue of asylum were influencing how I interpreted the conversation.

Read more: Indigenous cultural appropriation: what not to do

In another instance, I wrote a character that was verbally and racially attacked on public transport. White Australians came to her rescue. I was thinking that was what I would have done. But after interviews with refugees, I discovered the instances of racial abuse were much more violent and common than I imagined.

One interviewee related a story about an apple being thrown at her head; another described how her foot was stomped on. Contrary to what I had written, they expressed resilience and stood up for themselves.

I once watched author Claire G. Coleman in a debate by ABC RN on the topic of writing what you know. She said that cultural appropriation is dangerous because authors can only “contextualise that character as a version of themselves”. That certainly seemed to be the case. I was just writing what I thought would happen, from my perspective – not theirs.

So how can we get it right? It’s difficult to tell unless we ask someone from the background we are writing about. In getting feedback, I found that there were parts of my manuscript that resonated with interviewees’ experiences, such as an instance where an Iranian man was told that he was lucky to be here by a white Australian. The character didn’t feel that he was lucky. One interviewee said that he felt the same, that he had everything in Iran, including education and a job, and now he had to start over.

But even gaining feedback from interviewees did not mean they were going to tell me everything I “got wrong”. Those giving feedback wanted to give advice, not to criticise.

Walking in someone’s shoes is useful as a method, but it is far from perfect. As writers, we need to ask ourselves whether we are contributing to the oppression of a group of people by speaking for them, and reinforcing racist stereotypes as we do so.

This is not to say that we should never write characters from other backgrounds, just that we need to accept criticism by people who identify from that group rather than dismissing it as censorship (as Beneba Clarke also pointed out on Q&A), and to be more realistic about our own limitations as empathetic writers.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joseph Camilleri, Emeritus Professor of International Relations, La Trobe University

The Liberal leadership spill and Malcolm Turnbull’s downfall is but the latest instalment in a game of musical chairs that has dominated Australian politics for the best part of a decade.

For many, it has been enough to portray Tony Abbott as the villain of the story. Others have pointed to Peter Dutton and his allies as willing, though not-so-clever, accomplices. There’s also been a highlighting of the herd instinct: once self-serving mutiny gathers steam, others will want to follow.

But this barely scratches the surface. And the trend is not confined to Australia.

Read more: Dutton v Turnbull is the latest manifestation of the splintering of the centre-right in Australian politics

We need only think of Donald Trump’s America, Britain’s Brexit saga or the rise of far-right populist movements in Europe. Politics in the West seem uneasily suspended between farce and tragedy, as deception, accusations of “fake news” and infighting have become commonplace.

In Australia, the revolving prime ministerial door has had much to do with deep tensions surrounding climate change and energy policy more generally.

In Britain, a longstanding ambivalence towards European integration has deeply divided mainstream parties and plunged the country into “Brexit chaos”, a protracted crisis greatly exacerbated by government incompetence and political expediency.

In Italy, the steady erosion of support for the establishment parties has paved the way for a governing coalition that includes a far-right party committed to cracking down on “illegal”, specifically Muslim, immigration.

Yet, beyond these differences are certain common, cross-cultural threads which help explain the present Western malaise.

Simply put, we now have a glaring and widening gap between the enormity of the challenges facing Western societies and the capacity of their political institutions to address them.

Neoliberalism at work

The political class in Australia, as in Europe and North America, is operating within an institutional framework that is compromised by two powerful forces: the dominance of the neoliberal order and relentless globalisation.

The interplay of these two forces goes a long way towards explaining the failure of political elites. They offer neither a compelling national narrative nor a coherent program for the future. Instead, the public is treated to a series of sideshows and constant rivalries over the spoils of office.

Read more: Partially right: rejecting neoliberalism shouldn’t mean giving up on social liberalism

How does the neoliberal creed underpin the state of current political discourse and practice? The shorthand answer is by setting economic growth as the overriding national objective . Such growth, we are told, requires the public sector to be squeezed and the private sector to be given free reign.

And when economic performance falls short of the mark, pressing social and environmental needs are unmet, or a global financial crisis exposes large-scale financial crimes and shoddy lending practices, these are simply dismissed as inconvenient truths.

Compounding the impact of this highly restrictive economic agenda is globalisation or, to be more accurate, the phenomenal growth of cross-border flows of goods and services, capital, money, carbon emissions, technical know-how, arms, information, images and people. The sheer scale, speed and intensity of these flows make them impervious to national control.

Read more: It’s not just the economy, stupid; it’s whether the economy is fair

But governments and political parties want to maintain the pretence they can stem the tide. To admit they cannot is to run the risk of appearing incompetent or irrelevant. Importantly, they risk losing the financial or political support of powerful interests that benefit from globalisation, such as the coal lobby.

And so, deception and self-deception become the only viable option. So it is that several US presidents, including Trump, and large segments of the US Congress have flagrantly contradicted climate science or downplayed its implications.

Much the same can be said of Australia. When confronted with climate sceptics in the Liberal ranks, the Turnbull government chose to prioritise lowering electricity prices while minimising its commitment to carbon emission reductions.

The erosion of truth and trust

In the face of such evasion and disinformation, large segments of the population, especially those who are experiencing hard times or feel alienated, provide fertile ground for populist slogans and the personalities willing to mouth them.

Each country has its distinctive history and political culture. But everywhere we see the same refusal to face up to harsh realities. Some will deny the science of climate change. Others will want to roll back the unprecedented movements of people seeking refuge from war, discrimination or abject poverty.

Others still will pretend the state can regulate the accelerating use of information technology, even though the technology is already being used to threaten people’s privacy and reduce control over personal data. Both the state and corporate sector are subjecting citizens to unprecedented levels of surveillance.

Read more: The Turnbull government is all but finished, and the Liberals will now need to work out who they are

Lies, “fake news” and cover-ups are not, of course, the preserve of politicians. They have become commonplace in so many of our institutions.

The extraordinary revelations from the Banking Royal Commission make clear that Australia’s largest banks and other financial enterprises have massively defrauded customers, given short shrift to both the law and regulators and consistently disregarded the truth.

And now, as a result of another Royal Commission, we have a belated appreciation of the rampant sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church, which has been consistently covered up by religious officials.

These various public and private arenas, where truth is regularly concealed, denied or obscured, have had a profoundly corrosive effect on the fabric of society, and inevitably on the public sphere. They have severely diminished the social trust on which the viability of democratic processes vitally depends.

There is no simple remedy to the current political disarray. The powerful forces driving financial flows and production and communication technologies are reshaping culture, the global economy and policy-making processes in deeply troubling ways.

Truth and trust are now in short supply. Yet, they are indispensable to democratic processes and institutions.

A sustained national and international conversation on ways to redeem truth and trust has become one of the defining imperatives of our time.

Joseph Camilleri will speak more on this topic in three interactive public lectures entitled Brave New World at St Michael’s on Collins in Melbourne on Sept. 11, 18 and 25.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Frain, Teaching Fellow, Strategic Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, Australian National University

Much has been made recently of the revenge motives of Tony Abbot, and the seemingly self-defeating choices of the Liberal party room in changing our prime minister from Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison.

While these may be partially true, such narratives are a distraction from what’s really at the heart of events like Turnbull’s fall from office: intergroup dynamics.

Research into collective psychology helps us understand the forceful resistance to Turnbull as leader, and why the Liberal Party reaction in some ways has been perfectly rational.

Read more: How the hard right terminated Turnbull, only to see Scott Morrison become PM

The importance of collective psychology

Journalist Annabel Crab’s recent analysis points out that Turnbull’s lack of acceptance by the conservative wing of the Liberal Party of Australia was his undoing.

Her interpretation was that the conservatives succumbed to irrational fear; that a better approach may have seen Tony Abbott and colleagues appreciate the concessions that Turnbull made (such as shifting policy on the National Energy Guarantee), look past superficial differences, and bury the hatchet.

Read more: Malcolm Turnbull shelves emissions reduction target as leadership speculation mounts

Such analyses are fed by the common belief that individual realities and individual motivations primarily drive actions. The truth is the opposite: collective psychology is central to who we are, and powerfully influences motivation.

It starts with basic cognitive psychology – humans need to translate the things we encounter into concepts. We do this through a process called cognitive categorisation.

Put simply, we class things together, and contrast those things with other things. Whatever it is – whether chairs, tables, pens, or cars – the way we understand the world is by constructing cognitive categories.

The field of collective psychology takes this further, and shows how cognitive categories are also the way we understand people – including ourselves.

If we want to understand who we are, then we categorise ourselves. Sometimes that’s as unique individuals (“I” contrasted with “others”), while at other times it’s as members of social groups (“us” contrasted with “them”).

Leadership and social identities

Obvious examples of inclusive cognitive categories include sporting teams, nationalities, fandoms, and occupations. Cognitive categories of this type are termed social identities.

There is growing evidence that social identities are key to organisational commitment, influence, charisma, and trust. And that understanding social identities is a core characteristic of leadership.

Social psychologists have long argued that human motivation needs to be understood in light of social identities.

Yes, sometimes we are motivated by self-interest, seeking to do better for ourselves as individuals. Other times, however, we are motivated by collective interest: first and foremost, we care about our group.

Social identities in politics

The subgroups of an organisation, not the organisational itself, are often what is most important to people. Abbott, Dutton, and colleagues, are members of the conservative wing of the Liberal Party. This wing has a passionate membership, and has values and beliefs that it holds dear.

Who is Turnbull to this audience? Turnbull is the person who plucked the mantle of prime minister from its champion of the conservative movement. Turnbull reduced the government majority to a sliver. Turnbull enthusiastically oversaw the legislation of gay marriage and has well known sympathy for climate change concerns.

Yes, when the 2018 spill happened the Liberal Party was in power, and might have won the next election. However, under continued Turnbull leadership, what prospects were there for growing conservative influence?

If the Liberal Party was to win the next election under Turnbull, this might serve to legitimise the moderate take on the party. Better perhaps to take the reins, loose the next election, but have the platform to reinvigorate the conservative movement across Australia.

Overall, there are legitimate explanations to see Turnbull as an outsider who would not advance the values of those he sought to lead. But we can only appreciate these as legitimate if we recognise the reality of social identities.

It’s social identities – here, a strong sense of “we conservatives” – that make it logical to face immediate personal hardship for the sake of a longer term collective goal.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: The high costs of our destructive coup culture

Ignore collective psychology at your peril

In time, a dominant description of events will emerge. Many now talk of recent events as if a soap opera.

We hear of the retribution motives of Abbott, the cunning of Turnbull, and the jostling and scheming of the party room. And that maybe Morrison knew what he was doing all along.

These are stories of individuals pursuing individual ends, responding to base individual urges – an idea summarised well by Barnaby Joyce:

Do you think that human nature has changed that much? It’s called ambition. It’s called ego. It’s how it works.

Possibly, but these perspectives are also convenient. They are convenient because they allow unsympathetic voices to deny, as much to themselves as anyone else, that the conservative movement is a sincere, coordinated, and powerful force in Australian politics.

Why can we indulge in this denial? In part, it’s because collective psychology isn’t sufficiently respected. It’s taken as optional; we can accept or ignore its presence to our heart’s content.

That denial blinkers us severely. Without it, we can’t properly understand, and anticipate, the commitment to a cause that humans are capable of.

The conservative wing may burn the Liberal Party to the ground if it’s no longer a vehicle for success. How the social identities of the Liberal Party are managed will determine whether that occurs or not.

Brigadier Nicholas Jans (Ret’d) OAM, PhD contributed to writing this article.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Josh Nicholas, Deputy Editor: Business + Economy, The Conversation

What can governments do to stop increasing obesity rates, help people save or get them to file their tax returns on time? The default answer used to be some kind of tax or penalty. Just make people pay more and they’ll do the right thing, right?

But what if you could encourage certain behaviour without forcing the issue? That’s where nudges come in. These are small changes in design or presentation, like putting healthy food near the cash register, or sending reminders out around tax time.

For this episode of Speaking with, The Conversation’s Josh Nicholas chats with Cass Sunstein, a Harvard professor who worked as a “regulatory czar” for years in the Obama administration. Sunstein literally wrote the book on nudges along with Richard Thaler, who won the 2017 economics Nobel Prize. The book is called Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness.

Read more: The promise and perils of giving the public a policy ‘nudge’

As the controversial My Health Record has shown, behavioural science is now considered a standard part of the public policy toolkit. My Health Record was created to be “opt out”, in order to “nudge” people into remaining in the system.

This takes advantage of a bias we have towards the default setting: many of us won’t expend the effort to opt out. Many governments – including Australia’s – now have professional “nudge units” stocked with behavioural scientists, working on problems such as tax avoidance and organ donation.

Today on Speaking with, Professor Sunstein talks about nudges and public policy, when and where they work and how policymakers should use them.

Subscribe to The Conversation’s Speaking With podcasts on Apple Podcasts, or follow on Tunein Radio.

Music

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Duane Mellor, Senior Lecturer in Human Nutrition, Coventry University

If you get your health news from blogs such as Goop and Dr Oz, you might be led to believe a certain group of vegetables called “nightshade vegetables” are bad for you.

The theory goes that members of the plant family Solanaceae, which includes tomatoes, capsicums, chilli peppers, eggplant and potatoes, contain toxins designed to stop us from eating them, which are damaging to our health.

This idea comes from the fact that poisonous berries called “nightshade” are also in the solanaceae family. But that doesn’t mean all plants in this family are toxic, and the nutrient-rich solanaceae vegetables are the building blocks of some of the most healthy dietary patterns on the planet (such as the Mediterranean diet).

Read more: Food as medicine: why do we need to eat so many vegetables and what does a serve actually look like?

The “toxins” in these vegetables that some have claimed to be the problem are compounds called lectins. Lectins are proteins, the stuff that meat is made up of, or enzymes that exist in many foods and our bodies. They’re slightly different to the proteins in meat and muscle as they have sugars attached to them meaning they can bind cells together.

It’s thought by those who believe lectins are harmful, that they stick the cells in our body together, causing potential damage and pain, such as arthritis. However, the simple act of cooking helps to break down these lectins and the minute risk of any negative action can be easily deactivated.

The other key point is levels in foods vary, while some foods contain them in high quantities (such as kidney beans, which should be eaten cooked), quantities are very low in food we would eat raw such as tomatoes and capsicums.

But aren’t these chemicals designed to stop us eating them?

It’s sometimes thought the reason plants make lectins is to stop them being eaten, and that because of this they must cause us harm. One claim is that they cause inflammation, worsening arthritis. But in our recent review of the research there was little evidence for this.

The evidence that exists on arthritis and other forms of disease related to inflammation (including heart disease) supports the role of the Mediterranean-type diet. This is based on vegetables, including those from the solanaceae family.

Read more: Health Check: are microgreens better for you than regular greens?

It’s also a myth that compounds plants produce to stop them being eaten are harmful to us. Increasingly there’s evidence many of these compounds can have beneficial effects. Polyphenols, which are bitter chemicals found in a range of fruit and vegetables to stop them being eaten have been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke, and maybe even dementia.

Although there are no apparent benefits of lectins, and some theoretical potential of harms (cells sticking together in a test tube, or vomiting after eating raw kidney beans) these naturally occurring chemicals can be easily broken down by cooking.

So, on the plate, lectins are not an issue. And the so-called “nightshade vegetables” have numerous other reasons why they’re benefical for heath, from vitamins and minerals through to fibre and polyphenols. The key is to eat as wide a variety of fruit and vegetables as possible to maximise these health improving factors.

What’s in a name?

The favourite of health bloggers and “superfood” proponents is the goji berry. But surprise, this too belongs to the nightshade family.

Goji berries have been claimed to treat dry skin, promote longevity and even improve sexual desire. Some of these claims might be related to its historical use as a traditional Chinese treatment.

It does contain vitamins A and C, so it’s not devoid of any nutritional value. But any claims of health benefits above and beyond any other kind of berry are currently unproven.

So the message here? Don’t worry too much about which fruits or vegetables famous bloggers or TV doctors tell you to eat or not to eat. Enjoy them all, be sure to get your “two and five” serves, and store and wash them properly before you tuck in.

Read more: Health Check: can chopping your vegetables boost their nutrients?

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter C. Doherty, Laureate Professor, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

Peter Doherty was invited to deliver the 2015 Rita Levi-Montalcini Lecture at BergamoScienza, an Italian science festival.

In this extract from his new book The Incidental Tourist, Peter explains how Rita was a true hero of 20th century science.

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) grew up in Turin, a two-hour drive from Bergamo, Italy.

While we never met, my early background in brain pathology (she was a developmental neurobiologist) and the fact that she was a prominent public advocate for science (and supporter of BergamoScienza) meant that I was well aware of her.

Levi-Montalcini was a co-recipient (with Vanderbilt University’s Stanley Cohen) of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and was also appointed by the president of Italy as Senator for Life (from 2001) in the upper house of the national Parlamento della Republica Italiana.

There is no doubt that Levi-Montalcini spoke out strongly for the value of looking at public policy through the prism of actual evidence – although, as with any scientist who deals directly with politicians, there must have been a high level of mutual incomprehension.

Even so, given that many of the profound changes in our world are driven by science and technology, along with the ethical challenges that new knowledge raises for both policy and the law, finding some mechanism for getting at least a small measure of scientific understanding into politics does seem like a reasonable idea.

Read more: Australia needs boldness and bravery from Karen Andrews, the new minister for industry, science and technology

At least until recently, Britain appointed leading scientists (including Sydney Boys High School/University of Sydney-educated Bob May and Geelong Grammar/University of Melbourne-trained Alec Broers) to the House of Lords.

Few professional scientists will take up the challenge of seeking elected office, although Germany’s Angela Merkel, a physics PhD, is a notable exception.

There were also three PhD physicists, Rush Holt, Bill Foster and Vernon Ehlers, in the 110th (2007–09) US Congress.

Qualifying first as an MD, Levi-Montalcini was dismissed from her assistant professorship in anatomy at the University of Turin when Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party passed a 1938 law banning all Jews from academic appointments.

Having some family resources, and maybe as a result of good luck and a move from Turin to Florence, she and her twin sister Paola (a well-known artist) avoided the fate of being transported to Auschwitz.

Fellow Turin scientist and author, the industrial chemist Primo Levi, did not, and he describes in If This is a Man how he survived that ordeal due to his technology skills.

Read more: 70 years on, Primo Levi’s If This is A Man is still a powerful reminder of what it means to be human

Continuing to do investigative work in a laboratory set up in her bedroom, Levi-Montalcini spent much of the second world war focused on the factors that determine nerve growth in chick embryos. Even in wartime, it was possible to get hold of fertilised hens’ eggs!

In my field, a great deal of important virology and immunology research was done initially with chick embryos (especially by Sir Macfarlane Burnet, as I described in Sentinel Chickens: What birds tell us about our health and our world). But I was only peripherally aware of Levi-Montalcini’s work with developing chicks until, seeking to acknowledge her achievements at the beginning of my Bergamo lecture, I looked into her career more closely.

As often happens when I read about the lives and contributions of leading biologists of an earlier era, I find a record of dedication and intellectual clarity based on simple, elegant experimentation and insight. She was continuing a great Italian tradition.

The science of embryology began in the 17th century when, working in Bologna, Marcello Malpighi described the progression he saw when he examined chick embryos at different stages of development.

Read more: I’ve always wondered: can two chickens hatch out of a double-yolk egg?

Early vertebrate evolution followed common pathways for birds and for us and, even in an era where human dissection was forbidden, the all-controlling Church of Rome could hardly object to cracking open hens’ eggs.

Remarkably, some religious fundamentalists believe that embryology, in the words of US Republican Congressman (2007–15) Paul Broun, “lies straight from the pit of hell”!

Given that such research just describes what’s actually there, it’s hard to comprehend a mindset that finds the most obvious realities of biology to be obnoxious. Remarkably, Broun is a medical doctor!

After the liberation of northern Italy in April 1945, Levi-Montalcini volunteered her medical services to help the allies in Florence.

She then moved to the United States to continue her focus on nerve growth in the research group led by eminent émigré German/Jewish developmental biologist Viktor Hamburger at the Washington University of St Louis. There she also began her professional association with biochemist Stan Cohen, her co-Nobel Prizewinner.

Appointed as full professor at Washington University in 1958, Levi-Montalcini was, by 1961, directing the Research Centre for Neurobiology in Rome.

Thereafter, while continuing her US collaborations, she saw out her research career in Italy.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Romain Fathi, Lecturer, History, Flinders University

This is the first in a series of explainers on key moments in the past 100 years of world political history. In it, our authors examine how and why an event unfolded, its impact at the time, and its relevance to politics today.

In October 1918, a young man was temporarily blinded on the Western Front and evacuated to hospital. For four long years, he had served in the German Army alongside 11 million men.

Whether his blindness came from a gas attack or a sudden bout of nerves is still being debated. But it is clear that, like hundreds of millions of people at the time, his wartime experience shaped the rest of his life.

This was during the first world war – the foundational event of the violent 20th century – and that young man was Adolf Hitler.

What happened?

Sparked in the Balkans as a result of European nationalism and imperial rivalries, the first world war raged from July 1914 to November 1918. It pitted the 48 million soldiers of the Allies – led by the French, British and Russian empires – against the 26 million soldiers of the Central Powers – led by the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, who lost the war.

It was a truly global conflict fought on battlefields across the world, but also on the home front – in people’s living rooms, fields and factories.

Read more: Flies, filth and bully beef: life at Gallipoli in 1915

The impact of the Great War

Over four long years, the world collapsed in what was then the largest industrial war ever fought. The conflict left over 10 million soldiers and 6 million civilians dead.

Over 20 million men were wounded – both physically and mentally – rendering them unable to resume civilian life. What’s more, the war facilitated the spreading of the Spanish flu pandemic, which killed at least 50 million people in 1918-19.

And for what?

The Allies’ “victory” in 1918 did not result in a safer and better world, and the first world war failed to become the “war to end all wars”.

Conflict raged on in the Middle East and colonial outposts right through the 1920s. For many, war did not stop with the Armistice of November 11, 1918.

In fact, given the scale of devastation across Europe, it is not clear who won what.

“Winners” and “losers” alike lost population, resources and infrastructure. Yes, there were marginal gains here and there for some, but most countries came out of the bloodshed crippled financially. Some were politically crippled, too.

Perhaps one clear winner did emerge from the conflict, however: the United States.

The US sold materials and lent money to the Allies during the war and, as a result, amassed gold reserves that underpinned its post-war global economic dominance, while other countries were gripped in an inflationary spiral.

To a lesser extent, Japan, too, benefited from the conflict. Fighting on the same side as the Allies fuelled the country’s militarisation and imperial ambitions in Asia.

Another outcome of the war was the disintegration of the centuries-old Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires, alongside the more recently-formed German empire, forever transforming the world’s political landscape.

The first world war also prompted the Russian Revolution, which further altered the course of the 20th century.

The “winners” were not immune from turbulence, either. France and Britain were confronted to various challenges in the colonies that had supported them throughout the conflict, in Africa or in India for instance. Local populations demanded more autonomy and at times even rebelled against their colonial masters.

The new world that emerged from this global conflict was one filled with hope, but riven by unrest, revolutions and ethnic conflicts.

A series of peace treaties, the most memorable one being the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919, endeavoured to secure and build a global peace, laying the basis for new international institutions such as the League of Nations. Its role was to prevent future wars through conflict resolution and diplomacy. But the treaty also required the demilitarisation of Germany, demanded that Germany acknowledge its responsibility for causing the war, and inflicted severe war reparations on the country.

The end of the fighting also brought more challenges. Tens of millions of soldiers were demobilised and returned home, prompting issues related to public health, unemployment and domestic violence. Hitler, for example, returned to Munich with no family, no career prospects and no place to stay. He would resent the Treaty of Versailles his whole life, and claim that Germany was not defeated on the battlefield, but stabbed in the back by internal enemies – the Jews, the left and the republicans.

But let it not be said that the first world war caused the second, nor that it made Hitler who he subsequently became. In the late 1920s, Germany was doing pretty well under the Weimar Republic – so well that this period was dubbed “the Golden Age”. Pacifism was a strong bipartisan force in 1930s France, Britain and Belgium. Another future was entirely possible.

Contemporary relevance

Yet, in the inter-wars years, the repercussions of the first world war remained omnipresent.

Old empires had left a vacuum for new states like Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia to form, and the borders of those new states were soon contested.

Even the 1929 financial crash was partly related to the first world war. This was because states accumulated debt to finance the conflict, and their debt increased even more as they continued borrowing to pay war reparations after the war had ended. This contributed to global inflation and financial insecurity, two factors of the 1929 crash. The first world war – or rather, its consequences – seemed endless.

And it is those consequences which undeniably created some of the conditions which set the second global conflict ablaze. Not least through armament, such as tanks, military aviation, submarines, chemical weapons – all of which became weapons of choice during the first world war and played a crucial role in the second.

But the second world war had its own intrinsic causes not directly related to the first world war. These included the development of new totalitarian ideologies, mass media, anti-Semitism, and the failures of the League of Nations as well as liberal democracies to oppose dangerous regimes.

Interestingly, some historical actors and historians believe that the two world wars cannot be separated, and form, in fact, a Thirty Years’ War.

Certainly, the repercussions of the first world war are still being felt today. Intergenerational grief and family history spurs hundreds of thousands of people to engage in digital commemorations or commemorative tourism at former battlefields.

The land, too, remains deeply affected. In Belgium and France, for instance, war-time explosive devices continue to kill people, and will still be found for hundreds of years to come.

In some places, the soil is so contaminated by chemical agents from the first world war that nothing has grown there since.

Finally, much of the geopolitical struggles of modern times date back to the first world war. The Middle East is a case in point. Decisions taken during and after the war laid the basis for ongoing conflicts due to contested boundaries and spheres of influences in the region.

The end of the war was not the victory the Allies claimed it was. But politicians and military leaders had to justify the dead and the enormous sacrifices they had demanded from their people. Thinking back, the most chilling part of the vain bloodbath is that the citizens of the belligerent nations did support the war and its sacrifices for years, some until the breaking point of revolt.

The first world war was a turning point in history as it irremediably altered political, economic, social and cultural life around the globe. First world war studies remain one of the most active fields of historical research today precisely because of the relevance of the conflict throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Understanding the first world war is thus an exercise in comprehending the depth of human commitment to destruction, violence and resilience at a scale never experienced before 1914. But it also reminds us of the fragility of peace, and of our duty as citizens to remain vigilant of nationalism.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Christine McCaughey, Research Fellow in Microbiology, University of Technology Sydney

Nearly one million people die every year from bacterial infections that cannot be treated with common antibiotics. This is frightening because right now we don’t have any alternatives to these antibiotics.

Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria change in a way that prevents the antibiotic from working. Changes in bacteria, known as resistance mechanisms, come in different forms and can be shared between different bacteria, spreading the problem.

Antibiotic resistance risks returning us to an age where even simple cuts and scrapes can become deadly. For a glimpse of what could be commonplace in our future, here are five of the scariest antibiotic resistant bacteria from the last five years.

Read more: We know _why_ bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, but _how_ does this actually happen?

1. Extensively drug-resistant Salmonella typhi

This highly contagious bacterium causes typhoid fever, a life-threatening infection that affects about 21 million people around the world every year. About 1% of those affected, or 223,000 people, will die.

In November 2016, a strain of Salmonella typhi emerged in Pakistan. It was resistant to five antibiotics, leaving only one oral antibiotic (azithromycin) able to treat it. Since then there have been 858 reported cases of this infection, resulting in four deaths in just one Pakistani province.

Worryingly, this strain of Salmonella typhi had changed from being multidrug-resistant (resistant to at least three classes of antibiotic) to extensively drug-resistant (resistant to all but two classes of antibiotic) in a single step. It achieved this by acquiring a piece of DNA, called a plasmid, which already contained all the new resistance genes it needed.

Even more concerning is that this strain is now only one step away from being untreatable with all available antibiotics by finding another plasmid with the resistance genes for the last two classes of antibiotic that can kill it.

2. Extensively drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the world’s leading infectious killer, causing more than 1.7 million deaths every year. One of the reasons this bacteria is so deadly is its ability to hide inside our cells. This means that to treat tuberculosis infection, people are required to take four different antibiotics continuously for six months.

It’s estimated up to 13% of all new tuberculosis cases are multidrug-resistant, with Europe, including Russia, seeing the highest number of these cases. This is alarming, as multidrug-resistant infections require treatment courses that are much longer (generally 18 to 24 months) and use antibiotics that are expensive and can be bad for the kidneys and other organs.

It’s now been found that 6% of these cases are actually extensively drug-resistant (resistant to all but two classes of antibiotic). With a treatment success rate of only 30%, the global spread of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis to more than 123 countries is extremely concerning.

3. Pandrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae

Klebsiella pneumoniae is a common bacterium found in the skin, intestines and soil. It causes a range of potentially deadly infections in people with compromised immune systems. As this bacterium is particularly prevalent in hospitals, it’s one of the most critical drug-resistant threats to public health.

In 2013 there were 8,000 reports of multidrug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae in the United States alone, with a death rate of 50% for people with bloodstream infections.

In 2016 a strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae was identified in the United States that was resistant to all 26 commonly available antibiotics (known as pandrug-resistant). The patient infected by this bacteria died due to a lack of alternative treatments.

This is not an isolated case; other bacteria are also becoming pandrug-resistant.

Read more: Antibiotic resistance? Sorry, not my problem

4. Pandrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Like Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a commonly found bacterium that causes infections in people with compromised immune systems. Like Klebsiella pneumoniae, it’s particularly prevalent in hospitals.

In the United States, there are an estimated 51,000 health care-associated Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections each year, with around 400 causing death. In the past five years, 29 cases of pandrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection have been reported in hospitals in England.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection is also the leading cause of death for people with cystic fibrosis. In 2013, more than 42% of cystic fibrosis patients with chronic Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection were treated with colistin, the “last line of defence” antibiotic. This is because most of these infections were resistant to every other antibiotic available.

5. Extensively drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae

There are an estimated 78 million global cases of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes gonorrhoea, a sexually transmitted infection affecting men and women. Although usually not deadly, serious and permanent health problems including infertility can result if the disease goes untreated.

Around one-third of all Neisseria gonorrhoeae infections are resistant to at least one antibiotic. More worryingly, a new extensively drug-resistant “super gonorrhoeae”, resistant to all but one antibiotic, has been discovered.

Two of the first reported cases of this superbug were in Australia. This is cause for concern, as extensively drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae can spread quickly through a population if people have multiple partners. In rare cases, untreated gonorrhoea can enter the bloodstream, causing septic shock and death.

Read more: When the drugs don’t work: how we can turn the tide of antimicrobial resistance

Could future outbreaks be worse?

Yes. Bacteria have the ability to pass antibiotic resistance genes to other bacteria and can develop the resistance themselves. So it’s likely a bacteria resistant to all but one antibiotic will develop resistance to that final one over time.

The good news is we can reduce the likelihood of this happening if we use antibiotics appropriately and invest in the research and development of new antibiotics, vaccines and diagnostic tools.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fabrizio Carmignani, Professor, Griffith Business School, Griffith University

The evidence on the ground is very clear. The Trump tax cuts have led to stronger investment, stronger growth, lower unemployment rate and higher wages.

– Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann, interview on RN Breakfast, August 13, 2018

After two years of debate and months of intense negotiation, the government’s proposal to cut the corporate tax rate from 30% to 25% for companies with turnover of more than A$50 million was voted down in the Senate.

But while the government’s attempts to pass tax cuts in Australia were not fruitful, tax reform remains a significant international issue.

In arguing for a tax reduction for big business, Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann pointed to economic outcomes in the United States, where corporate tax rates were cut from 35% to 21% in January this year.

“If you look at the economic data in the US in the second quarter, of course post the Trump tax cuts, the US is recording in excess of 4% growth on an annualised basis, the unemployment rate now has a ‘three’ in front of it, and wages growth is the strongest it’s been in a very long time,” Cormann said.

“Massive, massive capital investment has been returned to the United States.”

Is that right? And if yes, are the tax cuts to thank? Let’s take a closer look.

Checking the source

In response to The Conversation’s request for sources and comment, a spokesperson for Cormann provided GDP and capital investment data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, employment data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, a Bloomberg article, and a January 2018 World Economic Outlook from the International Monetary Fund.

You can read the full response from Cormann’s office here.

Verdict

Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann’s statement that corporate tax cuts in the US had “led to stronger investment, stronger growth, lower unemployment rate and higher wages” is not supported by evidence.

Cormann pointed to US economic data from the second quarter of 2018 (shortly after the US corporate tax cuts were enacted) to support his statement.

Cormann correctly quoted the figures about GDP growth and the unemployment rate. His statement on wage growth is debatable, and there are qualifications to be made about his interpretation of the capital investment data.

But the simple observation that some US economic indicators improved in the second quarter of 2018 does not imply that those improvements were caused by the tax cuts.

Even if causation could be established, one quarter of data tells us very little about the effect of tax reform. It takes time for companies and workers to adjust to changed taxation environments. These adjustments happen progressively over time, and this can lead to significant differences in the short term and long term responses.

It’s worth noting that the improvement in economic conditions in the US started in mid-2016, around 18 months before the tax reform.

The fundamental issues with the claim

Can we really look to US economic data from the second quarter of 2018 to support (or for that matter, reject) the argument that corporate tax cuts would benefit Australia?

My answer is no, for two reasons.

There is not evidence of causation

The simple observation that some US economic indicators improved in the second quarter of 2018 (after the introduction of the corporate tax cuts) does not imply that those improvements were caused by the tax cuts.

Several other factors will determine economic dynamics in any given quarter. A sophisticated statistical analysis based on a longer string of data after the second quarter of 2018 would be needed to determine the causal contribution of corporate tax cuts.

The assessment of causality is further complicated by the fact that there is a lag effect of corporate tax cuts on the economy.

It takes time for companies and workers to adjust to changed taxation environments. These adjustments happen progressively over time, and this can lead to significant differences in the short term and long term responses.

It’s also important to note that the improvement in US economic conditions started in mid-2016, around 18 months before the tax reform.

One quarter of data is not enough

Even if we neglected the causality issue, data from the second quarter of 2018 only gives us a limited idea of the very short term effects of the corporate tax cuts.

When it comes to tax reform, long term effects are what really matters. The important difference between short term and long term effects is evident from the preliminary economic projections published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in August 2018.

According to the authors of the IMF working paper, the US corporate tax cuts are projected to have a modest impact on long term growth, but will also cause an increase in the US federal debt to GDP ratio by approximately five percentage points by 2023.

Therefore, the corporate tax cuts may, in the end, fail to sustain long term growth, and make it harder to reduce government deficits and debt.

Rather than focusing on what happened in the second quarter of 2018 in the US, those debating corporate tax cuts should look at the economic theory and evidence drawn from countries where tax reforms have been implemented for a longer period of time (for example, Canada and Germany).

In general, this body of research does not provide any solid theoretical or empirical evidence backing the argument that corporate tax cuts will lead to a more prosperous economy.

A closer look at the economic figures

As outlined above, we cannot say that the Trump tax cuts “led to” the economic outcomes quoted by Cormann. But we can take a look at the numbers, for interest’s sake.

Cormann pointed to four macroeconomic benchmarks:

US GDP growth

Cormann said the US is “recording in excess of 4% growth on an annualised basis”.

Based on GDP data from US Bureau of Economic Analysis, and with the growth rate calculated as annualised change over the previous quarter, Cormann was correct: GDP growth hit 4.1% in the second quarter of 2018.

The GDP growth rate can also be calculated as the change compared to the same quarter of the previous year.

On that measure, the growth rate was 2.8%, compared to 2.1% in the second quarter of 2017, following a steady increase from 1.3% in the second quarter of 2016.

US unemployment rate

In July 2018, the US unemployment rate was 3.9%, as Cormann correctly stated.

The chart below shows both the employment rate at the end of each quarter (for example, June 2018 for the second quarter of 2018) and the average rate across the three months in each quarter.

US wages growth

To support his statement about US wages growth, Cormann pointed to a Bloomberg article which drew on data from the US Bureau of Labour and Statistics Employment Cost Index. In the second quarter of 2018, this particular index did record its highest growth since mid-2008.

However, measures of “wages” differ depending on which parts of employees’ salaries are included, and which are excluded.

Another, and perhaps more useful, definition of wages is employees’ average hourly earnings, also reported in the table.

The picture emerging from this measure quite different. These figures show that employees’ average hourly earnings actually fell in the year to the second quarter of 2018.

This doesn’t support the conclusion that wage growth in the second quarter of 2018 was the “strongest it’s been in a very long time”.

US capital investment

We can measure capital investment by looking at Nonresidential Gross Private Domestic Investment data, sourced from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. These figures show a pick up in investment in the first and, to a lesser extent, second quarters of 2018.

These figures are not, however, necessarily evidence of “massive capital investment” being “returned” to the US, as Cormann stated.

The figures Cormann quoted in his response to The Conversation measure capital expenditure on commercial real estate, factories, tools and machineries in the US – not where the investment comes from.

The term “nonresidential” doesn’t refer to foreign investment, but to investments in commercial (rather than residential) assets.

The chart below, based on data from US Bureau of Economic analysis, shows there was an increase in capital investment in the first quarter of 2018 (when the tax cuts were implemented).

Again, this follows a trend of increases in capital investment, with peaks and troughs, since the first quarter of 2016.

The continuation of an existing trend

Overall, the data paint a rather favourable picture for the US in the second quarter of 2018.

However, it also seems that these macroeconomic indicators began to improve in mid-2016. This is particularly the case for GDP growth and unemployment.

Therefore, the positive outlook for the US in the second quarter seems to be the continuation of a positive cyclical phase that started before the enactment of the corporate tax cuts. – Fabrizio Carmignani

Blind review

I concur with the verdict.

Senator Cormann’s assertion that the growth in business investment and wages and the decline in unemployment observed in the US over the first half of this year can be attributed, either wholly or in part, to the Trump administration’s corporate tax cuts is not supported by the evidence.

As this FactCheck points out, all of these trends were under way well before the corporate tax cuts took effect, and one or two quarters worth of data is not sufficient to establish that the tax cuts have made any significant or sustained change to those trends.

I disagree that average hourly earnings is a ‘better’ measure of US wages growth than the employment cost index (for the same reasons that most Australian economists regard the ABS wage price index as a better measure of Australian wages growth than average weekly earnings).

But that doesn’t undermine the conclusion that the gradual upward trend in US wages growth was well established before the Trump administration’s corporate tax cuts came into effect, and owes far more to the gradual tightening in the US labour market (which has been underway for a long time before those tax cuts came into effect) than it does to those tax cuts.

Indeed, over the first two quarters of 2018, the employment cost index rose by just 0.1 of a percentage point more than it did over the first two quarters of 2017, which is hardly compelling evidence of a significant impact of the corporate tax cuts.

It is worth noting that one-fifth of the 21% annualised rate of growth in US real private non-residential fixed investment over the first half of this year was due to a 156% (annualised) increase in investment in “mining exploration, shafts and wells”.

This category that accounts for less than 4% of the level of private non-residential fixed investment, and the spurt in this category of business investment would have owed far more to the rise in oil prices since the middle of last year than it would have to the cut in corporate tax rates.

Finally, it is also worth noting that the one component of the Trump administration’s corporate tax reforms which the IMF and others have acknowledged would likely have some temporary positive impact on business investment – the immediate expensing for tax purposes of capital expenditures incurred before 2023 (what we in Australia call an ‘instant asset write off’) – isn’t part of the measures which Senator Cormann had been asking the Senate to pass. –Saul Eslake

The Conversation’s FactCheck unit was the first fact-checking team in Australia and one of the first worldwide to be accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, an alliance of fact-checkers hosted at the Poynter Institute in the US. Read more here.

Have you seen a “fact” worth checking? The Conversation’s FactCheck asks academic experts to test claims and see how true they are. We then ask a second academic to review an anonymous copy of the article. You can request a check at checkit@theconversation.edu.au. Please include the statement you would like us to check, the date it was made, and a link if possible.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mike Young, Reseach Chair, Water and Environmental Policy, University of Adelaide

Scott Morrison has an honours degree in economic geography, and it shows. On Thursday the prime minister split apart the ministerial responsibilities for energy and climate, which were previously part of a united portfolio under Josh Frydenberg.

The new federal environment minister Melissa Price is now responsible for climate policy, whereas the incoming energy minister Angus Taylor has been described by Morrison as the “minister for getting energy prices down.”

Read more: Better than the alternative. What the market thought of ScoMo

Splitting the energy and environment portfolios may seem like a step backwards, given the significant greenhouse emissions produced by the electricity sector and other energy industries. But by separating two significant areas, Morrison is following good economic practice: creating a “dynamically efficient” economy.

You’ve got to be dynamic

The first Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch for their contributions to the development of dynamically efficient economies.

Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize-winning advice was simple: if you want your nation to prosper, use separate policy instruments to achieve separate policy objectives.

Better still, put responsibility for climate and electricity in separate departments and charge each with responsibility for the delivery of each outcome as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

Read more: The too hard basket: a short history of Australia’s aborted climate policies

Price’s new challenge is to come up with the best greenhouse gas reduction program she can. Rather than putting lots of money into subsidies, fiddling with renewable energy targets and embracing expensive schemes such as Snowy Hydro 2.0, she is relatively free to design a dynamic, economy-wide scheme that can be described confidently as being robust enough to serve Australia well in the centuries to come.

Sharing it around

One of the best options available to Price is to set up a nationwide “climate-sharing” system. We already have this system for water – for example, the water-trading system that operates through much of the Murray Darling Basin.

To set up a sharing system, essentially the government would have to issue shares to each significant greenhouse gas emitting company, in proportion to its recent emissions. A large power station, for example, might be given ten million shares.

Every year emissions permits can be issued in proportion to the number of shares held, and the company would then need to decide whether or not it had enough permits – just like a standard emissions trading system. There are, however, two differences between an emissions trading system and a climate sharing system.

Bottom-up investment and a community return

First, shares tend to be very valuable and, as has been shown repeatedly with water, can be used to fund investments in emissions-reduction technologies. Once these have been made, shares can be sold to pay for the change.

Second – and overcoming the common objection to rewarding polluters by giving them valuable shares – a community return can be introduced. This would require all shareholders to surrender a percentage of their shares every year.

Companies can decide either to let these shares go or to buy them back. In practice, this would operate much like a carbon tax – but it is determined on the industry’s rather than the government’s assessment of the long-term cost of dealing with climate change in the most innovative way possible.

The question then is what to do with the resulting annual return. One option (arguably the best available) is to share this equally between federal, state and local governments in proportion to recent emissions. Those communities most affected by the need to reduce emissions would then be given the resources necessary to plan for and build an alternative future. The annual reduction of each shareholding by 1-2% would be sufficient to do this.

Real stability

Sharing systems already increase wealth, drive innovation and stimulate investment in our fisheries and rivers. We may still fight over the details of the water markets, but the foundations of these systems as a way to manage uncertainty are rock solid. Why not do the same with climate?

Well-designed sharing systems give local communities and local businesses a stake in a game that otherwise is played out largely in political arenas.

Whenever such a system is put in place, two markets quickly emerge. The market for shares is used to protect investments, fund innovation and empower local communities. The market for permits enables each power station to search for the most efficient way to meet ever-changing demand and supply conditions.

As is the case for water, the number of permits to be issued per share could be flexibly managed by a board of stakeholders.

How fast we move towards the Paris emissions target (and whatever targets follow) can be worked out adaptively as we go. If the cost of compliance goes up, more permits per share can be issued. If the development of non-polluting sources of energy continue apace, the cost of meeting our Paris commitments many not be as great as many think.

Read more: New coal doesn’t stack up – just look at Queensland’s renewable energy numbers

Implementation

Pragmatically, Price could start by issuing shares to the electricity sector. But once feasibility has been proven, this could quickly expand to iron ore, cement and other stationary industries. Having done this, the logical next step would be to include transport and other sectors.

Early on in the roll-out of a climate sharing scheme, farmers could be offered the opportunity to sell carbon-sequestration permits into the scheme. Once they see the value of climate shares, however, I would not be surprised if many farmers start arguing for full inclusion in the scheme.

(Farmers, by the way, would be likely to recommend setting up a central register and making it possible to mortgage climate shares.)

Then, and as has happened with water, the banks can be get involved in helping to fund a transition to a low-carbon economy while creating jobs and driving innovation.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anneke Fitzgerald, Professor, Griffith University

What happens when you bring a group of older residents to mix with young children in childcare? Clapping hands and singing songs is just one way they spend the morning together. These interactions are made possible by intergenerational care programs that have gained popularity in Australia in recent years.

Intergenerational care programs provide older adults and children aged three to five with care and social support in the same setting, for short periods of time. This has mutual benefits.

The widespread implementation of intergenerational care programs has the potential to solve many of today’s economic challenges associated with child and aged care, while enhancing the educational and social benefits in encouraging relationship building between generations.

Intergenerational care programs in Australia

Although intergenerational care programs are popular in the US and UK, they’re in their infancy in Australia.

Given changing economic, demographic and social pressures in Australia, there’s an increased need for quality and cost-effective care arrangements for both older people and young children.

There’s an anticipated rise in demand for formal care services associated with an ageing population in Australia. This is further compounded by an increase in people not having children, shifts in perceptions of family obligations for caring, rising divorce rates and rising female employment rates.

Accompanying the unprecedented demand for formal aged care services is the limited supply of such care. Finding appropriate care for both older people and young children in Australia is often difficult and unsuitable for the person in need of care or their carer.

The increase in demand for formal care services and the shortage of supply of such care highlights the need for alternative models. This includes models such as intergenerational care. But current intergenerational programs in Australia tend to operate in residential aged care facilities, lack a formalised program based on educational teaching strategies, and don’t keep track of or evaluate participant outcomes.

The Griffith University Intergenerational Care Project

The Griffith University Intergenerational Care Project focuses on trialling two models of care:

1. a shared campus model where an aged care centre is located in the same place as a childcare centre

2. a visiting campus model where childcare and aged care centres are located separately and one group travels to visit the other.

The psychological and social benefits of intergenerational care programs are well recognised. Griffith University’s Intergenerational Care Project is investigating the educational, workforce and economic benefits intergenerational care programs can bring to Australia.

This research is now well underway and is being conducted across four locations within Queensland and NSW. It’s conducted with older adults living with dementia and children aged three to five years.

In this program, older people and children meet for one hour each week over 16 weeks. They partake in shared activities designed to enhance engagement between generations.

Preliminary results suggest the reception of the program has been positive. Both younger and older participants expressed excitement and joy at being able to interact with each other.

Benefits of intergenerational care

Intergenerational care programs give children the opportunity to learn from and connect with an older generation, improve children’s behaviour and attitude towards older people, and enhance the overall well-being of both young and old participants.

Read more: Combining daycare for children and elderly people benefits all generations

For older participants, intergenerational care programs allow them to pass on their knowledge and interact with young children in a meaningful way. As a result, they feel an improved sense of life meaning and enhanced self-worth.

Broader benefits

Community perceptions of older adults and ageing also tend to shift from negative to positive. This is especially important because older people want to be treated as valued members in society. Intergenerational care programs enhance the quality of relationships between ageing people and children, and challenge ageist stereotypes.

Intergenerational care programs create a strong opportunity to address ageism in society from an early age and challenge people’s assumptions about the contributions of people living with dementia or experiencing other forms of cognitive decline.

This is particularly important in Australia. It’s projected by 2050 about one million people will be living with a dementia-related illness. This represents an increase of 254% since 2011.

Delivering intergenerational programs in one location is also attractive because of anticipated cost savings. Both aged care and childcare organisations can decrease total running costs by sharing resources such as skilled labour, learning materials, and buildings.

Our preliminary workforce interview findings suggest intergenerational care is a career path that interests staff. It also suggests creating a training qualification to enable this career path may address workforce shortages in both child care and aged care.

Read more: What happened when we introduced four-year-olds to an old people’s home

Intergenerational care programs offer an effective alternative model of care in Australia in the face of increasing economic, demographic and social pressures. An extensive rollout of such programs has the potential to give families access to more, higher quality childcare, and helps older people feel like valued members of society.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wendy Shaw, Associate Professor, UNSW

Sections of cities all over the world are being demolished to meet increasing demand for transport infrastructure. The process of building new roads, harbour crossings, metro systems and light rail lines seems unending. Large-scale construction includes loss of public space, housing and backyards.

Historic suburbs, such as Sydney’s Haberfield, have suffered. And then there’s the issue of cost blow-outs and traffic gridlock. There are rumblings, too, about environmental impacts and equity of access. But there is actually one public transport option that can mitigate many of these concerns: cable cars.

Read more: We hardly ever trust big transport announcements – here’s how politicians get it right

Cable cars now grace many urban skylines, including some of the world’s most populous, congested and poorest cities, such as Colombia’s city of Medellin, but also the US city of Portland. These cities have integrated cable cars with existing transport networks. The newer versions are cheap, quick to build and solar generating. Perhaps it’s time for Australia to start looking skyward for solutions.

What are cable cars?

Cable cars are also known as aerial trams, gondolas, wires or ropeways. They are well known at ski resorts, but some cities are now including them as a form of public transportation. A pioneering example is the Colombian Medellin Cable, built in 2004. This was the first in the world to be fully integrated into the urban public transport system.

Medellin triggers images of modern-day gangsters (including the drug baron Pablo Escobar) and high murder rates. But in 2016, the city won the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize for extreme reduction in violent crime. This was attributed to a multi-targeted approach to sustainable urban redevelopment, with a focus on accessible transport.

The cable car was the main feature of this transport system. This has improved the lives of many in the poorer parts of the city by providing transport out of impoverished areas to employment and other opportunities.

The Mexicable in Mexico’s city Ecatepec in Morelos, opened in 2016. The journey, which spans 4.8 kilometres, used to take over an hour on the roads below. Now up to 30,000 passengers a day travel along the route of 17 minutes. It is solar powered and cost just A$US72 million to build.

With a limit of ten people per car, commuters feel safer. One explained:

bandits go after buses but leave the cable cars alone.

Cable cars are equipped with high-tech surveillance security, including cameras.

Another commuter, a woman this time, told Al Jazeera:

most of all I like the feeling of security … when travelling by bus I never know what my children would experience.

There are many other recent examples of urban transit cable cars including the Portland Arial Tram in the United States, built in 2007. Each of the tram’s two cabins has the capacity to hold 79 people.

The aerial tram travels a journey of just over 1km and cost US$57 million to construct. In comparison, a 1.6km stretch of an urban four-lane freeway costs US$60-$300 million. Cable cars require less land, less infrastructure and are quick to build.

There is also the Telepherique de Brest in France, completed in 2017. There are plans for an 11km cable car for Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and a 10km span for Istanbul, Turkey.

Australia could be next

According to Stephen Graham, a cities professor at the UK’s Newcastle University, city planning has traditionally tended to occupy a horizontal plane and adopt a flat perspective.

A geographer at University College London, Andrew Harris, considers this horizontal thinking as somewhat ironic, given that the 21st century’s urban age “has stimulated and necessitated three-dimensional urban growth with the construction of new overhead and underground infrastructure…”

We need to think three-dimensionally, and look skyward as well as underground. While the cable car industry is currently in a selling frenzy in cities all over the world, Australian cities have not engaged with this form of urban public transport.

Read more: Our new PM wants to ‘bust congestion’ – here are four ways he could do that

Cable cars in Australia are mostly found in the ski fields or as tourist attractions. Those in the planning stages also follow the tourism model (such as for the Mount Wellington Cable Car in Hobart) rather than contribute to mass transit.

Cable cars are not constrained by the urban landscape and require minimal land or property acquisition. They are capable of providing mobility where other technologies are unworkable at street-level. Many are built over existing main roads and provide a direct public transport option to sitting in traffic. Most modern examples are user-friendly and easily accessible. The Mexicable has wheelchair access at every station.

Just think how Australian cities might be transformed. Imagine highly congested urban transport routes with an aerial tram moving almost silently, high above. This is the reality for an increasing number of urban commuters, globally.

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Isaacs, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Sydney

What makes a film a classic? In this column, film scholar Bruce Isaacs looks at a classic film and analyses its brilliance.

Marie Antoinette, 2006.

Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette divided both critics and audience alike with its playful depiction of historical events. Many critics felt that by choosing to depict history on film, Coppola had a responsibility to be faithful to that history.

Read more: Sofia Coppola emerges from her father’s shadow with Cannes triumph for The Beguiled

While some of the harshest critics accused the film of abusing historical facts, Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is a sophisticated recreation of the past through the impressionistic lens of the present. The film has a lot to say about how we experience the past, and how that past is relevant to us today.

See also:

The great movie scenes: Hitchcock’s Vertigo
The great movie scenes: Antonioni’s The Passenger
The great movie scenes: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The great movie scenes: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws
The great movie scenes: Hitchcock’s Psycho
The great movie scenes: The Godfather
The great movie scenes: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Solnim, Professor of Economics, University of Sydney

Australia’s demand for plasma, a component of blood that transports nutrients, is rapidly outpacing domestic supply. This means enormous quantities of plasma must be imported from overseas, where donors are paid for donating.

Two factors can help explain the shortfall. First, the Australian Red Cross Blood Service has a monopoly to collect all blood products in Australia. Second, Australia’s donors receive no financial compensation.

These two factors limit the domestic supply of plasma, is unjust for Australian donors and makes domestic collections financially burdensome.

Australia needs a competitive market that pays plasma donors. This would address the injustice to Australian donors and potentially save taxpayers over A$200M annually.

Read more: Explainer: what’s actually in our blood?

Plasma is used for people suffering from burns, shock and other medical emergencies and its components are used to treat rare chronic conditions.

In contrast to whole blood which can only be stored for a maximum of six weeks, plasma donations are highly processed, and can be stored for a year or longer.

Donating plasma takes up to one and a half hours, including around 45 minutes “needle-in” time. During this time, blood cycles through equipment that separates plasma from other blood parts, which are returned to the donor.

For and against compensating donors

In one of the classic texts on social policy, Richard Titmuss claimed paying donors would reduce blood supply and safety.

Titmuss argued compensation would reduce donations by eroding the spirit of volunteerism to help others and would threaten safety because compensation would attract donors with greater likelihood of having transmissible diseases.

This concern seemed justified in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic. And this encouraged Australia’s policy of not compensating donors for blood products.

Read more: Restricting gay men from donating blood is discriminatory

But much has changed since the 1970s. Careful screening and medical advancements have eliminated virtually all safety concerns.

And, contrary to notions that compensation diminishes donations, research overwhelmingly shows incentives substantially increase donations.

My colleagues and I reviewed many studies. We found that of the 19 different incentives offered, 18 increased donations significantly and none ever reduced donations or harmed safety.

In our study with the American Red Cross, donors were 30% more likely to donate if offered $10 gift cards than if only asked to volunteer.

Read more: Explainer: what’s actually in our blood?

To examine how compensation will affect Australian donations, I conducted a survey asking Australians “how likely” and “how often” they would donate in the next year.

Some respondents, randomly assigned, were asked these questions when not being offered any compensation. The others were asked the same questions when being offered A$50. A$50 is about the average amount that international donors are offered.

Consistent with the previous research, those offered compensation were 20 percentage points more likely to say they would donate than those not offered compensation (60% vs. 40%).

Further, respondents offered compensation indicated they would make over three more plasma donations per year than those not offered compensation.

The chart below shows those offered compensation will donate more than those not offered compensation regardless of whether the study participants had never donated (will donate 3.3 times if offered compensation vs. 0.5 times if not offered compensation); had donated, but not recently (4.2 vs. 0.8) or had donated recently (6.9 vs. 2.9).

Creating a fairer and less costly system

Not compensating Australia’s approximately 150,000 plasma donors for their time is unfair given its enormous value to society, and especially considering we pay for plasma that comes from international donors who are paid for the equivalent donation.

The National Blood Authority’s 2016-2017 annual report indicates Australian imports of immunoglobulin, a plasma component, provide 44% of domestic demand. This costs A$120 million while the remaining 56% comes from domestic supply costing A$413 million.

This implies the domestic supply of immunoglobulin costs over three times more per unit than what is imported, despite domestic donors not being compensated.

Read more: Explainer: what are blood groups and why do they matter?

It also implies Australia could save over A$200M annually by importing all immunoglobulin.

Likely culprits for the higher domestic costs include the Red Cross Blood Service’s monopoly powers and not compensating donors. Since not offering compensation limits donations, it likely increases other costs, including recruiting donors.

And the Blood Service’s monopoly position reduces the normal competitive market motives to constantly search for the most cost effective collection methods.

Read more: Three ethical ways to increase organ donation in Australia

Given lower international prices, one way to save money is to collect more plasma abroad and less domestically. A much more desirable solution would be to introduce a (regulated) competitive domestic market for plasma.

A competitive domestic market should successfully develop following the international market model, would provide new business opportunities and allow compensation to land in Australian rather than international donors’ pockets.

Concerns should be no different for plasma coming from a domestic than international market, and the domestic market could be better as we can tailor regulations to our needs rather than rely on international market rules.

To save taxpayer money and treat Australian donors more fairly, a competitive market for plasma supply is necessary.

Alex Berger provided outstanding support on all aspects of the Survey.