Power to the people controlling the people

A year after the Australian waterfront war the debate over industrial relations reform remains hot although not visibly violent.  Three competitive directional forces are apparent which are impacting on how Australians are organised in their working lives.

The item attracting most national attention is the Federal Government's Second Wave legislation which seeks to further soften the power of the centralised system.  In direct legislative opposition is the new Queensland IR Act which has delivered an unheralded degree of power to the IRC and unions.  The third force is represented by the significant growth of working arrangements outside of any imposed IR system.

These three forces are manifestations of starkly different conceptual models operating in a society which is evolving towards greater individual freedom and equality.  The greater the levels of individual freedom and equality a society can deliver to citizens, the greater are the levels of creativity, productivity and sense of self worth achieved by citizens.

Regulation of people's working lives has always been justified on grounds that employees are in an unequal power relationship with employers.  This inequality is ensured through the legal basis of employment where the employer has the presumptive "right to control" the employee.  It is a situation out of step with where society is heading.

For example, the power of one partner in a marriage to have legal control of the other partner has been removed through statute.  The right of one class, race or religion to have power over or to discriminate against others has been legally removed.  In a just society our parliaments look to create laws which give people the presumption of legal equality.

Yet with employment law the reverse is the case.  Employment law, regulations and the regulating institutions impose legal presumptions of unequal power relationships.  Centralised IR systems operate on the premise that inequality of power at work is best resolved by creating a third, more powerful authority which can impose its will on employers and employees alike.  Rather than removing legal inequality of power the IR system creates more inequality.

With this issue of power in mind the three identified trends can be observed.

The Federal Government's Second Wave legislation is a mild adjustment to its initial legislation.  It doesn't seek to address the legal unequal power inherent in employment but does aim to further diminish the power of the third party and to push employers and employees to solve issues directly through individual agreements.  The warrior cry of the unions in opposition is motivated by their progressive removal from the interplay between employer and employee.  Unions contend that "controlled" individual employees cannot protect themselves from legally dominant employers, an argument that has some moral resonance.

Moving within a different paradigm to industrial relations legislation is the community shift to working under commercial contracts where the legal presumption is of equality between the parties.  With well over 10% of the workforce working this way, equality within commercial contracts has become a significant factor affecting people's working behaviour.  This trend is likely to expand given that the Federal Governments tax reform package is closing any tax loopholes normally associated with contracting.  As businesses discover the new tax legitimacy of independent contracting they will feel more comfortable utilising managerial approaches which look for equality in the work relationship.

In many respects the second wave legislation and independent contracting are moving in a coherent direction but with different structures and timeframes towards a society where legal equality in working relationships is the desired if not actual goal.

In the opposite direction are the forces which seek to deny the trend to legal equality and instead seek to reimpose and reinforce notions of unequal power between people at work.  A high mark of this counterforce is the 1999 Queensland IR legislation, which delivers to the IRC and unions a near total legislative authority to intervene in work situations.  Further, the Queensland Act seeks to intervene in relationships where equality under commercial contracts exists.  The forces pushing for this Queensland-style legislation deny that equality at work can ever be achieved and so seek to impose third-party authority on all people who work.

Whatever is the real life behavior of people it is socially progressive to construct legislation which delivers to people at least the presumption of legal equality.  This has been achieved in the areas of marriage, race, religion and other areas of human activity but in the area of our working lives the struggle for legal equality is furtive.

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Conformity at the ABC

With the announcement of Jonathan Shier as the new managing director of the ABC, ABC staff have been active in the media arguing for three propositions:  that Shier needs to prove himself effective at getting increased funding for the ABC;  that the culture of the ABC must preserved;  and that private sector involvement with the ABC (for example, through advertising) should not be increased and should ideally be decreased.

The tension between increased funding and no advertising is obvious.  Equally obvious is the preferred solution:  more taxpayer funding.  This would certainly not do anything to upset the current culture in the ABC.

What seems less obvious to the ABC staff offering the public the benefit of their wisdom is that there is a very real tension between the current culture of the ABC and increased funding.

First, since that culture is very much seen as hostile to the Coalition, why would any Coalition government increase funding to the ABC?

More importantly, if that culture does not change, funding to the ABC ought not be increased.

The ABC is funded by all Australians.  It therefore has an obligation to reflect the intellectual and opinion diversity of the Australian nation.  This it clearly fails to do -- there is not a single conservative, libertarian or even classical liberal voice on the ABC.

If the ABC only reflects a narrow range of opinion -- as it does -- it has no right to dip further into the public purse.

Not only does it not reflect the country's diversity of opinion, significant ABC resources are put in to enforcing ideological conformity.

A presenter deemed "suspect" will find what they can say is policed, with battles over which phrases and what ideas will be deemed acceptable to presented to the tender ears of the public.  Too many such battles, and they will be eased out.  Aunty has a long history of this -- for example, members of the PLO were never to be called "terrorists" while West Bank settlers were "Jewish extremists".

This is a straightforward waste of public funds and abuse of position which alienates potential supporters of the ABC.  Diversity is, in fact, efficient:  conformity is costly.

The problem is, opinions have become markers of status, of being a "good" person:  they therefore become moral assets to be defended.  This encourages conformity and intellectual sterility since genuine debate makes the opinions contestable -- just another opinion -- and thus not indicators of status.

The ideological conformity in the ABC is the most obvious sign of staff capture, with public funds being used to polish and defend the moral vanity of staff.

But if the ABC cannot be bothered to reflect the intellectual diversity of Australia, why should any government -- but particularly a Coalition one -- be bothered to increase its funding?

Let's Make A Quid From Our Asylum

Should the government set aside a few thousand places in Australia's annual refugee intake to be sold to the highest bidders?

Such a suggestion probably seems outrageous, a heartless sacrifice of human concerns on the altar of economic rationalism and the free market.  But it is not so different from the current situation, where Australia faces what amounts to an illicit market in refugee places.

People claiming to be refugees are paying crime syndicates to bring them to Australia illegally, and to instruct them in the most effective ways of taking advantage of our comparatively liberal immigration and welfare programs.  As there are only a fixed number of refugee places available, wealthy asylum-seekers are displacing those in genuine need who are too poor -- or maybe too scrupulous -- to jump the queue.

Reports suggest that illegal immigrants are willing to pay as much as $45,000 to the criminals who are transporting them to Australia.  It is true that some of these people may actually meet the United Nations definition of a refugee, having a well-founded fear of being persecuted in their own countries because of their political opinions, ethnicity, social group or religion.

But it is also certain that many of the illegal entrants are simply attempting to get around Australia's migration requirements by falsely stating that they are escaping from persecution.  Some do not even come from the countries they claim to be fleeing, and destroy their passports and other documents in the hope of preventing authorities from discovering the identity of their true homeland.

Others are "forum shoppers".  These are people who qualify as refugees, but who have residency rights in another country which, while offering them a safe haven, is not a place where they wish to remain, because the economic or social conditions are not sufficiently to their liking.

Despite the heavy penalties Australian law lays down for people smugglers -- up to 20 years in prison and fines of $220,000, as well as confiscation of their boats -- it is a growing racket, as lucrative as drug trafficking, but with much less risk.  And as experience with the narcotics trade around the world has clearly shown, the threat of life imprisonment or even capital punishment is not enough to deter criminal gangs who stand to make millions of dollars on a single deal.

But why should all the money go to foreign crooks?  Surely it would be preferable if the large sums that illegal entrants seem ready to pay went into Australian public coffers, where they could help to provide a higher level of post-arrival services so as to integrate needy refugees more effectively into the wider community.  The money could even be used to give us a better coastal surveillance system, allowing surfers and fishermen to concentrate on their recreation without having to double as guardians of our shores.

It seems reasonable to expect that were the government to put them on the market, refugee places would fetch as least as much as the criminal syndicates are now charging, perhaps considerably more.  Auctioning, say, 2,500 places a year at an average of $40,000 each would bring in $100 million.

Those who were able to purchase places would obtain a comfortable risk-free trip to Australia, secure in the knowledge that on arrival they would be given the benefit of the doubt, and treated as though they might actually be genuine refugees.  Such a scheme would cut much of the ground from under the illegal people-traffickers by siphoning off their most lucrative potential customers.  It might even serve to allay at least some of the opposition to immigration by cutting its costs to the Australian taxpayer.

Another major benefit would be that the successful bidders could commence their new lives in Australia without first breaking our immigration laws.  Given that many of the desirable aspects of our way of life depend on a widespread respect for the rule of law, new arrivals should not gain the impression that Australia condones -- and even rewards -- illegal behaviour and rorting.  This would be a further step towards reducing public disquiet about immigration.

So although a government-run market in refugee places would clearly disadvantage the poor, it would still be morally and practically superior to the current illicit market, which is just as discriminatory.  Nevertheless, such a scheme is never likely to be adopted.  It would cause apoplexy amongst the soft-hearted spokespeople for the Uniting Church, the Australian Democrats, and all the other self-appointed keepers of the nation's conscience.

Yet these same groups are bitterly attacking the Federal Government which, with somewhat reluctant Labor support, is attempting to make Australia less of a soft touch, and so reduce the "pull factor" which sustains the illicit market.

Certainly, it is valid to question whether or not the government's measures will actually work.  While I believe we should maintain a generous immigration and refugee program -- though one that gives due consideration to social harmony and the national interest -- I think the real problem with the recent moves against illegal entrants is that they may not do enough to undermine the "pull factor".

It is fanciful to suppose that diplomatic moves and stronger actions against people smugglers will make much of an impact on the illicit trade in asylum-seekers, without correspondingly tough measures designed to make Australia far less attractive to would-be illegal immigrants.  And given the nature of the problem, it is also wrong to think that such tough measures are somehow unfair or unjust.

Unless they realise this, the caring advocates from the refugee lobby will only be manifesting a failing they share with many of their kind -- so preoccupied with displaying their tender hearts that they ignore the need to develop hard heads that might offer genuinely equitable and effective solutions to difficult social problems.

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So sorry, my mythtake

There is nothing for it but to apologise.  I got it wrong.  I did not check my facts as well I should have and I relayed an urban myth as fact.  The incident I related (Opinion 22 November, reproduced below) with Jane Fonda, Colonel Carrigan and the beatings was an urban myth replicated by e-mail.

Jane Fonda did go to Hanoi, she did appear in North Vietnamese uniform supporting the North Vietnamese cause and she did later call PoWs liars for claiming they had been tortured.  But the specific incident of the beatings did not happen.

My problem was that I received the e-mail from a very reputable source, and later from another reputable source, it is being circulated very widely amongst US military personnel, it accorded with information I already had, it was mixed in with information which was true and I was affronted by Jane Fonda being regarded as one of the 100 great women of the century, as I still am.

I did not consider carefully enough the information provided back to me when I looked into the story:  they were not quite the confirmations I thought they were.

So, I should not have relayed that particular story, and I apologise to Age readers for doing so.  Those who want the full details can go to http://www.snopes.com/spoons/faxlore/hanoi.htm.

It is, of course, a classic example of how we get bitten by urban myths, particularly spread by e-mail.  The printed word has a feel of authority to it, magnified if it comes via someone who is reputable, magnified even more if you receive it from other, equally reputable, people.

And rather than the things you are automatically inclined not to believe, it is the things which naturally accord with your prejudices -- in fact things which engage your emotions -- which you are most inclined to get wrong.

But, as I certainly well know from other issues, just because something is repeated a lot, doesn't make it true.

Oh well, I am told contrition is good for the soul.

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Why Hanoi Jane's a traitor, not a hero

It is a common complaint about modern American culture in particular that it mistakes fame for importance.  Earlier this year, the American ABC network screened a program on the 100 most important women of the 20th century.  One of the women to be honoured was Jane Fonda.

Why Jane Fonda you might ask?  After all, she is merely an actor, the child of a famous actor, who made some films, some workout videos and married media billionaire Ted Turner.  She has lived a deeply privileged life, and she is famous, but what has she done that makes her a great woman?

Well, she was involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement.  But so were many, many thousands of people.  But she was famous and in the anti-War movement.  Again, so were others.

But Jane Fonda used her fame in a very particular way.  At the height of the Vietnam War she went to Hanoi and publicly paraded her support for the North Vietnam regime and people and accused American PoWs of being war criminals.  Some of those PoWs remember Ms Fonda very well.  They have reason to.  Because of Fonda some of them never came home.

Larry Carrigan spent six years in the "Hanoi Hilton" as a PoW, the first three of which he was listed as missing in action.  His wife lived on faith that he was still alive.  One day, his group got the cleaned-fed-clothed routine in preparation for a "peace delegation" visit.  They devised a plan to get word to the world that they were alive.  Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his Social Security number on it, in the palm of his hand.  When paraded before Fonda, she walked the line, shaking each man's hand and asking little encouraging snippets like, "Aren't you sorry you bombed babies?".

Believing this had to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper.  She took them all without missing a beat.  At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the PoWs, she turned to the officer in charge and handed him the little pile of notes.  Three men died from the subsequent beatings.  Carrigan was almost number four.

Other former PoWs have similar memories of Ms Fonda.  Carrigan was one of a group who attempted to have Ms Fonda charged for her actions, but her fame and position have so far protected her.

Another former PoW, when asked what he thought of Jane Fonda and the anti-war movement, replied that he held Joan Baez's husband in very high regard, for he thought the war was wrong, burned his draft card and went to prison in protest.  If the other anti-war protesters took this same route, it would have brought our judicial system to a halt and ended the war much earlier, and there wouldn't be as many on that sombre black granite wall called the Vietnam Memorial.  That, the former PoW added, was democracy, that was the American way.

Jane Fonda, the former PoW continued, chose to be a traitor, and went to Hanoi, wore their uniform, propagandized for the communists, and urged American soldiers to desert.  After her heroes -- the North Vietnamese communists -- took over South Vietnam, they systematically murdered 80,000 South Vietnamese political prisoners.  May their souls rest on her head forever, he added.

The moral choice was not being for or against the Vietnam War -- there were worthy values which led either way.  The moral choice was what you then did.  And even in a postmodern world, actions speak louder than words.  Or attitudes.

Jane Fonda was allegedly included in the 100 great women for "bringing fitness to the masses".  There is, and was, nothing great about Jane Fonda.  Yet, it appears fame itself is enough to make her so in the eyes of American TV.

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The folly of setting prices

Letter to the Editor:

John Quiggin ("Microsoft deserves a hard time" AFR 11 Nov) demonstrates gaping holes both in his knowledge of competition law and in his awareness of the importance of incentives for innovation.  He argues that Microfoft's Windows should be "declared" by the ACCC as an essential facility and be required to be sold at marginal costs.

Neither the ACCC nor other government price fixing authorities specify marginal cost principles as an appropriate basis for price setting.  The ACCC's favoured approach, "provides for a normal commercial return on efficient investments in infrastructure (in the long term) ... (and so) provides the appropriate incentives for future investment."

A moment's consideration reveals the folly of a regulator setting prices based on marginal costs.  The message such an approach delivers to innovators is, "Don't incur the costs in the first place".  Dr Quiggin's prescriptions are for a static world where all innovation has ceased and the only task is to milk the incumbent suppliers.  The policy approach he advocates would create that static world for Australia.

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Insecure Elites

After crushing a popular uprising in 1953, the communist leaders of East Germany said that the people would have to work very hard to regain their confidence.  In response, Bertolt Brecht wrote a famous poem which sardonically proposed that the regime should consider dissolving the people and electing another.

Our elites' reaction to the result of the republic referendum suggests that this is just what they would like to do to those of us who did not follow their exhortations, stupid and unworthy wretches that we are.

Rather than a gracious acknowledgement of the possibility that people who voted "no" might have considered the issue just as responsibly and intelligently as those who voted "yes", our righteous worthies went ballistic.  In doing so, they must have quelled the misgivings of some people who were wondering whether they had really made the right decision in voting against the republic.

But the vehement response of the elites seems out of all proportion to the issues that were supposedly at stake.  It was not a referendum over radically different social or economic programs, which might lead to a substantial realignment of winners and losers on a national scale.  Surely all those angry and tearful celebrities had not been nursing a secret hope that one day they might be Parliament's choice for President?

The most plausible interpretation of the referendum result is that, even though a substantial majority of Australians would like us to become a republic eventually, they do not view it as an urgent matter.  The republican push did not derive from a groundswell of popular sentiment.  It was imposed from above, motivated at least in part by some rather shabby political considerations.

Obviously, people would prefer to wait until they are presented with a more agreeable model for a republic, one that better expresses the national ethos and that is not as flawed as the model on offer last Saturday.  Such an attitude is neither irrational nor irresponsible.  It is offensive to state that the Australians who voted "no" are "ignorant", or "unpatriotic", or "gullible", or any of the other nasty epithets hurled at them by activists, commentators, and correspondents to newspapers.

A somewhat less patronising explanation was proposed by Paul Kelly of The Australian, and taken up by a number of others.  Based on voting patterns in different kinds of electorates, the suggestion was that the "yes" supporters were generally people who feel confident and secure about the pace of social and economic change, whereas the "no" supporters were those who are finding change tough.

Perhaps there is something to this explanation, although I remain to be convinced.  But even so, the commentators have avoided the really interesting question.  Why did the elites respond with such intensity to the outcome of the referendum?

I think that the answer may be found by turning the Kelly explanation on its head.  People who really feel confident about their place in the world would be much more laid back about their defeat on what is only a symbolic issue.  Clearly, important sections of our cultural and political elites are deeply insecure, uncertain about their own identities, and very worried about what others think of them.

Having convinced themselves that the world was focused on the referendum and that they would somehow be judged by the outcome, they are now in an awful funk.  They have globalised the old lament of jittery conformists -- "what will the neighbours say?".  The usual suspects are now lining up to express their shame at being Australian, in the hope that they can somehow distance themselves from the international opprobrium that they foolishly imagine will befall this country.

Anguished expatriates are writing to ask how they can explain the "no" victory to their colleagues.  (Simple enough -- "Most Australians made up their own minds, despite all the attempts by academics, celebrities and the media to browbeat them into voting 'yes' ".)  Eight superannuated diplomats pontificated that "overseas", we will continue to be seen as "subordinate", and as "turning away from the progress Australia has made in the past 50 years to establish a truly independent national identity".

The obvious fact that most ordinary Australians are not swayed by such overwrought nonsense -- widely canvassed before the referendum as well -- suggests that unlike the elites, they feel comfortable about their national identity.  Their justifiable pride in being citizens of a decent and highly successful nation has not been compromised by Australia's status as a constitutional monarchy.

And they are much less likely to indulge in pompous navel gazing about Australia's identity.  Although the elites portray their relish for such activity as a mark of their sophistication and public-spiritedness, it is more the expression of an adolescent self-absorption which projects personal anxieties and emotions onto the nation as a whole.  After all, it wasn't "Australia's heart" that was broken last Saturday night, but Malcolm Turnbull's heart and the hearts of his mates.

Given their role in our national life, it is not a good sign that our elites are so lacking in confidence.  But it is hardly surprising.  Many prominent people in politics, academia and the arts have achieved their positions through patronage networks which provide protection and advancement in exchange for loyalty and conformity.  Such an environment encourages self-doubt, because people can seldom be sure of whether their success is a result of their own talents, or a consequence of their connections.

So we should adopt a more understanding approach towards our elites, and be more sympathetic about the personal anxieties that drive their obsessions.  Until they feel good about themselves, they will never feel comfortable and relaxed about Australia.  It is not a republic that they need, but a national program of therapy and education that might help them to become more independent and confident of themselves.  Only then might they stop patronising their fellow Australians.

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ABC Needs a Culture Change

Jonathan Shier is the best person for Aunty's top job

The defence by ABC TV journalist-producer John Millard (Opinion, Thursday) of the ABC's current culture and staff prerogatives expresses what is wrong with the ABC.

An ABC completely independent of government is an ABC independent of any real owner.  The lack of any effective owner means that -- as is common in the public sector -- the organisation becomes largely captured by the interests of its staff.

The obvious massive vested interest governments have in media coverage simply exacerbates this, since any attempt to enforce accountability on the ABC can be, and is, immediately derided as partisan interference.

This staff capture does not mean that the ABC is therefore a happy organisation to work in.  On the contrary, there is a rich literature on how organisations lacking a real owner-interest as a focus have inherent tendencies to become collections of feuding fiefdoms fighting over resources.

The ABC is also an organisation dominated by progressive viewpoints.  A major aspect of the personal return for progressive politics is publicising particular opinions and receiving recognition for their superior moral insight and worth.  In the absence of an effective owner, there is a premium placed on nurturing the moral vanity of the dominant worker group, and excoriating their critics.

First, moral vanity.  Millard is at some pains to make it clear that the new ABC managing director-to-be Jonathan Shier's background in (horrors!) commercial broadcasting is a significant disadvantage.  As he informs us, the public associates the ABC -- unlike, of course, the commercial broadcasters -- with editorial integrity.  It would have been so much better, Millard tell us, to have had someone with a background in public broadcasting.  The utterly transparent adoption of a posture of moral superiority is almost endearing in its total lack of self-consciousness.

It is also an indicator of everything that is wrong with the internal culture of the ABC -- a sense of moral superiority that has huge difficulties in treating other perspectives and viewpoints fairly.  As he makes clear in the rest of his article, Millard regards any connection with private enterprise as having an inherent tendency to pollute the ABC's moral purity.

Second, staff capture.  Millard informs us that "inside the ABC, staff have expressed concern, as has this journalist, that our Aunty is quietly repositioning herself".  Pardon:  whose Aunty?  In case we had any doubt that it really is the staff's ABC, Millard immediately proceeds to complain bitterly about ABC management actually telling people what to do.  The concept that managers might actually manage is clearly offensive to him.

But one would expect that in a staff-captured organisation.

Of course, this is put in terms of editorial-compromising budget cuts and of enterprise deals that directly or indirectly compromise the ABC charter responsibility of editorial independence and distinctively Australian program content.  And this from the organisation for whom 8 out of 10 of whose top-rating shows are British, and 60 out of 100 top-rating shows are produced overseas.  (What many people actually like about the ABC is its role as a BBC relay station.)  But self-interest can always find appropriate rationalisations.

The major question facing policy makers is how to make use of the digital spectrum.  If the decision to allocate the spectrum to the current incumbents and mandating high definition TV for the commercial broadcasters stands, then public broadcasters will have an advantage in being able to engage in multi-channelling and datacasting.

If the Howard Government -- via the ABC Board it has now largely appointed -- wanted to do a hatchet job on the ABC, the new MD would have been someone with a track record in what is euphemistically known as organisational restructuring.  That MD-elect Jonathan Shier is both an outsider and has a background in broadcasting and, more particularly, broadcasting technology makes him an excellent appointment.  The last thing the ABC needs is an ideologue to the taste of ABC staff such as Millard.

Shier must, however, resist attempts -- such as that of John Millard -- to pre-shrink him to conform to the current ABC culture:  changing that culture has to be one of his key tasks.

Contractors and Tax

In the last ten years or so the use of contractors has grown from 3% to more than 10% of the workforce.  Yet even this substantial growth has been held back by business concerns over tax arrangements.  Businesses thinking of using contractors could never be sure if the contractor arrangements they used would be accepted by the tax office.  The tax push was to use PAYE employees.  Contractors were considered by many to be tax evaders.

This is all about to change.  Under the federal tax reforms, contractors are set to enjoy a new tax legitimacy that will remove business worries thus increasing prospects for use.

The tax confusion over the use of contractors has been a result of the Income Tax Acts' tying of the collection of PAYE to master-servant employment.  The courts have used PAYE to denote "controlled" employment, ensuring that PAYE workers were brought within the jurisdiction of industrial relations regulation.  Conversely, PPS payers were taken to be contractors not subject to IR regulation.  As a result, the legislative objective of collecting income tax and the employment definitions used by the Australian Taxation Office have been linked to IR issues, a bad outcome for the ATO and Australian workers and businesses.

Critical to understanding the IR-tax dilemma is the often repeated claim that PPS causes a loss of tax revenue relative to PAYE.  The truth is that PPS and PAYE payers have always paid the same amount of tax.  The difference has been in the method and timing of tax collection.  PAYE workers pay on a sliding scale and enjoy a tax-free threshold.  PPS workers pay at a lower flat rate but from the first dollar earned.  Any differences are corrected by the provisional tax system.

Tax deductions said to be available to PPS contractors but not to PAYE employees merely reflect the transfer of deductions away from a business using PPS workers, who generally supply some tools and on-the-job transport.  They are paid more than PAYE workers by way of compensation, have higher expenses and consequently claim tax deductions for these items which would have been claimed by a business if PAYE workers were used.

The remaining potential tax-revenue problem arises from income splitting.  But even this is not the dramatic issue it is usually claimed to be.  The tax losses from income-splitting have often been alleged to be between $2 billion and $3 billion a year;  but the ATO has shown these figures to be false.

In the most detailed audit for income splitting ever conducted, the ATO, in its Alienation of Personal Services Project, targeted the tax returns of 65,000 taxpayers profiled as likely income splitters.  In an intense eighteen month audit only 714 taxpayers were issued adjustment notices, with increases in tax paid varying from 1.9% to 11.6% per taxpayer.  The audit confirmed that the great bulk of individuals who form companies do so for legitimate business purposes, not to avoid tax.  The audit team was disbanded in late 1998 because the additional tax collected did not cover the cost of the audit.

The Ralph Committee thinks, however, that there is a residual income splitting.  But it is recognised that the issue arises not from contractors as such but from artificial company structuring.  People do not necessarily need to create a company to be a contractor.

The truth has always been that the facts on contractor tax, have not justified the accusations of contractor tax avoidance.

The more serious but largely ignored issue, has been that the tax collection system has been corrupted by being an instrument of industrial relations systems.  The important overriding principle is that legislation should, as far as possible, avoid confusing the ATOs' obligations to collect tax with non-tax issues.

The federal tax reform package addresses this issue, beneficially separating tax from common law employment definitions and thus from industrial relations issues.  Through the interconnecting mechanisms of the Australian Business Number (ABN) and PAYG, all people will pay income tax under PAYG without the legal issues of contracting or employment even being a consideration.

No longer will managers need to sit down and study pages of legalistic style ATO rulings to decide if they should withhold tax.  Managers will not need to become bush lawyers knowledgeable on common law presidential case studies to determine a persons tax status.

The decision will be simple.  If a person supplies an ABN, GST will normally apply and no income tax will be withheld.  If no ABN is supplied income tax will be withheld and remitted to the ATO under PAYG.  Under labour hire, the labour hire company will charge GST and attend to workers income tax under PAYG.

Where community concerns exist over artificial income this will be partially controlled through the ABN because, on achieving an ABN, GST applies.  This, combined with the Ralph Committee's recommendation on personal income tax application where 80 per cent of income is obtained from one source, will limit the commercial incentive to split incomes.

The ABN/PAYG aspect of the new tax system will supply comparative administrative simplicity and legal surety.  Consequently businesses will be able to focus on the true managerial alternatives presented by employment and contracting.

Employment as both a legal and a top driven management paradigm, is about human inequality where control of one human (employee) is exercised by a dominant other human (employer).  In comparison, using contractors involves legal and managerial ideas of equality where control of humans is replaced with achievement of results through mutual agreement.

With these tax changes businesses will be freer to focus on people performance dynamics without having decisions confused by administrative tax demands.

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A Headless State Could be the Answer

I find both sides of the Republic debate equally unappealing, with their common resort to shabby arguments and specious warnings.  Once again, the politically active elites are patronising the electorate and showing that they do not trust Australians to make intelligent and informed decisions.

On the one hand, advocates of the "No" case are making the outlandish claim that a republic would be the first step on the road to a Stalinist tyranny or worse.  While I am not drawn to any of the favoured candidates for first President, none of them strike me as being likely to metamorphose into a Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin once they take office.

The "No" case is also indulging in the humbug of offering up politicians who warn that politicians cannot be trusted to choose a president.  Apart from the question of whether this really means that they cannot be trusted with anything, many of the same individuals want us to stick with the present system in which politicians have effectively been choosing the governor-general for nearly seventy years.

True, a few of the politician-picked governors-general turned out to be duds.  But there have also been some genuine successes, and no system of selection is ever going to be perfect.  Popular elections can throw up a Joe Bjelke-Petersen or a Gough Whitlam, and hereditary succession can produce a Prince Charles.

The people promoting the "Yes" case are no better, with their shameless attempts to invoke the cultural cringe by pretending that the rest of the world will laugh at us if we vote to remain a constitutional monarchy.  And Kim Beazley's vacuous declaration that "it is time to tell kids across the country they are good enough to become president of Australia" could not have come at a worst time, given that NSW members of his party have just told the kids' parents that they are not even good enough to be given an honest chance of getting tickets for the Olympic Games.

So I would like to suggest an alternative course of action.  Admittedly, some may dismiss it as fanciful.  But it would certainly blow an equally large raspberry at both the "yes" and the "no" sides of the Republic Referendum, as well as offering many other wonderful benefits.

My humble proposal is for a republic without a president, or indeed, without any head of state at all.  The whole point of a republic is supposed to be about symbolism, and the kind of image that we should be presenting to the world.  If we really think it is necessary to make a grand statement about the egalitarianism of our nation, then no-one should be occupying a symbolic position above the sovereign and equal Australian people.

Such a move could restore us to the status we held around the end of the last century, when people in Europe and America saw us as a great beacon of democratic hope.  The secret ballot was an Australian innovation, and we were one of the first countries in the world to give women the right to vote.  Australia was held up as an exciting social laboratory, where many radical ideas about equality, justice, and welfare were starting to bear fruit.

A headless republic would show the world that once again we are prepared to indulge in worthy social experiments of our own provenance, rather than slavishly following dubious nostrums imported from the United States and Canada.  It could even help our own chattering classes to abandon their deep sense of shame at being Australian.

A republic without a president would also provide a boost for reconciliation, for it could readily be presented as an adaptation of traditional Aboriginal beliefs that tribes or clans should not be led or represented by a single individual.  It would involve a more substantial acceptance of the idea that indigenous cultures could enrich the life of our country than fatuous New Age sounding claims about "their deep kinship with their lands", or exhortations for us to "taste the spirituality of our first peoples".

So how would the duties of a president or head of state be divided up under this alternative proposal?

Occasional political crises involving the appointment or dismissal of governments could be dealt with by the judges of the High Court.  This would do little more than regularise the situation which now exists, where many of the judges seem to believe that they should be able to make creative political determinations which usurp the law-making powers of popularly elected governments.

Ceremonial duties, such as opening Parliament, receiving visiting dignitaries, or hosting garden parties at Yarralumla would be handled differently.  They could be allocated in a way that truly expresses the Australian ethos, through a national lottery in which every citizen would have an equal chance of wearing the ceremonial plumes for a day.

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Fine-tuning GM labels

On Friday, Health Ministers will meet to determine the labelling requirements for Genetically Modified (GM) Food.  Their decisions will have a profound effect on Australian food development and agriculture generally.  There is a tapestry of changes that can be introduced into existing stock to allow them to use less water, more readily take up fertilizer, secrete their own "natural" pesticides and so on.

We are told that GM foods may:

• create hazards to human health;
• harm the environment;
• cross breed with other plant stock or cause organic foods to reduce their relative tolerance to pests.

Nobody contends the need to be address these issues with GM, as with traditional introductions of new genes into existing plant varieties.  But, the scientific community, overwhelmingly supports the new technology, seeing its outcome as identical to the traditional practices.

The best known genetically improved variety, Monsanto's Roundup Ready Soyabean, improves yields by 5%, and lowers production costs by 10-20%.  It also uses 22% less herbicide, with positive environmental spin-offs.  In future, GM products will also appear that improve taste or create more healthy food.

At their previous meeting in August, Health Ministers decided to require "reasonable steps be taken" to establish the origin of food ingredients if manufacturers were to make a "may contain" claim.  Where, as is normal, the GM product is identical to existing product, the issue is the tolerance levels which trigger manufacturers' need to patrol the chain of supply.  Organics in Europe are allowed to contain 5% of non-organic material.

The impact of mandatory GM labelling is on product segregation.  The cost increases range between 6 to 50% and higher.  Some of this brings offsetting gains:  voluntary labelling in response to consumer demand (as opposed to consumerists' regulatory demands) delivers benefits in excess of the costs.  If manufacturers are allowed to label as "GM free" food that may occasionally contain some 1-2% GM product, the costs are likely to be at the lower end of the scale.  If "GM free" requires a total segregation of GM from other ingredients, the costs will be at the top end.

Even at a 6% cost impost, labelling of Australian crop production, worth about $15 billion per annum, adds up to almost $1 billion.  That sum is based on the realistic view that genetic modifications will be developed for all crops.  In addition, there has been little debate to date of secondary GM produce -- animal produce from GM inputs.  This extends beyond grain fed beef and chicken.  Virtually all existing grasses have been introduced by farmers and GM techniques will be found to raise their protein levels, allow them to grow faster and so on.  Hence the next round of GM demonization will attach itself to the meat and dairy industries.  And this is even before we have GM for livestock itself.

Health Ministers are unaccustomed to taking decisions that impact upon the whole of primary industry and much of the manufacturing sector.  They will need to brief themselves comprehensively about the costs their decisions may unleash onto the community.

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Massacre of Truth at Forrest River

Horrific murders create two sets of surviving victims.  The most obvious are the grieving families of those who have been killed.  But the families of the perpetrators also suffer, carrying the burden of their loved one's villainy for as long as people remember the crime.

Their plight tends to attract expressions of sympathy, but little genuine concern, particularly if they attempt to deny their relative's guilt.  It usually requires courage to take up their cause.

Five years ago, Perth journalist Rod Moran wrote a lengthy article for The West Australian arguing that the 1926 Forrest River massacre of Aborigines in the Kimberley was simply a myth, despite its widespread portrayal as one Australia's worst crimes this century.

The family of the late Constable James St Jack, who was supposedly a major participant in the murders, felt vindicated.  They have long believed that St Jack was maliciously accused of an outrage that never actually occurred.

Understandably, Kimberley Aborigines, whose forebears died in the disputed massacre, were deeply offended, saying that Moran was "stealing their history".  Their sentiments were shared by many other people, both black and white.

Unfazed by this anger, Moran continued his researches, and he has just published a book, Massacre Myth.  Though not an engrossing read, this sets out his arguments in painstaking and seemingly compelling detail.  He dissects the testimony presented to the Royal Commission set up in 1927 to investigate the murders, focusing on the inconsistencies and other weaknesses in the evidence.

Moran maintains that the massacre stories involved a fantastic distortion of much less egregious events -- the slight wounding of a man during a raid on an Aboriginal camp, and Constable St Jack's shooting of the camp occupants' dogs.

More sensationally, Moran maintains that the rumours that grew out of these incidents were promoted and embellished by Reverend Ernest Gribble, the head of the Forrest River Mission, as part of a devious plan to protect himself by discrediting Constable St Jack.  Moran suggests that Gribble learnt the constable had obtained information that the reverend and his son were supposedly engaged in serious hanky-panky with Aboriginal women.

The purported evidence comes from St Jack and his family, and includes reference to a long-destroyed personal diary, combined with some fanciful interpretations of scraps of other material.  The slender grounds on which this allegation is based makes it hard to accept that Moran is the rigorous and sceptical researcher he would have us believe.

The most comprehensive account of the killings has been presented by the Western Australian historian Dr Neville Green, in his 1995 book The Forrest River Massacres.  Having worked with Green on another project, I have some confidence in his judgement and his respect for the facts.

The Forrest River Massacres makes no attempt to disguise the problems involved in uncovering the truth about the murders.  Nor does Green shy away from revealing the extent of Reverend Gribble's many personal faults, which eventually led to his removal from the mission.

But unlike Moran, Green describes the massacre in the full context of four decades of bitter race relations in the Kimberley.  Very few people felt impelled to seek justice for Aborigines who had suffered violence, particularly if the interests of respected local identities were threatened.

Green has no doubts that Aborigines were murdered by a police expedition led by Constable St Jack and Constable Dennis Regan.  The party of fourteen, comprising Aboriginal assistants as well as whites, were trying to capture an Aborigine named Lumbia for the killing of a station owner who had raped his wife.

Although Lumbia himself was eventually found and brought in for trial, many innocent Aboriginal men, women and children were killed along the way, and their bodies were incinerated in an attempt to hide the evidence.

No-one knows the precise number.  The Royal Commission concluded that at least eleven Aborigines were killed at three separate locations.  Police Inspector William Douglas, who had been sent to investigate Gribble's allegations before the Royal Commission was established, reported that sixteen Aborigines were killed.

Reverend Gribble thought that the number was at least thirty.  And in 1968 Charles Overheu, the brother of one of the participants in the massacre, told Neville Green that as many as three hundred Aborigines lost their lives, although Green believes this figure is far too high.

Commissioner Wood recommended that charges of murder be laid against Constable St Jack and Constable Regan.  In May 1927, the two were arrested for the murder of just a single Aborigine, a man named Boondung.  Fearing that public sympathy for the two constables in the Kimberley would preclude a fair trial, the committal hearing was held in Perth.

But, as the Royal Commissioner himself had been forced to admit, all the evidence for the massacre was circumstantial.  It had not been possible to identify a single body of those who had been killed;  and neither was it possible to state that any particular individual had been responsible for the deaths.

Worse, at the committal hearing even Gribble could not state for certain that Boondung was dead.  And the Government bacteriologist, who had examined the burnt and fractured skeletal remains collected at the massacre sites, testified that he did not think they were from humans.  Green suggests that the material had been tampered with, because others who had examined it beforehand were convinced that it contained human remains.

The presiding magistrate dismissed the case against the two constables, who were quickly reinstated into the police force.  Gribble, whose determination had been almost solely responsible for bringing the case to public attention, was largely discredited.

Gribble was clearly an extremely self-righteous, autocratic and intolerant man, which made it so easy for many to dismiss everything he said.  But sometimes it requires a real ratbag to point us down the path towards truth.  It would be most unfortunate if Rod Moran's writings lead people to believe that the Forrest River massacre is just another fabrication perpetuated by the Aboriginal industry.

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Risk Assessment and Decision Making for Genetically Modified Foods

Biotechnology Backgrounders

SUMMARY

The introduction of genetically modified foods has been accompanied by a level of concern in Europe which was not seen in the United States.  This is seen as reflecting both a different cultural appraisal of risk, sensitised by the "mad cow" experience in the United Kingdom, and a desire by European farmers to protect the advantages they enjoy under the Common Agriculture Policy.  The level of concern over GM foods is much greater than for GM medicines, where the benefits of the technology are more readily defended.

This Backgrounder, while arguing that risk management must build on the best possible science, draws attention to the social, economic and political aspects of the risk management process.  It draws attention to the use of exaggerated claims and the misuse of the precautionary principle by the opponents of GM foods, and argues that many of the concerns about the technology reflect such factors as a sense of unease about the power of the corporations which employ it.

It argues that, like any technology, GM food carries with it both advantages and risks, and that the costs of forgoing GM plants includes environmental costs such as the greater use of pesticides.  It argues for careful assessment of the risks, which (if it is to address the public concerns) must be conducted in a transparent and credible manner which builds public trust.  The acceptability of risks, it concludes, depends on this as much as science, since the prevailing "culture of fear" thrives on secrecy and attempts to manipulate public opinion.

INTRODUCTION

The recent experience in the UK with "mad cow disease" or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has engendered a particular sensitivity among consumers over what they are eating.  BSE -- thought to be caused by a protein molecule called a prion -- produced the devastating "new variant" Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (nvCJD) in humans who had consumed nerve tissue.

BSE was shocking not so much because of the scope of the problem in humans (relatively few people have contracted nvCJD), but because of the horror of the disease.  "Spontaneous" CJD was best known previously among those treated with growth hormone extracted from the pituitary glands of dead humans, or as kuru in Papua New Guinea, where ritual cannibalism involved the consumption of human brain tissue.  The BSE experience has fed concerns about foods which have been produced using the new technology of genetic engineering.  But the way in which concerns have developed into policy responses has been markedly different in Europe than in the United States, where concern exists but has not had a significant impact on policy development.  Why?

To answer that question we must delve into the process of risk assessment, whereby different political systems confronted with the same scientific evidence can reach fundamentally different positions on how to manage any particular risk.  In so doing, we can also shed some light on why what the alarmists have labelled "Frankenstein food" has evoked much more concern than the use of genetic engineering to produce pharmaceuticals.  In a wonderful irony, genetic engineering has, for a decade, allowed the production of a growth hormone which has avoided the risk of CJD without giving rise to any alarm.  Understanding risk assessment also allows us to understand why this is so, and points towards the ways in which we should assess the risk of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Concerns about beef in Europe are not new.  Hormone-treated beef has been in dispute between the European Union and the US since 1985, when the then European Community imposed a regulation prohibiting the sale or importation of beef raised with the assistance of artificial hormones.  At that time, problems had arisen in Italy among children who consumed (European) beef which had been injected intramuscularly with hormones, while the US argued that their production methods did not give rise to the same risks, since they used hormone patches behind the ear of cattle beasts.  Since the ear was not consumed, there was no chance that high concentrations of residues could find their way into meat sold for consumption. ⁽¹⁾

The more recent dispute has not involved artificial hormones at all, but naturally-occurring bovine somatotrophin (BST) produced by organisms which have been genetically modified.  Recombinant BST (produced by bacteria whose genetic material has been modified so they will produce it) has been available for commercial use in the US since February 1994, but was not approved for use in the European Union, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway.  The product is produced using the identical BST synthesised by the cattle and is thus indistinguishable from "naturally-grown" beef -- itself the result of animal husbandry techniques and eons of selective breeding by humans to improve productivity.  So why the concern?

Part of the answer can be gauged from the way in which other EU nations exploited Britain's BSE tragedy, in which about a million cattle had to be slaughtered.  (The economic cost to the UK has been over £3 billion.)  This was a bonanza for Continental beef producers, since it allowed bans on trade in British beef within the European single market and restaurants were able to advertise their steak as being "non-British" or "French Charolais".  There is almost always a silver lining for someone in any such dark cloud -- but more on that later.

RISK AND NATURE

Increasingly, we care about how our food is grown and prepared.  We no longer eat restaurant dishes with classic names like "steak Diane", but "rump of grass-fed yearling King Island beef, pan-fried ..."  The sizzle has become at least as important as the sausage, and part of the sizzle has to do with our conceptions of nature, particularly with somewhat romantic notions of purity or the absence of contamination.  "Organic" is good, despite the fact that organic chemistry has given us all those pesticides about which we are so concerned.

"Chemical" is usually synonymous with synthetic chemical, and these notions of purity extend to the bottled water we buy.  It is possible to buy bottled water from the Snowy Mountains which is labelled "organic" -- somewhat absurd when the whole point of drinking bottled water is to be sure that it is absolutely free from organic substances.  Similarly, the label of water bottled at a spring in Tasmania boasts that it is free of chemicals -- right beside an analysis of the calcium and other minerals it contains.

And while we are told that we should be concerned about traces of chemicals in the environment which can mimic hormones, we are increasingly drinking soy milk.  This contains sufficiently high concentrations of phytoestrogens that it is recommended by some as both a natural alternative to hormone replacement therapy and as a means of preventing prostate cancer.

Our perceptions of risks and benefits, as these examples show, are almost inevitably affected by factors other than just the "objective" science describing toxicity, carcinogenicity and so on.  Many of our perceptions of risk are affected by questions such as:  whether the risks affect children or adults;  whether they are accepted voluntarily or imposed;  whether processes are secret or open;  whether risks are assessed by industry or by analysts seen as disinterested;  whether they involve the catastrophic death of large numbers of people or a succession of isolated deaths;  the kind of deaths involved;  whether the effects are immediate or delayed;  and whether the risks are natural or man-made.  Travelling 10 miles by bicycle in the US and living for 50 years within 5 miles of a nuclear reactor, for example, have both been estimated to yield an increased probability of death of one in a million, yet we respond to these risks quite differently. ⁽²⁾

One factor which affects our perceptions of risk associated with chemicals, GMOs and drugs is the fact that these products are manufactured by large, faceless corporations, usually transnational corporations which are seen as being beyond the control of governments.  As anthropologist Mary Douglas has pointed out, many of our fears about such risks reflect our sense of powerlessness in the face of such corporate giants in an increasingly globalised world. ⁽³⁾  But she also argues that risks are used to blame those already disliked.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the regulation of such hazardous substances poses problems which are tailor-made for those who would wish to amplify the risks.  All typically involve intellectual property, and patent law provides for a period of monopoly to recover development costs and profits, balancing the public good of having the lower prices which competition would bring against the public good of encouraging research and development by industry.  But this means that most of the research into the safety of such products is conducted either by the corporations themselves or by contract scientists or research laboratories who must be contractually bound to honour commercial confidentiality.  (Patents for pharmaceuticals might offer no protection if a competitor could add to the molecule an additional but meaningless chemical element or two which might simply be removed in reaction with stomach juices, for example.) ⁽⁴⁾

Regulators must use such science in making licensing decisions, but it is easy to construct a somewhat paranoid discourse around both the science and the scientists in such circumstances.  Products found to represent a low hazard can still be claimed to constitute an unacceptable risk when most of the science can be dismissed as the biased product of self-interested industry, or of corrupted scientists who have undertaken research consultancies -- if not now, then at some time in the past. ⁽⁵⁾

Science can be wrong.  Bias is a constant problem.  But science has developed means of minimising such pitfalls.  It can never eliminate them completely, but the canons of the scientific method -- if followed -- can improve the reliability of scientific knowledge.  The courts in the hyper-litigious US have had to rule on what constitutes acceptable scientific evidence in the face of a tendency for parties to each hire their own expert witnesses, and (not surprisingly) decided that the appropriate test was whether the information was generated by following key elements of the scientific method, such as replicability of results and publication after anonymous peer review. ⁽⁶⁾  Scientific knowledge always contains some residual uncertainty, but we have learned to place more faith in knowledge which emerges from such a process than that which appears from research which has not followed established scientific protocols.

While the source of funding might alert us to the direction in which a piece of scientific research might be biased, the appropriate test must be adherence to the scientific method.  Against such science, we are often asked to be alarmed about the implications of research which has not yet been replicated and, in some cases, not yet published in peer-reviewed journals.  Regardless of its source -- industry or environment group -- we should be extremely wary about acting upon such "science".

This is so even for those interest groups which profess to have the public good at heart.  It has been suggested that there is a "danger establishment", consisting of scientists (especially in "grant-rich" areas of research), journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and environment and other public interest groups, which has an interest in exaggerating dangers. ⁽⁷⁾  And because many researchers and journalists are often clamouring to build support or a readership, there is a tendency for them to shout in order to be heard.  We need to be aware, in other words, that bias can enter our social risk assessments from many directions, and recall examples such as the McBride case where research was found to have been falsified to exaggerate the dangers of a drug in order to secure continued funding for a research institute.

We should see Greenpeace -- even if we share its goals -- as not just an environmental group, but also as a transnational private company which licenses its trademark to thus-controlled foreign subsidiaries and which has among its informal goals that of system maintenance.  Like any organisation, it has salary and operating costs to cover and it must try to retain its annual revenue base of well over A$150 million worldwide.  It would be an exceptional organisation which managed to purge itself of the pursuit of goals of system-maintenance.  It can therefore be expected to focus its effort in areas and ways which will heighten concern and willingness to pay (especially since it rewards fund-raising success internally with decision-making influence).

Greenpeace specialises in politicised science, often committing the cardinal scientific sin of bringing the evidence to the theory, usually in the form of dramatic visual footage supplied to the media from some remote location.  Perhaps because of the remoteness and perhaps because of Greenpeace's perceived disinterestedness, news editors screen such footage when they would not do the same for footage supplied by more obviously interested sources.  (At a political science conference in Christchurch last year a TVNZ news executive stated that his corporation never screened footage from sources outside the company of established news services -- except for Greenpeace!) Footage of the retreating Bering Glacier provided on the eve of a climate change conference provides powerful support for action on climate change, but science is also interested in why, for example, glaciers in New Zealand are advancing.

We can illustrate this with the problems generated by Greenpeace's politicisation of science associated with GMOs.  In June 1999, France was leading the push within the EU to have the EU ban the importation of GM food.  France is not regarded as an environmental vanguard state in Europe, but it is one of the strongest supporters (and greatest beneficiaries) of the Common Agricultural Policy.  It was supported in this push by Greenpeace, whose members dressed as butterflies and carried a banner containing the slogan "Give butterflies a chance" to the meeting of EU Environment Ministers in Luxembourg on 24 June.  Citing a recent US study which indicated that pollen from genetically-engineered Bt maize could kill the larvae of monarch butterflies, Greenpeace invoked the precautionary principle in urging a ban.  The EU froze the approval process.

This piece of scientific knowledge, combined with the precautionary principle, gave considerable power to the coalition of Greenpeace and European agriculture, but it took what appears to have been sound but limited science further than it should have and ignored contextual factors completely in providing a convenient protectionist cloak.

The monarch butterfly research was published by John Losey at Cornell University in a (refereed) letter to the journal Nature. ⁽⁸⁾  Losey issued a careful press release which was totally ignored by the media (and Greenpeace), stating that the research was conducted in the laboratory and that it would therefore be inappropriate to draw any conclusions about the risk to monarch populations based solely on these initial results.  The reasons for this caution are obvious when the nature of the experiment is considered.  Hatchling monarch larvae were given a diet consisting solely of milkweed leaves (their sole food) dusted with corn pollen.  (Older larvae might be less susceptible.)  In the wild, larvae are known to avoid leaves with pollen on them and move to a clean leaf.  Further, milkweed is rarely found in cornfields, because farmers avoid them at all costs;  it is commonly found in pastures and old fields.  Maize pollen also does not travel far:  little can be found 30 feet from a cornfield and it is practically non-existent at 100 feet.  Finally, the period when maize pollinates and monarch larvae feed are both very short and might not even overlap in some seasons.

It is interesting to note that the toxin produced by the GM maize in this experiment was Bt toxin, so named because it is found in a common soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis.  Bt toxin is used by organic farmers as essentially their only pesticide, and they fear that its use in GM crops might cause the insects it protects against to develop immunity.  This, rather than concerns over Bt toxicity, lies at the heart of opposition from organic farmers. ⁽⁹⁾

Reductionist risk assessment -- attempting to regulate solely on the basis of toxicity -- ignores these crucial exposure factors and relies solely upon the science of toxicity, which can be persuasive, especially to those who wish to invoke the risk-averse precautionary principle.  It not only advantages economic interests threatened by the advantages of Bt maize, however, but also carries an environmental opportunity cost (what has to be given up as a consequence), since non-modified maize is sprayed for insect pests 8–10 times, a practice which is likely to cause substantially more harm to monarch butterflies and other insects.

Social risk assessment requires a careful analysis of the best available science, an understanding of the social and psychological factors which will inevitably intrude into the process, and careful policy analysis. ⁽¹⁰⁾  Such policy analysis requires prioritisation of candidates for risk management, which is made all the more difficult because of the "shouting" of the "danger establishment", and a careful weighing of the costs and benefits involved.  No activity can ever be risk-free.  (American author Robert Benchley once remarked that the only way of avoiding accidents was to remain in bed, but even then there was a chance you might fall out.)  There is always a need to consider the costs of risk management -- including opportunity costs -- and to be careful of the social context within which the decision is made.  A cholera epidemic in Peru once killed 3,000 people because of a decision to follow a US EPA risk assessment and not chlorinate water supplies. ⁽¹¹⁾  Chlorinated water carries an elevated risk of bladder cancer of 0.8 per 100,000, ⁽¹²⁾ but we need to remember that the costs of avoiding this risk can be much higher.

RISK AND PRECAUTION

The cholera example is particularly apt, because the actions of a physician amid the squalor of the industrial revolution are often taken as reinforcement of the need to apply the "precautionary principle" in cases of environmental or health risk.  In 1849, before the discovery of the cause of cholera, a London doctor, Dr John Snow, suspected that the source of one outbreak might be the water from a particular well, and removed the pump handle.

Precaution is, of course, much better than cure, but such an anecdotal understanding of history glorifies post hoc those who happened to be right and ignores the multitude of cases where doctors acting on similar imperfect knowledge got it sadly wrong.  How we should exercise precaution is by no means self-evident, and the reasonable-sounding, commonsense precautionary principle is frequently misquoted and distorted to the point of nonsense.

The accepted version of the precautionary principle (in the Rio Declaration in 1992) reads:  "Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation". ⁽¹³⁾  This is commonsense, but alone it cannot be operationalised:  we need to add meanings to "serious", "irreversible" and "damage" and decide what level of uncertainty we are prepared to accept as the basis for action.

Advocates often use the example of cigarette smoking.  It involves both business interests and uncertainty, and they like to point to the exploitation of that uncertainty by industry to forestall regulatory action.  We now know the precise mechanisms by which substances initiate cancer and aid progression by damaging two genes, but in fact we commenced regulatory action against tobacco long before we had identified precise mechanisms of causation.  We did so on the basis of good peer-reviewed science which indicated a problem over 30 years ago, and while the tobacco lobby has been particularly active and we have not banned tobacco, that reflects a number of factors, including the loss of regulatory control (and taxation revenue to pay the costs of damage) prohibition regimes carry with them (witness heroin).

But it is not prudent to take regulatory action on the basis of no evidence, or non-peer-reviewed science, or even a handful of scientific papers.  Sometimes we choose to accept risks:  a risk assessment of quartz almost resulted in a ban on children's sandpits in Sweden until reality prevailed. ⁽¹⁴⁾  Motor vehicles kill thousands, directly or indirectly, but we accept that their benefits outweigh these risks.  But some seek to invoke the precautionary principle as a justification for not just reversing the burden of proof, but to demand a logically-impossible proof of safety, or the absence of harm.  Demanding that a negative be proved is the logical equivalent of asking people to prove that they are not witches.

In addition, however, environment groups and official documents have stretched the meaning of the precautionary principle to the point where it legitimises the risk management strategy of Chicken Little and this has even found its way into international policies.  For example, Recommendation 89/1 of 22 June 1989 of the Paris Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution from Land-based Sources (PARCOM) stretched it to include action "even where there is no scientific evidence to prove a causal link between emissions and effects". ⁽¹⁵⁾  If this is accepted, all one needs is some indication of serious and irreversible effects and one can demand logically-impossible proof of an absence of harm or else regulatory action will be taken.

Everything is capable of causing harm under some circumstances:  as Paracelsus put it 500 years ago, everything is poisonous -- the dose makes the poison.  So we must insist that the precautionary principle is not misused and that risk assessment considers factors such as doses, exposure pathways, individual and species susceptibilities, costs and benefits and the consequences of regulatory actions.  Unless we do, we are to forgo the benefits that a product might bring, and produce either policy paralysis (as regulators freeze like rabbits in the glare of a multitude of precautionary spotlights), or a wasteful misplaced set of priorities (causing regulators to chase any number of hares which have been released).

RISK AND GMOs

How does this apply to GMOs?  In order to answer that question, it is necessary first to state that the discussion which follows does not seek to make a risk assessment of GMOs, nor engage in a detailed discussion of the science of genetic modification and the hazards it might pose.  The analysis accepts that genetic engineering is a hazardous activity which has been subjected to regulatory scrutiny from basic research through to its applications since its inception in 1970.  It accepts also that the products of this technology provide benefits.  It accepts that the risk management process will be difficult and complex, but unless it is performed we run the risk of either forgoing benefits or experiencing hazards.

But it also holds that risk assessment must be sensitive to particular products and practices and specific exposures.  A bacterium modified to produce BST poses different risks than genetically modified cotton, and cottonseed oil so produced poses different risks from the consumption of a GM tomato, where live DNA might be ingested.  The dangers posed by the possible escape of genes to wild species depend crucially upon the GM species and the environment into which it might be placed.  For example, for the UK, there are no compatible wild relatives for maize or potatoes, so no gene transfer can occur.  Rice and soya are inbreeding species, so transfer is possible, but unlikely.  With oil rapeseed, on the other hand, this is an outbreeding species with many wild relatives, so greater caution is necessary.  The same holds for the dangers from consumption.  Sugar from GM sugar beet contains no genetic material whatsoever;  flour from GM soya may contain the new gene or its product, but many of the purification processes used in food production will destroy any DNA present in the raw material. ⁽¹⁶⁾

It is entirely possible that we might as a society decide that the risks of one GM product are worthwhile while rejecting others.  We might reject a GM blue rose as being a trivial use of the technology which poses an unacceptable risk, while accepting the gains of GM foods which taste better, keep better and thus result in less wastage.  Lumping all genetic engineering together, and certainly condemning all GM foods as "Frankenstein food", is neither accurate nor helpful.

Making such decisions requires the participation of a wide range of people other than just the relevant scientists, industry and environment groups.  Risk management is a process which requires the application of relevant science, as well as statistics, ethics, economics, sociology and even political science, and certainly must have regard to the views of the public.  Attempts by scientists to prevent what they might see as the intrusion of "non-experts" into the process are not only unhelpful, but are likely to heighten public suspicion and apprehension.  Transparency and trust are vital.

There is a legitimate role for both industry and environment groups in this process, but neither should be allowed to dominate the process.  Unfortunately, the alarms seem to have run ahead of a reasoned consideration of the issues in Australia.  Despite the fact that there are few GM plants yet licensed for use here, we have considerable apprehension as the result of tabloid reporting of the perils of "Frankenstein food", with local government authorities even banning GM food in kindergartens and day-care centres.

The fear of "Frankenstein food" has been markedly more in evidence in Europe than in the US, and it has had more impact on government policies and on the policies of corporations.  Some supermarkets have refused to stock GM foods as the result of the effectiveness of boycotts by Greenpeace's "Genetic Hazard Patrols".  The responses of European governments have varied.  The UK, France and Spain appeared initially to be more permissive than the Northern European nations where support for Greenpeace and green political parties is strongest, but the question arises as to why the alarms have had greater impact in the European Union than in the US.

A similar question arises as to why concern has been almost non-existent over the use of genetic engineering to produce pharmaceuticals.

The answer to the first question lies partly in the accepted fact that cultural dispositions to risk vary, ⁽¹⁷⁾ even within Europe, with much higher support for such causes evident in Northern Europe than in Southern Europe.  But consumers in the US, especially in the Western States, are well known for their propensity to be concerned about such risks.  The best explanations for these regional differences lie in a happy coincidence between such values and economic interests which has led to institutional innovations which privilege risk-averse responses.

The precautionary principle had its origins in Germany as the vorsorge prinzip (roughly "preventive action principle") and was used to justify the "Green Keynesianism" developed by Helmut Kohl, also known as "ecological modernisation". ⁽¹⁸⁾  The export of the precautionary principle has not only bolstered the approach domestically, but has helped create markets for the export of technology and services developed domestically.  This is known as a "first mover" strategy and runs counter to the widespread belief that environmental regulation hinders the competitiveness of nations -- though it does depend on the successful export of policies and standards which will create a market for the technologies and services in which the nation has new-found advantage. ⁽¹⁹⁾

As we saw before, misapplied, the precautionary principle has considerable potential to undermine the risk management process from the outset by giving credence to poor science, and this has happened with GM food.  In a notable case, research on rats at the Rowlett Research Institute in Aberdeen was reported on television in 1998 to suggest that potatoes modified by the addition of a snowdrop gene to produce a natural insecticidal chemical, lectin, interfered with the development of both the rats' internal organs and their immune systems.  The research was not on transgenic potatoes about to be marketed, but an early part of research aimed at finding whether a form of lectin which was (on the basis of previous testing) likely to be least toxic to humans could protect potatoes from nematodes.

The researcher, Dr Arpad Pusztai, has since been dismissed from his job for a serious breach of scientific protocol -- going public with his claims before his research had been peer-reviewed and published in a recognised scientific journal.  No paper has yet been submitted for publication, and a panel of six toxicologists appointed by the Royal Society has dismissed the research as irrelevant and inconclusive, being flawed in many aspects of design, execution and analysis. ⁽²⁰⁾

By the time this rebuttal appeared, the claims had already been a key catalyst in the GMO debate in Britain, and a group of 20 scientists had held a press conference to declare their support for Dr Pusztai.  Despite the conclusion by the Royal Society panel that any observed differences between GM-fed rats were uninterpretable because of the technical limitations of the experiment and the incorrect use of statistical tests, Friends of the Earth was unswerving in its views of the dangers of GM foods.  FOE spokesman Tony Juniper resorted to the "witchcraft" position:  "There's no concrete proof that they are safe".

According to Debora MacKenzie in the New Scientist (not known for its conservatism on such matters), the "technical limitations" of the experiment included the fact that Pusztai could not get the rats to eat enough potato (they were malnourished no matter what kind they were eating and had to be given protein supplements to meet Home Office guidelines for animal experiments).  Another was the presence of known toxins in potatoes.  The only obvious conclusion supported by his research, MacKenzie stated, was that rats hate potatoes. ⁽²¹⁾  In fact, it was worse than that, as the methodology did not involve "blind" testing under which researchers are unaware of which rats were in the control group, and which were being fed GM potato.  This introduced the possibility for the introduction of researcher bias, something of a concern when Dr Pusztai was prepared to go public before publication.

There are a number of technical issues which make the testing of GM foods difficult, but as the reference to toxins in potatoes suggests, this holds for unmodified food also, since dozens of people die each year from the cyanide in peach seeds, and under-cooked kidney beans are poisonous (they contain the very lectins for which Pusztai's research was trying to find an alternative).  Many foods also naturally contain chemicals which have exhibited carcinogenic properties in laboratory tests, ⁽²²⁾ but in such small amounts that test procedures are likely to require such large quantities to be fed to rats that the acute toxicity of other substances is likely to kill them first.

An attempt to test GM tomatoes in the Netherlands involved feeding rats the freeze-dried equivalent of 13 tomatoes a day each, but this dose was still not enough.  Monsanto's GM maize does not contain enough of the Bt toxin produced by the novel gene for it to be isolated for testing, so they have to produce it from bacteria and then test it, but this raises questions about whether the two toxins are identical.  Some transgenic foodstuffs (Flavr Savr tomatoes, Round-up Ready soybeans, and virus-resistant squash, for example) have undergone extensive testing without any suggestion of serious health effects, ⁽²³⁾ which should have suggested caution about the potato research.

This suggests there is a need for caution with how we evaluate the hazards of GMOs, but it also stresses the need for the best possible science underpinning our risk assessment processes.  Much of the difference between the approaches of the EU and the US reflects the different philosophies of risk which operate in each jurisdiction.  The institutionalisation of the precautionary principle in Europe encourages both calls for action and government action itself on the basis of such "scientific" evidence as the potato research of Dr Pusztai, while the US approach to risk (since the Reagan Administration required the conduct of Quantitative Risk Assessment) has been to examine the economic costs and benefits of any risk management action.

Ironically, the relative absence of the consideration of economic factors in the EU approach facilitates the use of fears of GMOs by economic interests.  The fight against US beef produced using recombinant BST has been led by British beef producers, themselves harmed by BSE, and the whole issue has allowed Europe to revisit the 1985 issues.  The US has advantages in the use of biotechnology, and its economic efficiency poses a considerable threat to the enormously costly and inefficient Common Agricultural Policy, already under pressure after the Uruguay Round liberalisations in agricultural trade.  The GMOs debate has provided less efficient European producers of beef, soybeans and so on with an opportunity to try to nobble their more efficient US competitors.

This partly explains why there has not been a similar outcry over genetic engineering in the pharmaceuticals sector:  Europe has an efficient, competitive pharmaceuticals sector which would oppose and contest campaigns on the issues, rather than support them (as with agriculture).  But even though the consumption-related risks from pharmaceuticals -- often directly injected into the body or packaged in such a way as to facilitate absorption even after attack by digestive juices -- would appear to be equivalent to those associated with foods, there has not really been a campaign mounted against them.  There are at least two other factors at work here:  one relating to pharmaceuticals and the other to agriculture.

The first is that the benefits side of the equation is much clearer with pharmaceuticals and would be much more difficult to counteract.  A soybean which can be produced more cheaply does not quite offer the same kind or size of benefits as a drug produced by a GM bacterium.  Focusing political campaigns on food promises better political returns than attacking possible cancer cures, especially when it coincides with agricultural interests in Europe.

The second is that the anti-GM food campaign resonates strongly with an earlier campaign in the early 1980s over the introduction of Plant Variety Rights (PVR) -- or intellectual property rights for plants.  Many of the concerns then, such as the fear that agricultural genetic material would be controlled by large transnational corporations, not only have been repeated with the GMO campaign, but the same fear of transnational dominance is (as we have seen) a key factor in amplifying risk perceptions of GMOs.

These fears have been heightened by the insertion of so-called "terminator genes" into seeds, which render the seeds of transgenic crops infertile, requiring growers to buy again from the multinationals rather than engaging in the traditional practice of saving seed for next year's crop.  This would appear to be something of a non-problem:  Third World farmers will be perfectly able to continue traditional farming practices with traditional seed;  transgenic crops will only be grown where the benefits outweigh the costs of doing so.  The situation is no different from that obtaining with the seeds of infertile hybrids, except that "terminator genes" could be seen to serve a useful risk management function by preventing the escape of GM stock into the wild.

CONCLUSION

The assessment of the risks of GMOs can be seen to reflect numerous social and institutional factors, and these help explain the differences between the approaches in the US and the EU, and between transgenic food and transgenic medicine.  These factors are giving rise to particular problems for the trade regime as they offer plenty of scope for non-tariff barriers to be erected in the name of the protection of health or the environment, but they also throw some light on the elements we need to bring together in order to assess properly the risks associated with GMOs.

First, there is a fundamental need for good science and insistence on sound, peer-reviewed science and rejection of evidence gathered to support theoretical predispositions -- either that GMOs are dangerous or that they are harmless.

Second, there is a need to consider the benefits as well as the dangers, and the costs (including opportunity costs) of any decision we take.  We should expect that any GMO might not be all that the owners of the technology might make it out to be, but neither are they without the promise of considerable benefits and cannot, therefore, be rejected lightly.

There is also a need to undertake specific risk assessments for different kinds of GMOs, taking care to distinguish production-related risks (of, say, GM canola cross-pollinating or out-breeding with other species) from consumption-related risks (such as, if Dr Pusztai turned out to be right, GM potatoes affecting our immune systems).

There is also a need to accept that the social evaluation of risks is likely to be more accepting of GMOs in medicine than in food, and that such evaluations must be a central part of any risk management process.  There are identifiable reasons why what society will accept in saving lives, it might not tolerate in producing food.  That might hinder the adoption of GM technology in agriculture, but attempting to impose outcomes on a reluctant public is likely only to heighten fears.  Openness and transparency -- together with good science and a consideration of costs -- are the keys, but this does not mean that the proponents of GM technology should abandon the field to their critics.  Society requires a full and open debate which will expose the exaggerated claims which might come from any side and allow it to make better decisions about which risks to accept and which to reject.

Issues such as genetic engineering are tailor-made for the development of what Frank Furedi has called a "culture of fear". ⁽²⁴⁾  Such a culture thrives on secrecy and attempts to manipulate public opinion to secure consent, which inevitably arouse suspicion and hostility.  If genetic engineering is to come to be regarded as involving socially-acceptable risks, the process by which the risks are assessed and managed will have to be one in which the public trusts.

Our assessment of the risks of GM foods must therefore be careful to take many factors into account.  Genes -- that is, DNA -- are a normal constituent of our diet.  It is 200 years this year since the first report of hybrid cereals was made, and we have been consuming the fruits of the deliberate human transfer of genetic material between species since 1876 (Triticale wheat x Rye cross).  GM techniques expand these possibilities enormously and rightly should be subjected to careful regulation.  But we would be wrong in supposing that all the risks we face are caused by human agency, or that we are completely incapable of regulating them.

Ironically, both these lessons can be drawn from the "mad cow disease" experience.  The former is suggested by the fact that the best hypothesis about the origins of BSE and nvCJD seems to be a chance occurrence of a rare spongiform encephalopathy (probably from scrapie in sheep) which found its way into cattle food and thence into the human diet. ⁽²⁵⁾  The route might just as readily gone straight from sheep to humans, but for a roll of the genetic dice.  The outbreak might have resulted from feeding rendered sheep carcasses to cattle, but the genetic chance occurrence appears to have been a completely natural occurrence.

The BSE/nvCJD outbreak, despite the alarms, also demonstrates that we are capable of regulating risks.  BSE in cattle was first positively diagnosed in cattle in 1986, and regulatory action was taken in 1988 and 1989 to remove infectious material from the animal and human food chains.  The risks of human exposure were highest at this time, when public concern was almost non-existent, and with a possible ten-year incubation period;  by 1997 there were only 19 established cases of nvCJD in Britain and one in France.  About a million cattle were slaughtered and Britain's beef trade was harmed, but (despite the high economic stakes) scientists and regulators minimised the impact of the tragedy.  It is most certainly a tragedy, but it has not quite been an apocalypse, yet the role of good science and risk management in limiting the scope of the tragedy has been submerged in a climate of dread, and the risk management success overlooked.

The BSE/nvCJD tragedy, as has been noted, had nothing to do with the GMO debate, except in its impact on public perceptions -- indeed, GM growth hormones have removed the major source of risk of transmission of spontaneous CJD (barring outbreaks of ritual cannibalism).  But the suspected origins of the BSE outbreak also contain an important lesson about how we should evaluate the risks of GMOs.

It is thought that until the early 1980s, the process by which carcasses were rendered for stock food destroyed the infectious prion from the scrapie as they were subjected to high temperatures and organic solvents to remove the tallow.  The price of energy rose, the price of tallow fell, and concerns emerged over the exposure of workers to organic solvents, so a new process was adopted to avoid solvents and high temperatures.  The scrapie prion survived the new process and subsequently it is believed to have infected cattle. ⁽²⁶⁾

This serves to remind us that our actions have consequences that are difficult to imagine.  This holds not just for the introduction of new technologies, but both changes to old ones and decisions to withhold new technologies.  GMOs present risks, but they also present considerable opportunities.  The challenge is to manage the risks in order to maximise the benefits.  How we do this requires the best possible science, the right amount of precaution, and open and democratic processes, an admixture which will be difficult (but not impossible) to achieve.

ENDNOTES

1.  See John H. Jackson, "Dolphins and Hormones:  GATT and the Legal Environment for International Trade after the Uruguay Round", UALR Law Journal, 14, 1992, pages 435–36.

2.  See Paul Slovic, "Perception of Risk:  Reflections on the Psychometric Paradigm" in Sheldon Krimsky and Dominic Golding (eds), Social Theories of Risk, Westport, CT, Praeger, 1992;  or Joseph V. Rodricks, Calculated Risks:  Understanding the Toxicity and Human Health Risks of Chemicals in Our Environment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.  For an excellent introduction to the topic of risk, see John Adams, Risk, London, UCL Press, 1995.

3.  Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame, London, Routledge, 1992;  page 15.

4.  For a discussion of the importance of patents in regulation of chemical and pharmaceutical risk, see Aynsley Kellow, International Toxic Risk Management:  Ideals, Interests and Implementation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999 (in press).

5.  For an example of this genre, see Sharon Beder, Global Spin:  The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism, Melbourne, Scribe, 1997.

6.  See James T. Rosenbaum, "Lessons from Litigation over Silicone Breast Implants:  A Call for Activism by Scientists", Science, 276, 6 June 1997, pages 1524–25.

7.  See Thomas M. Dietz and Robert W. Rycroft, The Risk Professionals, New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1987.

8.  John E. Losey, Linda S. Rayor, Maureen E. Carter, "Transgenic pollen harms monarch butterfly", Nature, 399, 1999, page 214.

9.  See VitalSource, "GM:  What is known and/or in dispute?" at http://www.vitalsource.org/gm/science.html.

10.  See John D. Graham and Jennifer Kassalow Hartwell, "The Risk Management Approach" in John D. Graham and Jennifer Kassalow Hartwell (eds), The Greening of Industry:  A Risk Management Approach, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997.

11.  Christopher Anderson, "Cholera epidemic traced to risk miscalculation", Nature, 354, 1991, page 255.

12.  Rodricks, op. cit., page 218.

13.  See Lawrence E. Susskind, Global Diplomacy:  Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994;  page 79.

14.  See Robert Nillson, "Integrating Sweden into the European Union" in Roland Bal and Willem Halffman (eds), The Politics of Chemical Risk:  Scenarios for a Regulatory Future, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1998.

15.  Nigel Haig, "The Introduction of the Precautionary Principle into the UK" in Timothy O'Riordan and James Cameron (eds), Interpreting the Precautionary Principle, London, Earthscan, 1994;  pages 243–246.  (Emphasis added.)

16.  For a discussion of these issues, see The Royal Society, Genetically Modified Plants for Food Use, London, The Royal Society, September 1998.

17.  Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas, Risk and Culture, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981.

18.  Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, "The Precautionary Principle in Germany -- Enabling Government" in Timothy O'Riordan and James Cameron (eds), Interpreting the Precautionary Principle, London, Earthscan, 1994.

19.  David Vogel, Trading Up:  Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1995.

20.  See the report "GM food study was 'flawed' " by BBC News on 18 May 1999 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/special_report/1999/02/food_under_the_microscope/newsid_289000/289002.stm

21.  Debora MacKenzie, "Unpalatable Truths", New Scientist, 10 June 1999 at http://gmworld.newscientist.com/

22.  See Bruce N. Ames, Renae Magaw, Lois Swirsky Gold, "Ranking Possible Carcinogenic Hazards", Science, 236, 17 April 1987, pages 271–80.

23.  See OECD, Food Safety Evaluation, Paris, OECD, 1996.

24.  Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear:  Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation, London, Cassell, 1997.

25.  The Royal Society, Second Update on BSE, Statement by the Royal Society, London, 21 July 1997.

26.  The Royal Society, BSE -- A Statement by the Royal Society, London, 2 April 1996.  As John Adams has noted, however, the prion theory of causation is by no means universally accepted.  See John Adams, "Cars, cholera and cows:  virtual risk and the management of uncertainty" Science Progress, 80, 1997, pages 253–272.