In the wake of Donald Trump's surprise election victory the former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, made a bold claim. "Ours is a better society than the United States" he told ABC TV.

Comparing whole societies can be tricky but there's plenty of data to back him.

Take the Human Development Index, a league table of countries collated by the United Nations each year. It ranks countries according to three fundamentals that determine quality of life: health, educational attainment and incomes.

Australia was second in the world in the last report, just behind Norway. And we'd probably be number one if our temperate weather was taken into account. The US was ranked eighth.