Andrew Leigh

One School’s Desire to Do Better

The Chronicle, 3 October 2017

Ainslie School celebrated its 90th birthday last month, proud of its past and looking towards the future. Opened by Prime Minister Stanley Bruce in 1927, the school is distinguished by its Art Deco architecture and its honour boards. There’s an old-fashioned phone in the foyer, and some say that the library is haunted by a friendly ghost called Mary.

AUSTRALIAN LESSONS ON GUN CONTROL

Washington Post, 6 October 2017

Australia experienced our deadliest mass shooting in 1996 after gunman Martin Bryant killed 35 people in and around the Port Arthur tourist site. Twelve days later — before all the victims had been laid to rest — Australia’s police ministers met and unanimously agreed on a package of measures to tighten licensing and registration requirements, restrict access to semi-automatic weapons and limit sales.

The national government coordinated a buyback program, which paid market prices for guns that were handed back. Over the next year, more than 600,000 firearms — about one in five of all guns in Australia — were handed into police stations. Given the harrowing loss of life in the United States to gun violence, it’s worth understanding the impact of the Australian reforms.

Did it stop gun massacres? Following the tragic mass shooting in Las Vegas this week, some have dismissedAustralia’s buyback as ineffective, asserting that mass shootings were too rare in Australia prior to the buyback to show any clear evidence of progress.

Alas, that isn’t correct. If we define a mass shooting as the killing of five or more victims, Australia experienced an average of one mass shooting per year in the decade to 1996. In the decade after, no mass shootings took place. The chance of this being due to luck alone is less than 1 in 100.

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TELEVISION INTERVIEW

SKY NEWS – AM AGENDA

MONDAY, 2 OCTOBER 2017 

SUBJECTS: Marriage equality postal survey, energy crisis, new book ‘Choosing Openness’, trade, immigration, foreign investment.

KIERAN GILBERT, PRESENTER: This is AM Agenda. With me now is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh. In relation to the Government and the states, what are your thoughts on GST held back in return for the states lifting these moratoriums. Do you think that is a good move?

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Seems to be the blame game all over again, doesn't it Kieran? You’ve got a government that has been unwilling to impose a national interest test, unwilling to pull the gas trigger, unwilling to put in place a Clean Energy Target that their own hand-picked Chief Scientist recommended. And now they want to take money away from schools and hospitals across various states simply because they have been unable to put the right policies in place on gas.

GILBERT: They didn't have to pull the trigger, did they? They got the companies to agree to doing it themselves voluntarily.

LEIGH: Kieran, I remember back in April when Malcolm Turnbull was telling us that gas prices were going to halve. My guess is most of your viewers haven't seen that halving yet. The Turnbull Government has been a lot talk on this but unwilling to take tough action. When Labor put in place a national interest policy last year, we were criticised by Josh Frydenberg as being protectionist. Had the Government moved with Labor a year ago, we would be in a better place than we are now.

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TELEVISION INTERVIEW

ABC NEWS BREAKFAST

SUNDAY, 1 OCTOBER 2017 

SUBJECTS: New book ‘Choosing Openness’, trade, immigration, foreign investment, Turnbull tax proposals, Labor’s fairer tax plan, inequality.

MIRIAM COROWRA, PRESENTER: Cutting the company tax rate and stimulating wage growth are two key issues that have been topping the political agenda this week. The Treasurer warned that if these two issues are not addressed now Australia risks falling behind the rest of the world and the nation's economy will suffer. 

GREG JENNET, PRESENTER: To discuss this and other political issues of the week we're joined by Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh from Parliament House in Canberra. Andrew Leigh, you've just written a report for the Lowy Institute which is normally preoccupied with matters of national security and strategic policy. Why is the subject of income inequality being bracketed in among those topics? 

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Greg, I think one of the central challenges of our age is this rise in right-wing populism. We've seen not only the British Brexit decision and the rise of Donald Trump, but also right-wing parties in Germany and Austria and Hungary really making the argument that those countries would be better off retreating from the global economy. My new book Choosing Openness argues that for Australia that would be the wrong choice, and that our prosperity has been grounded very much in the benefits of open trade, migration and foreign investment. We need to manage those things properly. As you say, there's been a significant rise in inequality in the past generation. But if we have the right social protections, then Australia can benefit significantly from engaging with the world. 

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TELEVISION INTERVIEW

TICKY WITH FULLERTON – SKY NEWS

THURSDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2017 

SUBJECTS: New book Choosing Openness, trade and foreign investment, energy policy, Malcolm Turnbull’s tax cuts for millionaires and multinationals, Labor’s fairer tax plan, migration, inequality.

TICKY FULLERTON, PRESENTER: Well it's all very interesting timing for our first chat with Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh, who is launching a new book for the Lowy Institute called Choosing Openness, why global engagement is best for Australia. In a former life Andrew Leigh was also a professor of economics at the Australian National University, so what does he make of the state that Australia and the world is in? I spoke with him earlier.

Andrew Leigh it's great to get you there. Now this is not the first book you've written, you're making the case for openness in trade, migration, investment in this populist world.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Well it is a world in which people are encouraging a hunkering down, in which we're seeing a rise of right-wing populism not just in the United States, Austria, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands but indeed in our own country. And part of that harks back to the notion that for most of human history, we did live in very small groups of about 150 or so, where being distrustful of outsiders was a good survival strategy. The trouble is that now engaging with outsiders is actually the best path to prosperity and i'm making the case in Choosing Openness that if we have the right social programs to support engagement with the world, then Australia can benefit through trade, migration and investment.

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RADIO INTERVIEW

2GB MONEY WITH ROSS GREENWOOD

THURSDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2017 

SUBJECTS: New book Choosing Openness, German election, migration, inequality, energy policy.

ROSS GREENWOOD, HOST: Welcome back to Money News right around Australia. It's actually appropriate that you've actually got all this talk about Donald Trump and tax and globalisation and what happens to Australia now. Are we driven down a lower tax path? Is there more appetite in Australia to try and maintain competitiveness on tax with the largest economy in the world, and one that we have a free trade agreement with because, obviously, the free-flow of goods between the two countries is going to be influence by the cost of a whole bunch of things - it could be energy, it could be labour, or indeed it could be taxes as well. Now, it's appropriate I say, because today the Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh, who is also the Shadow Minister for Competition and Productivity, and for Trade in Services, has launched a new book that raises, in his mind, a whole bunch of questions. It is called 'Choosing Openness' and it makes a timely intervention into the debate about globalisation, free trade, but also immigration, which is a key issue. Let's get him on the line now. Many thanks for your time, Andrew

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: A pleasure Ross, great to be with you.

GREENWOOD: Alright, so you've also been an economics professor at Australian National University; you've done a whole bunch of things, awarded the Young Economist Award, a prize given every two years by the Economics Society of Australia. You've got skin in the game in regards to this. Many of your colleagues in the Labor Party have indicated that they would prefer more of a closed shop here in Australia, that they prefer Australia to be more protected and that really that we don't really openly trade with the rest of the world. Do you believe that is really the model for Australia for the future?

LEIGH: Ross, that's not the picture I see when I look around the Labor caucus. I hear first speeches that tell great stories of immigrants. I see a leader who was in Korea and Japan this week; a Shadow Treasurer and Shadow Foreign Minister who are releasing a paper on our Asian engagement tomorrow. The globalisers have the upper hand in my party - and have done so for at least the past generation.

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RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC SYDNEY MORNINGS

THURSDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2017 

SUBJECTS: New book Choosing Openness, Brexit and German election, migration and the US refugee resettlement deal

WENDY HARMER: We often hear about politicians that they’re not experts in the field that they end up having their portfolios in, but I don’t think you could argue with this one because my guest is Andrew Leigh. He’s the Shadow Assistant Treasurer and prior to entering the Australian Parliament in 2010, he was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. That’s not too shabby, is it? He holds a PhD in public policy from Harvard, he graduated from the University of Sydney with first class honours in law and arts and he’s a pretty prolific author as well. He has a few books – I don’t know how many altogether, but the ‘The Luck of Politics’, ‘The Economics of Just About Everything’, ‘Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequity in Australia’ and ‘Disconnected’. This latest effort is a Lowy Institute paper, which is released today. It’s called ‘Choosing Openness’. So I don’t think we can complain about the lack of expertise. Hello Andrew Leigh, welcome to the program.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: G’day, Wendy. Great to be with you.

HARMER: Thanks. It’s very nice to have you along. Now, as I mentioned there, it’s in the news today that former prime minister Tony Abbott is about to advise a new think tank in Britain on how to Brexit. What would you be saying? I imagine you’d be saying ‘wrong way, go back’.

LEIGH: Well, there’s nothing wrong with trying to make lemonade out of lemons, Wendy, but let’s face it – Brexit was a retreat from the global engagement that Britain had engaged in throughout that post war era. There’s now an ongoing Remain movement that’s still looking at the prospect of whether Britain might be best served by staying within the European Union and that I think has a stronger free trading bedrock than do these attempts to see how Britain can make its way outside the European Union.

HARPER: You warn against this sort of populist – you put a few of them in together, interconnected, haven’t you, these sorts of populist politics which have brought us Donald Trump and Brexit. Can you just outline your argument there of why you think that those populist decisions came about in the first place?

LEIGH: I think there’s a handful of factors that have driven populism. We’ve had some poor economic outcomes – rising inequality, there’s been an increase in the death rate among low educated whites in the United States, a pretty extraordinary development. We’ve seen very rapid technological change and I think sometimes when the world is changing fast people can feel a little adrift from their values. So things like genetic sequencing, mobile computing, artificial intelligence have given a sort of cyclone feel to what’s going on in the world. We’ve had some pretty canny political entrepreneurs who have made the most of this. You can look at Marine Le Pen in France as a good example of this and of course President Trump. Then you’ve seen a decline in traditional institutions, among them mainstream political parties whose voters have fallen by about 10 per cent right across the advanced world. Just as we’ve retreated from traditional institutions like churches and big business and trade unions, so too traditional political parties have shrunk. So all of that has made space for these right wing populist movements such as Brexit, such as the Alternative for Deutschland Party which entered the parliament in Germany on the weekend.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

ED HUSIC, SHADOW MINISTER FOR THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

 AGAIN. THE ATO SYSTEMS CRASHED AGAIN. 

Yesterday critical ATO systems went down. Again. For at least the 14^th time since December 2016.

Important tax office systems have now crashed so often it’s hardly a surprise to hear of another – but it isn’t good enough for the government to continually allow important online functions to be taken down for so long.

This outage was reportedly first experienced at 11.30am and the myTax service was still offline at 4.30pm. This is unacceptable.

The Turnbull Government – and its peak digital agency, the DTA - has overseen a litany of embarrassing tech wrecks, perhaps none as drawn out and futile as their management of the failing ATO systems.

ATO systems have been crashing since at least December last year and have occurred repeatedly right through to this years’ tax time. 

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TELEVISION INTERVIEW

SKY NEWS AM AGENDA

MONDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 2017

SUBJECTS: Same-sex marriage postal survey and its impact on mental health, religious protection, the energy crisis and the Clean Energy Target.  

KIEREN GILBERT: On the program now is Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh. Your thoughts on that issue, which has been reported in the Fairfax papers and Patrick McGorry expanding on that this morning about their experience with particularly the youth services, that there’s been a spike in requests for assistance.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Really troubling, Kieran, and it isn’t just the statistics we’re seeing. We had Eddie, a 14-year-old with two mums come to Parliament last week to talk about the experiences that he’s felt as a child of same-sex parents. It’s not as though gay and lesbian couples don’t already have children – they do and many of those children are feeling the brunt of some of the nastiness in this campaign. We warned this would happen. This is why Labor never supported this notion of a national survey and thought the parliament should just do its job.

GILBERT: But it’s not all bad, as Professor McGorry pointed out in that interview. While there’s a short term spike and issue, by November 15, if the result goes as the polls suggest, this will be a big win for that particular group of people in terms of the community’s support, acknowledgement, their broader acceptance.

LEIGH: We could have had that win by just letting parliament do its job. The important thing now is to make sure those organisations are resourced. Bill Shorten has called on Malcolm Turnbull to provide additional resourcing to mental health services, particularly those supporting young gay and lesbian teenagers.