Andrew Leigh

MORE STAR TREK THAN TERMINATOR?

Inside Story, 25 November 2019

The most significant consumer innovation of the last decade was announced on 9 January 2007. Despite uneven health, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs took to the stage at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco and unveiled the iPhone. Ten years later, a billion of them had been sold. Today, many think touchscreen smartphones are as necessary as underwear and more important than socks. Yet when Jobs launched his revolutionary phone, many believed it would fail. His counterpart at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, laughed at the device, calling it “a not very good email machine.”

The critics were wrong, and wrong in a major way. As industry insiders, they all paid the price for their poor predictions. Their products would all exit the industry, replaced by the new Apple, of course, but also by Samsung and Huawei. What turns out to be a successful innovation might not seem that way at first. There is a reason for that: innovation is new to the world. If it was obvious, someone would have done it.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TV INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS FIRST EDITION
MONDAY, 25 NOVEMBER 2019

SUBJECT: China.

LAURA JAYES: Joining me now is Labor MP Andrew Leigh. He joins us live from Canberra. Did you see this last night? How concerned are you?

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Laura, very concerned. I think both the stories you're talking about, concerning Mr Wang and Mr Zhao, raise issues of the first order importance for Australia. It's not unusual for Australia to provide asylum status to people who say that they might be harmed if they go back home. Chen Yonglin was the Chinese official granted asylum a number of years back. Before that of course you think of Vladimir Petrov. What's most important is that Mr Wang’s safety is looked after in the interim, while the government carefully works through the details of his application.

JAYES: Do you think the government as well though needs to consider concerns like copycat approaches by lower level operatives, and also the backlash that we could see from China both economically and politically?

LEIGH: There's no scenario in which Australia's relationship with China isn't of first order importance to Australia. It's important that we maintain those strong economic ties, which improve prosperity in both countries. But at the same time, we need to recognise we have different political systems, different sets of values when it comes to issues around democracy and human rights. We should never hold back from staying true to those values.

Review of Alain de Botton, The School of Life: An Emotional Education

Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November 2019

In 1901, 98 percent of Australians told Census-takers that they adhered to a religion. For the vast majority, religion was where we got our notions of what it was to live a ‘good life’. Today, nearly one-third of Australians reports having no religion: seeking wisdom not from the pulpit, but from secular sages.

If there was a high priest of the unbelievers, it would be Swiss-born philosopher Alain de Botton.

Since writing Essays in Love at the age of 23, he has published a dozen books including How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Art of Travel, The Architecture of Happiness, Religion for Atheists, How to Think More About Sex and The News: A User's Manual.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS AM AGENDA
FRIDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2019

SUBJECTS: Anthony Albanese’s economic vision statement; the economy; Westpac.

ANNELISE NIELSEN: Now for a check in on what's happening in politics we're joined live by Andrew Leigh from the Labor Party. Andrew thank you for your time.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Absolute pleasure. 

CANADA SHOULD TAKE AN INSURANCE APPROACH TO FUTURE DISRUPTION

Policy Options, 15 November 2019

To help Canadians face the technological disruptions of the future, policy-makers should strengthen our education and economic safety nets.

Poker star Jimmy Chou, who has won more than $1 million playing the game, has a new teacher. Pluribus, a new artificial intelligence program, recently defeated Chou, along with a handful of the world’s best poker players, in six-player no-limit Texas hold’em. The strategy was computed in eight days, at a cost of $144 in cloud server power. As Chou graciously noted, “Whenever playing the bot, I feel like I pick up something new to incorporate into my game.” Playing against humans, Pluribus can win around $1,000 an hour, suggesting that online poker tournaments may soon become a thing of the past.

Six-player Texas hold’em now joins a long list of activities at which computers are superior to humans, including checkers (1995), chess (1997), Jeopardy! (2011), facial recognition (2014) and transcribing a telephone call (2016). It’s been two years since Google’s AlphaGo beat the world champion, Ke Jie, in the game of Go. The performance gap between AlphaGo and Ke is now about as large as the gap between Ke and a keen amateur. If Pluribus and AlphaGo were self-aware, they might look at our prowess in their games the way that we regard the intellectual powers of our pets.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2GB BREAKFAST
THURSDAY, 21 NOVEMBER 2019

SUBJECTS: Superannuation; Innovation + Equality.

ALAN JONES: I spoke last month to the Federal Labor MP Andrew Leigh. We discussed the great Australian athlete Peter Norman, and the price Peter paid for standing in solidarity with the black American athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the Mexico Olympic Games. In the wake of that interview, Dr Leigh dropped me a line about a new book he's co-written with Joshua Gans. It's called Innovation + Equality, with the argument being amongst some that you innovate and you create an unequal society. The thesis here is no, no, no - that's not necessarily the case. The book is subtitled How to Create a Future That Is More Star Trek Than Terminator, which I think is quite funny. The book's being launched tonight. These two blokes have got a few brains. Joshua Gans is a professor of strategic management, and holds the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto. Dr Leigh is a Federal Labor MP, the Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury. But he's a former professor of economics at the Australian National University. He also holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard. He has a first class honours degree in Arts and Law from Sydney University, which of course immediately means he is totally disqualified from having any political future. Here's me telling you, Dr Leigh will never, ever make it in politics because you see, he's got brains and ideas, and they are much despised in the world of politics. And that's the great sadness. I'm being ironical here, of course. I hope that people like this do make it to the top. He's bright, he's a thinker. He’s trying to get the rest of us to do the same and read the new book. He's on the line. Dr Andrew, good morning.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Good morning and thank you for the generous introduction.

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TV INTERVIEW

SKY NEWS NEWSDAY

TUESDAY, 19 NOVEMBER 2019

Subjects: Innovation + Equality; gender pay gap and sexual harassment; Josh Frydenberg’s speech and making older Australians work longer.

TOM CONNELL:  Plenty of Australians do feel behind by technological advantages and advances in the economy. But there’s no reason to fear, according to Labor's Andrew Leigh, or at least if we have the policies in place. He's written the book on it, and joins me now here in the studio. Thanks for your time.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Real pleasure, Tom.

CONNELL: I'll give it a free plug, “Innovation + Equality”. So there it is. I'm curious about the title in of itself. Is there a need to write innovation and equality because it's currently unequal or because there's a perception that it's unequal?

LEIGH: It's a great question, Tom. I think some people regard inequality as just being the price of progress. They think that the gap between rich and poor has to rise if we want to have AI and smartphones. But fundamentally, Joshua Gans and I don't think that innovation is because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is bigger. We think the real way of getting more innovation is by encouraging more entrepreneurs from unexpected backgrounds. At the moment, only a quarter of our startups are founded by women, and men from affluent backgrounds make up a disproportionate share of entrepreneurs. So if we want to get more innovation, we need to broaden the pool from which our innovators are drawn.

A MORE EQUAL SOCIETY DEMANDS NEW IDEAS

APPS Policy Forum, 18 November 2019

Australia is not doing enough to encourage innovation, but investment in education and support for those institutions that do innovate can create a fairer and more prosperous society, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh write.

Australia has an innovation problem. Just eight per cent of Australian firms say they produce innovations that are new to the world – down from 11 per cent in 2013. Innovation collaboration is especially woeful.

Across a sample of around 30 OECD nations, Australia ranked fourth-last for the share of large businesses collaborating on innovation, sixth-last in businesses collaborating with suppliers, and second-last in collaboration between businesses and universities.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

2GB RADIO MONEY NEWS

MONDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2019

Subjects: Innovation + Equality; technology and productivity; unions and innovation.

ROSS GREENWOOD: Well, the interesting subject of this is a new book that's come out and this is actually called ‘Innovation + Equality: How to Create a Future That is More Star Trek Than Terminator’. It's by Joshua Gans and also by Andrew Leigh, the Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and Charities, who comes on this program on a regular basis to talk about the economy. And he’s with me now. Andrew, many thanks for your time.  

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Always a pleasure to be with you, Ross.

GREENWOOD: Okay. Let's go through this book. It basically goes down on - intellectual property is one of the big things you look at here, about the way in which you create jobs and create value is by creating more intellectual property. And of course that means you're going to have intellectual property, well, either that is capable of being protected or is indeed able to be used for the greater good rather than necessarily being locked up. That's one of your arguments, isn't it?

LIKE IT OR NOT SCOMO, PROTEST MADE AUSTRALIA WHAT IT IS TODAY

Ten Daily, 14 November 2019

In 1960, my father and other Melbourne University students arranged an unauthorised street protest. The police told them they couldn’t march outside the campus. They refused, and walked onto the streets anyway.

Michael Leigh and his friends were protesting the White Australia policy, which was used to restrict non-Europeans from moving to Australia. The spark for the protest had been the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, where 69 civilians, including 10 children, had been killed. The Labor opposition called on the Menzies Government to pass a censure motion against the South African government. Robert Menzies, who had praised the White Australia policy for helping Australia avoid "the kind of problem they have in South Africa", refused to censor the Apartheid regime.