Andrew Leigh

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RADIO INTERVIEW

5AA MORNINGS

TUESDAY, 1 MARCH 2022

SUBJECTS: The Liberals dragging their feet on reform and costing charities millions; Ukraine.

GRAEME GOODINGS, HOST: Well, the Prime Minister has been under attack on the fundraising front. Dr Andrew Leigh, the Shadow Assistant Minister for Charities, claims Scott Morrison's failure to act on fundraising reform is costing Australian charities millions. Let's get him to explain this to us. Dr Andrew Leigh, good morning to you.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Good morning, Graeme. Great to be with you and your listeners.

GOODINGS: Yeah. What's your major grievance?

LEIGH: Charities have called for years for fixing Australia's outdated charitable fundraising laws. They were designed in a pre-internet age, and they're just not fit for purpose for online fundraising. Right now, if a charity wants to fundraise online, it needs to register in seven different jurisdictions - paperwork that takes them a week. That means that the cost to Australian charities in complying is over a million dollars a month. Yet the government, despite being told to fix it by the Royal Commission on Natural Disaster Preparedness and a bipartisan Senate report, has done absolutely nothing. So regular charities continue to have to jump through unnecessary hoops. Meanwhile, Peter Dutton sets up a fundraiser which if he was a charity wouldn’t be allowed under current fundraising laws.

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RADIO INTERVIEW

5AA MORNINGS

FRIDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2022

SUBJECTS: Battlers struggling and billionaires soaring under Scott Morrison; NBN; Fuel prices and cost of living; Labor’s policies for a better Australia; Unemployment, the gig economy and worker protections; Anthony Albanese.

GRAEME GOODINGS, HOST: Well, elections both state and federal in the wind, and the economy and the handling of Covid certainly front and centre. Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury Andrew Leigh has launched a withering attack in Parliament on the government's handling of the economy. He joins me now. Andrew, good morning.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Morning, Graeme. Great to be back with you.

GOODINGS: Yeah. Look, we've just gone through two years of COVID. Is your attack really warranted?

LEIGH: I do think we need to take economic growth seriously again, Graeme. We've had almost a decade now of lousy economic growth. This has been the slowest decade for growth per person of any decade, going right back to the post war era. And if we don't take productivity seriously, then Australians will keep on finding that prices are rising faster than their wages. Now, last couple of years, we've seen beef prices up 17 per cent. We've seen childcare up around 10 per cent. Now we've seen petrol go over two bucks a litre. And yet many people are earning basically what they earned a couple of years ago. Wage growth has been tepid, unless of course you're a billionaire - billionaires collectively have doubled their wealth since Scott Morrison became prime minister.

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TELEVISION INTERVIEW

PAUL MURRAY LIVE

WEDNESDAY, 16 FEBRUARY 2022

SUBJECTS: Worker protections in the gig economy; Labor’s plans for affordable, reliable power.

PAUL MURRAY, HOST: In the meantime, plenty to talk about with Senator Hollie Hughes and, from the Labor Party, none other than Andrew Leigh. Andrew, g’day. Lovely to see you too, Senator. So, interesting report out of New South Wales - so you can all go home, because it’s none of your responsibilities here - which is about Uber, and about how Uber is treating, potentially mistreating its workforce. Where the Uber app allows people to work endlessly, including some people who are working up to 61 days in a row. Now, Hollie, I'm fascinated by this, because I think for all of the high fives and all the rest of it about the gig economy, there are very big companies who are able to get away with workers being paid very little, but also not a lot of protections for them as well. What do you think?

HOLLIE HUGHES: Well, I think people that choose to be uber drivers choose to drive when they want to drive. So I don't think Ubers forcing them to work 61 days in a row, whether or not it's good for their health, but that's the decisions that they're making. You know, I can tell you as an old country girl, when you were doing harvest, the guys worked and the girls worked a lot longer than 61 days in a row, trying to get that crop off. So, you know, no one's forcing them to do it. I think there's plenty of other opportunities with the unemployment rates so low at the moment. So people are making the choice to be an Uber driver, work their own hours, work the days they want to do. But it is, as you say, a matter for the New South Wales State government and their regulation when it comes to the maintenance of the vehicles and ensuring that they're safe. But again, it's consumer choice. And I think sometimes we're getting a little bit carried away over what people want to choose to do rather than, you know, more government regulation.

MURRAY: Is it ultimate flexibility here, Andrew? Apparently 26 per cent of the 11,000 shifts that they had to look at were drivers working 12 or 13 hours.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 16 FEBRUARY 2022

I want to talk about the way in which people with disabilities have suffered during the pandemic. Labor introduced the National Disability Insurance Scheme to deliver certainty and security to Australians living with disabilities and to their families.

Yet under this government, rather than providing certainty, the NDIS has seen plans arbitrarily and without clear cause changed.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 16 FEBRUARY 2022

Australia's sports stars are nothing short of extraordinary. Last year we saw Emma McKeon set an Olympic record for the number of medals won by a female Olympian at a single Olympic Games. With seven medals, she equalled a record which hadn't been matched since the 1950s. We've just seen Jakara Anthony take out the gold in the women's moguls at the Winter Olympics. There are so many other extraordinary athletes out there going faster, higher, stronger than anyone who preceded them.

When I see that great success on the sporting field, I wish that we could see Australia's economy performing just as well. But unfortunately, under the Liberals, the Australian economy is struggling. If it was an engine, it would be sputtering and blowing smoke.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 15 FEBRUARY 2022

Today marks one year to the day since Lisa Wilkinson's interview with Brittany Higgins and Samantha Maiden's reporting. Samantha wrote today:

One year ago today, on the morning of February 15, @newscomauHQ published the first interview with Brittany Higgins. A lot of things have happened in intervening year. Good & bad. I remain proud of the work we did & grateful she chose to speak.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum

This, as I'm sure all honourable members know, is Latin for 'let justice be done, though the heavens fall'.

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TELEVISION INTERVIEW

ABC AFTERNOON BRIEFING

MONDAY, 14 FEBRUARY 2022

SUBJECTS: Foreign interference; Peter Dutton’s failures in defence; Donation transparency; Liberals’ climate inaction; NSW by-elections; Dyson Heydon.

GREG JENNETT, HOST: Jason Falinski, Liberal MP, and Labor's Andrew Leigh in the studio. Both have dashed into the studio from the House of Reps, where there was an impromptu division keeping you on your toes. Let's roll straight into discussion about weaponisation of national security. I think we might have heard some more overtones of this today in Question Time, as we did at the end of last week. Firstly to you Andrew Leigh. This is not without foundation, is it, when we hear Peter Dutton and others trying to dial up national security concerns on Labor when you consider the ASIO Director-General’s threat assessment last week, that is all parties are vulnerable here.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: We certainly know all parties are vulnerable, Greg, but it is very clear that there are no Labor candidates under concern from ASIO. Anthony Albanese said as much as a result of discussions with the ASIO Director-General. We know that ramping up fear of conflict with China is counter-productive to Australia’s national security interest.

JENNETT: If that is the case, Jason Falinski, why has Peter Dutton and others been talking in these terms that Labor and Anthony Albanese might be the Chinese Communist Party 's pick?

JASON FALINKSI: I don't think Peter Dutton suggested that, but feel free-

JENNETT: Something every similar.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 14 FEBRUARY 2022

Over recent weeks, far-Right antivax protests have cropped up in Canada, Britain, France and New Zealand. Last week these protests came to Canberra, where our 99 per cent adult vaccination rate makes us the most vaccinated city in the world. These protesters have a right to peacefully protest, but those of us who believe in science also have a right to point out that vaccines save lives and conspiracy theories can kill. Since the Morrison government belatedly began rolling out COVID vaccines in Australia, these free vaccines have protected thousands of Australians from hospitalisation and death. They work. Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and vitamin C do not.

These protesters aren't just wrong about the science; they're also a risk to democracy. As Van Badham has pointed out, these groups should be judged not by their relatively small numbers but by the damage they're willing to do. Ironically, the people who claim to be saving democracy are the biggest threat to it.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 14 FEBRUARY 2022

Two words sum up the challenge of aged care: neglect and respect. Neglect is the title of the interim report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which found widespread failures in the aged-care system under the Morrison government. Respect is what aged-care workers have not seen from this government. This government is constantly attacking workers, and never more so than when it comes to aged-care workers. I commend the member for Corangamite for bringing on this critical motion at this vital time.

Here in Canberra Nicole Butler was reported in the Canberra Times as having been unable to visit her mother, a resident at Warrigal Stirling, for nearly a month because of the COVID outbreak.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 10 FEBRUARY 2022

On Christmas Eve last year we saw a familiar pantomime playing out, of the Liberals again vetoing Australian Research Council grants. This sad and tired pantomime played out first under the Howard government, when Brendan Nelson knocked off nearly a dozen ARC grants. It then happened in 2018-19, when Senator Birmingham and the member for Wannon, Dan Tehan, as education ministers, knocked off another eleven Australian Research Council grants. And now we’ve seen the coalition do it a third time, with the decision of the member for Fadden, Stuart Robert, as acting education minister, to block six humanities research projects from receiving funding.

Let’s be clear about what it means to win an Australian Research Council grant. This is a process that involves several rounds of rigorous peer review from internationally determined experts. Those researchers who put their time into preparing for Australian Research Council grants do so often during summer, giving up their holidays in order to prepare documents, knowing that there is probably only a one in five chance that they will make it through that highly competitive process. I’m aware of this; as a former professor at the Australian National University, I was fortunate to win three Australian Research Council grants and to serve as a reviewer for Australian Research Council grants.