Andrew Leigh

Putting fairness first means protecting tax transparency, Business Spectator, 24 July 2015

What do the Watergate affair, Project Wickenby and Jeffrey Wigand’s revelations about Big Tobacco have in common? They are all instances where increased transparency identified dodgy dealings and put an end to practices that weren’t in the public interest. 

Transparency can also keep people on the straight and narrow by letting them know in advance that their actions will be scrutinised. That’s why companies must register the names of their directors with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, and why politicians like me have to provide public reports on our financial interests.

The last Labor Government saw that transparency empowered citizens, so we created the MyChild, MyHospitals and MySchool websites. For the same reason, we also introduced laws requiring the Australian Tax Office to publish information about the income and tax paid by companies earning more than $100 million. There has been growing concern in the past few years that some big firms aren’t paying their fair share of tax; improving transparency is one way to tackle this. 

There are only around 2,000 companies in Australia that currently earn enough to be included in this reporting when the tax office releases the data later this year. But right now the Abbott Government is trying to exclude over 800 of them from the rules so that they can continue keeping their tax affairs secret.

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TV INTERVIEW

SKY AM AGENDA

MONDAY, 27 JULY 2015

SUBJECT/S: Marriage equality; refugee policy; emissions trading scheme.

KIERAN GILBERT: The Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh, is my guest, to look at the various elements of this ALP conference. Andrew Leigh, first of all on the same-sex issue, wrapped up yesterday afternoon, a compromise deal with a binding vote now on the Labor platform. This is not really what Bill Shorten had hoped for.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Kieran, I think this is about how to get same-sex marriage done. Bill Shorten supports same-sex marriage, as does Tanya Plibersek and the vast majority of the Labor Party. We put it in our platform in 2011 and the question now is how to best marshal the numbers in the Parliament for a change which according to the polls has between two-thirds and three-quarters support of the Australian people. Tony Abbott just needs to give MPs and Senators a conscience vote.

GILBERT: So you're calling for him to give a conscience vote, just as you go to a binding vote, or at least plan one?

LEIGH: Kieran that question goes to exactly the considerations at play here. We'd like to see this done and in practical terms the best way to get this done is for Tony Abbott to unshackle his MPs and allow them to vote their conscience. So we're keeping open our conscience vote for this Parliament and next but if we can't get it done that way then the conscience vote will lapse.

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RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC NEWSRADIO

MONDAY, 27 JULY 2015

SUBJECT: ALP National conference, same-sex marriage, China Free Trade Agreement

MARIUS BENSON: Andrew Leigh, good morning.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Good morning Marius. How are you?

BENSON: I'm well. There was a lot of harmony at the end of the three days in fact throughout the weekend conference but there's plenty of reports of simmering tensions and divisions simply being papered over, is that the larger truth?

LEIGH: Marius, it ran the way in which a Labor Party conference should. I was the official conference spokesperson and I couldn't be prouder in the way delegates conducted themselves over the weekend. You would have been rightly horrified if there was no disagreement over anything because fundamentally Labor is Australia's party of ideas. And what the weekend showed is that unity doesn't require conformity. You can have a respectful debate over aspects of asylum seeker policy, over questions around same-sex marriage, over free trade - as great Labor Party conferences have had in the past. But fundamentally the things that unite Labor; our values of egalitarianism, opportunity and responsibility, remain extremely strong.

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RADIO INTERVIEW

RADIO NATIONAL DRIVE

MONDAY, 20 JULY 2015

SUBJECT/S: Tony Abbott’s plan to raise the GST; Bronwyn Bishop.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Andrew Leigh is Labor's Shadow Assistant Treasurer and he's with me now. Andrew, welcome to the program.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Thanks Patricia, good to be with you.

KARVELAS: State Labor leaders are not all singing from the same song sheet: you've got Jay Wetherill not ruling anything out, the ACT Chief Minister saying he'd accept a broadening of the GST base now, and Chris Bowen and Bill Shorten now saying no. Why won't you engage in a discussion at the federal level?

LEIGH: Patricia, we're happy to engage in a conversation, but it's really important that we do that based on the evidence we have on the equity and efficiency of the GST. Normally when you're looking at tax reform, you look at things like simplicity, equity and efficiency. If you look at the efficiency of the GST – in other words, the amount of economic activity that is destroyed for every dollar you raise – the Government's latest tax discussion paper says it is just as inefficient a tax as the income tax. It's much less equitable though. The income tax is paid disproportionately by those further up the distribution and the GST hits those down the bottom.

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RADIO INTERVIEW

936 ABC HOBART

MONDAY, 20 JULY 2015

SUBJECT/S: Point to Pinnacle run for World Vision

RICK GODDARD: Here's another invitation for you and it's quite a chilling one in itself. A bloke whose grandfather died doing something and he'd like you to come and do the same thing in his name, it's quite an amazing Tasmanian story actually. Andrew Leigh is Labor Member for Fraser for the ACT but his grandad was a Methodist Minister in Tasmania. Hello Andrew.

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER, ANDREW LEIGH: G'day, Rick. How are you?

GODDARD: What was your grandad doing running up the mountain in the ‘70s?

LEIGH: Well the Methodist Church got together for the first time in Hobart in 1970 and my grandfather was a very enthusiastic runner. He ran 50 miles on his 50th birthday and organised 24-hour runathons. So he thought a lovely way of recognising the Methodist Church getting together in Hobart would be to do a run to raise money for overseas aid and run up Mount Wellington. Cascade Brewery were one of the sponsors, nicely ironic considering the Methodists’ view on alcohol, but he unfortunately didn't make it to the top. There was one of those freak snow storms and he passed away in October 1970.

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RADIO INTERVIEW

666 ABC CANBERRA

FRIDAY, 17 JULY 2015

SUBJECT/S: Greek economic situation; Chinese stock market; ANZUS treaty; ALP National Conference; climate change; Tony Abbott’s Royal Commission.

CHRIS COLEMAN: Andrew Leigh is the Member for Fraser, and he is also the official party spokesman for the ALP's National Conference next week. He's also an economist so he's a good bloke to speak to about a number of things. Let's start on the economic front, Andrew Leigh – good morning.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Good morning Chris, it's lovely to be with you in your final half hour. I feel a bit like someone who sees a band just before they finish their tour.

COLEMAN: You're far too kind. While I've been here, one of the things we've talked about on numerous occasions, and it's been in just about every news bulletin, is Greece. Where are we at with Greece? And now there's been another attempt at resolution to the problems in Greece, how is that going to affect Australia?

LEIGH: The forecasts are still about a 50 per cent chance of Greece exiting the Eurozone. The challenge is making sure the package that was agreed earlier in the week passes the Greek parliament. It's a tough package indeed for the Greek people to swallow. I've been a little disappointed through the process of this that the IMF and the European Central Bank didn't act earlier. We know that if there's defaults, we're talking about $340 billion Euros of debt and that's going to have significant impacts on the rest of the Eurozone. That confidence contagion could flow through to Australia. So it would have been good to see the IMF and the ECB taking earlier action. Fingers crossed they manage to sort this out because a Grexit would be messy for Greece and potentially cause problems for countries like Italy, Portugal and Spain - not this year but in years to come.

Culture must foster the innovators of tomorrow, The Australian, 17 July 2015

Macgregor Duncan and Andrew Leigh

Like Jason and his famed Argonauts, the history of the Australian economy has been one long search for the Golden Fleece. Over time, we’ve successively found it in wool and gold, manufacturing and migrants, services and iron ore. But with Australian productivity growth in the doldrums, there has been much talk about the need for entrepreneurship to spawn jobs for the future. Today we’re seeking a new generation of Australian Argonauts in pursuit of a new Golden Fleece.

There are many things that Australia does well. We’ve enjoyed one of the longest spells of uninterrupted economic growth in world history, our life expectancy is among the longest in the world, and we currently hold the Ashes. But then there are the challenges. Australian innovation ranks high among those things that keep us awake at night.

What worries us is not that Australia lags behind the United States, it’s that we lag behind many other advanced countries as well. 

MORETON COMMUNITY ON GUARD AGAINST RISING INEQUALITY

Joint Media Release with Graham Perrett MP

Representatives from local community centres, multicultural groups and the disability sector today joined Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh and Member for Moreton Graham Perrett at a roundtable discussion on inequality at Brisbane’s Sunnybank.

Community groups in Moreton are concerned about tackling the issue of inequality and the lack of direct services for the most vulnerable in our community.

“People in the Moreton community are really feeling Tony Abbott’s cuts to childcare, aged care and education. Along with cuts to welfare and training programs, all of these decisions will increase inequality in the Moreton community,” said Mr Perrett.

Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh said that the Abbott Government’s first two budgets were full of policies that would lead to Australia becoming a more unequal country.  

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RADIO INTERVIEW

TRIPLE M GRILL TEAM

WEDNESDAY, 15 JULY 2015

SUBJECT/S: National Rifle Association lying about the success of Australia’s gun buyback.

MATTY JOHNS: It seems like every couple of weeks we hear about shootings in America that just leave you shaking your head. Now, the National Rifle Association laughs at Australia's gun laws. They view them as pointless and ineffective but an absolutely brilliant article in The Age newspaper showed the gun laws had been anything but in this country. Andrew Leigh worked as a summer clerk at a Sydney law firm in 1995 and his mentor was a 28-year-old woman named Zoe Hall. Zoe was Martin Bryant's second-last victim in the Port Arthur massacre. The National Rifle Association of America's constant criticism and disregard for our gun laws inspired Andrew to do a bit of digging into the stats on whether our gun buyback scheme that John Howard brought in has actually worked. Andrew joins us on the line right now – g'day Andrew.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Morning gentlemen, how are you?

JOHNS: Good thanks. Now Andrew, is it fair to say straight off the top that these laws have been a stunning success?

LEIGH: Absolutely. In the decade before Port Arthur, we had, on average, one mass shooting every year. In the two decades since, we've had just a single mass shooting in Australia. We've got the firearms homicide rate down, but interestingly we've got the firearms suicide rate down as well. It turns out that the person most likely to kill you with a gun is yourself – we have four gun suicides for every gun homicide. So we've actually saved something in the order of 200 lives a year as a result of the gun buyback, and most of those come from fewer gun suicides.

Why the NRA has Australia in its sights, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 July 2015

In 1995-96, I worked as a summer clerk at the Sydney office of law firm Minter Ellison. Each of us was assigned a mentor. Mine was 28-year-old Zoe Hall. Whip-smart, generous and perpetually smiling, Zoe was the perfect mentor. Surrounded by egos and timesheets, I felt like Zoe always had time to chat, and wanted to help me feel welcome in the firm.

That autumn, Zoe took a holiday to Port Arthur. She was filling the car at a petrol station when she was shot by Martin Bryant – the second-last of his 35 victims.

In the decade leading up to the Port Arthur massacre, mass shootings (in which five or more people are killed) had been a regular feature of Australian life. Between 1987 and 1996, a total of 94 victims were killed in mass shootings. Australia averaged a mass shooting every year, with places such as Strathfield, Hoddle Street and Canley Vale becoming synonymous with gun violence.