Andrew Leigh

SENATOR DON FARRELL, DEPUTY LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION IN THE SENATE

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW MINISTER FOR CHARITIES AND NOT-FOR-PROFITS

ANDREW GILES, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR SCHOOLS

LABOR STANDING UP FOR CHARITIES WHILE CLEANING UP DEMOCRACY

Labor welcomes the bipartisan support from the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters for changes to protect charities and minimize the impact of the Turnbull Government’s lacklustre legislation.

The Committee’s recommendation to provide greater clarity for the sector and minimise regulatory and compliance burdens are a fitting result after months of Labor going into bat for our charities.

LAUNCH OF THE CHINA STORY YEARBOOK

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

MONDAY, 9 APRIL 2018

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet today, and thank ANU’s Centre on China in the World for inviting me to speak here today. I also thank our hosts, Professor Brian Schmidt, Dr Jane Golley and Linda Jaivin, and their colleagues Dr Natalie Kohle, Dr Graeme Smith and Ms Wen Meizhen.

In the very early years of this century, the literary critic James Woods was trying to give a name to a new fiction genre that he recognised in the minutely observed, sprawling surveys of contemporary society. He called it hysterical realism because it had an edge of paranoia - seeing connections where there were only incidents, plotting causes and intention in fascinatingly random human activity.

These doorstop novels would take diverse threads of history, politics and popular culture and weave them together into intricate patterns. ‘Hysterical’ because these patterns emerge as the vision of a single organising intelligence – one mind, overfull.

But take away the angst and the overburdened pessimism of that single viewpoint and you get a different sort of tapestry.

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TELEVISION INTERVIEW

SKY NEWS AM AGENDA

MONDAY, 9 APRIL 2018

SUBJECT: Turnbull Turns Thirty

KIERAN GILBERT: Andrew Leigh, thanks very much for your time.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Pleasure Kieran. Good to be with you.

GILBERT: You’ve been a critic of polls in the past. This loss of 30 Newspolls has been coming for some time. An awkward moment for the Prime Minister, no doubt?

LEIGH: Kieran, as you say, I’ve been a strong poll critic but this is Malcolm Turnbull’s own benchmark. He’s like a dog that’s spent its lifetime trying to chase a car. He’s finally managed to catch it and discovered he’s got to drive it. That’s not much good for the rest of the country, since we’re now sitting in the backseat of a car being driven by a dog. Malcolm Turnbull has said himself that this is the standard upon which Prime Minister should step aside. On that basis, this is the moment for him to step aside.

GILBERT: That’s a big call though, to suggest that he is someone that shouldn’t be there, given that he won the last election. The real election of 2016. This is just a survey and one of many surveys that you have been very critical of over recent years?

LEIGH: You don’t need a poll to tell you that Malcolm Turnbull is out of touch. This is a deeply problematic government. It’s lost eight ministers over its time. It’s seen its electoral majority wiped out. It’s a government which in the face of profits growing eight times faster than wages wants to cut penalty rates and give a big tax handout to big business. It’s a government which is taking money out of schools and hospitals-

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RADIO INTERVIEW

RADIO NEW ZEALAND

SUNDAY, 8 APRIL 2018 

SUBJECT: Randomistas.

WALLACE CHAPMAN: Dr Andrew Leigh is a former economics professor at the Australian National University, a former London  lawyer and has a PhD from Harvard. These days he's an Australian politician, the Shadow Assistant Treasurer and while his political ideology flirted for a while with Tony Blair's third wave, he prefers these days to talk about a special duty to look after the most disadvantaged. He's in New Zealand this week as part of the Presbyterian Support Northern Speaker Series on improving child wellbeing. He's an author and his latest book is 'Randomistas', looking at how randomised tests are carried out every day to find out what works, what doesn't. The tests are done by supermarkets, search engines, online dating sites and also by political parties who use randomised trials to try to win elections. His book tells the stories of researchers who fight to have the findings from their research implemented. Dr Andrew Leigh has taken time from his packed schedule. Welcome.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Thanks Wallace, great to be with you.

CHAPMAN: Tell me, how did your interest in randomised trials actually start?

LEIGH: Well, it came originally when I was doing my PhD at Harvard University and working with a range of people who were just as passionate as I was about addressing social disadvantage, but had far fewer prejudices about which programs worked and which didn't. And it made me reflect on my own philosophy on social policy. I think I’d been very attracted to solutions and much less scientific and critical than for example a medical researcher who was trying to cure cancer. I didn’t realise that actually no matter how idealistic you are, lots of things that sound good turn out not to work so well in practice. One great example is Scared Straight, a program that puts troubled youths in jail for a day in order to scare them onto the straight and narrow, but actually turned out in rigorous randomised trials to increase offending rates.

IT'S ABOUT TIME THE ABS STARTED COUNTING HOW WE SPEND OUR DAYS ONCE MORE

Business Insider, 7 April 2018

Today is “No Housework Day”, a moment when we are supposed to stop washing dishes, refrain from doing laundry, and let the carpets gather dust.

If we all observed No Housework Day, who would benefit most? My guess is that it’d be women, who according to the 2006 Time Use Survey did most of the housework in Australia

Time use is a feminist issue. Women do the majority of unpaid caring for children and for older people. Women are more likely to volunteer, and do the majority of the housework.

Yet the Australian Bureau of Statistics hasn’t run a time use survey since 2006. As Shadow Minister for Women Tanya Plibersek puts it, we haven’t had a time use survey since the iPhone was invented.

HOW THE RANDOMISTAS CAN HELP FIGHT INEQUALITY

PRESBYTERIAN SUPPORT NORTHERN SEMINAR SERIES ON CHILD WELLBEING
WELLINGTON

 FRIDAY, 6 APRIL 2018

I acknowledge the Māori people, the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet, and thank our hosts, Presbyterian Support Northern, for inviting me to deliver these lectures.

New Zealand has turned out to be a pretty good predictor of what’s likely to happen next in Australia.

New Zealand women won the right to vote nine years earlier than Australian women.

Your country enacted same sex marriage four years before we did.

You even gave Barnaby Joyce citizenship before we did.

ANDREW LEIGH MP, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

TIM HAMMOND MP, SHADOW MINISTER FOR CONSUMER AFFAIRS

FLIGHT CENTRE RULING SHOWS NEED FOR HIGHER PENALTIES

Federal Labor has welcomed the decision by the Full Federal Court to order Flight Centre to pay $12.5 million in penalties for attempting to enter into price fixing arrangements with airlines between 2005-2009, but has called on the Turnbull Government to increase maximum penalties for anti-competitive conduct.

The court found that Flight Centre asked a number of airlines not to publish ticket prices on their website that were less than Flight Centre’s prices.

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ABC RADIO NATIONAL PODCAST

CLASS ACT PART FOUR: DON’T MENTION IT

THURSDAY, 5 APRIL 2018

SUBJECTS: Inequality, Class.

RICHARD AEDY: Hello, I'm Richard Aedy. This is Class Act on Big Ideas. We're looking at social class in Australia. In part one, you heard what our class system looks like and how we all fit into it. Part two was about how we got to where we are. And part three looked at inequality and social mobility – both are worse than they used to be.

This time we'll hear about why we don't talk about class, but we listen when other people do. There's also some ideas on what we can do about inequality, and what might be the beginning of a return to facing up to class, something we've done in Australia for most of the past 230 years – just not for the last 30. Here's the thing. We have a class system. It shapes the life we lead. But just like the movie Fight Club, the first rule of our class system is that you do not talk about our class system. The second rule of our class system is that you do not talk about our class system. It's weird. Here's the novelist Tim Winton.

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ABC RADIO NATIONAL PODCAST

CLASS ACT PART THREE: THE DARK HEART

WEDNESDAY, 4 APRIL 2018

SUBJECTS: Inequality, Class.       

RICHARD AEDY: Hello, I'm Richard Aedy. This is Class Act on Big Ideas, looking at social class in Australia. In parts one and two, you heard what class is, how it's determined, how we got here and the way it interacts with Indigenous Australians and with our politics. In part three we'll look at the dark heart of the class system: inequality and what it's doing to us.

It affects our health, where we live, how well we do at school and our prospects after we leave. You'll hear how class is playing into another big change, between one generation and the next. And we'll focus on something that's closely connected to inequality, and for some individuals is the antidote to it: social mobility. Because what we don't have in Australia is a level playing field.

VOICE: There's a perception among people who reside in that less well-educated, less wealthy group, that they're never going to be able to change the life of their children. And I think that's terrible because I think anybody can help their children to change their lives. And that doesn't mean changing the class they belong to; it means changing the perception that there is an underclass.

EQUALISING THE ANTIPODES: WHAT CAN NEW ZEALAND AND AUSTRALIA LEARN FROM EACH ANOTHER ABOUT REDUCING INEQUALITY?

PRESBYTERIAN SUPPORT NORTHERN SEMINAR SERIES ON CHILD WELLBEING
AUCKLAND

THURSDAY, 5 APRIL 2018

I acknowledge the Māori people, the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet, and thank our hosts, Presbyterian Support Northern, for inviting me to deliver these lectures.

In Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize winning novel, The Luminaries, Crosbie Wells is writing back to his brother in 1854, explaining why he plans never to return to England. Naturally, he starts with the weather in Dunedin ‘The sun is bright on the hills and on the water and I can bear the briskness very well’. But then he turns to social class. ‘You see in New Zealand every man has left his former life behind and every man is equal in his own way. Of course the flockmasters in Otago are barons here just as they were barons in the Scottish Highlands but for men like me there is a chance to rise… It is not uncommon for men to tip their hats to one another in the street regardless of their station. The frontier I think makes brothers of us all’.

Ironically, it was in England that I first became interested in New Zealand inequality. Working with the late Sir Tony Atkinson, we began to explore long-run taxation statistics to ask whether the historical trends in inequality in Australia and New Zealand matched the myths. Was it true, as one 19^th century gold-digger had written home to England, that ‘Rank and title have no charms in the Antipodes’?