Andrew Leigh

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.

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.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

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.

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?

LAUNCH OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY META-RESEARCH AND OPEN SCIENCE

THURSDAY, 7 NOVEMBER 2019

MELBOURNE

CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

[Acknowledgements omitted]

We often think of the era of William Shakespeare and the era of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as being the same. But in fact, the beliefs of educated people in those two eras were very different. The average educated person in the early 1600s believed in unicorns. They believed in werewolves. They believed that the sun rotated around the Earth. The average educated person in the 1600s believed that when a murderer approached the body, it would begin to bleed. Those people believe that witches actually existed, and they believed in alchemy. Alchemy was one of the most popular beliefs of the age. Indeed, Isaac Newton spent more time studying alchemy than he did during doing physics. Keynes once said of Newton that he wasn't the first of the scientists, he was the last of the magicians. It makes you wonder what other inventions Newton could have come up with had he spent a little bit less time on alchemy.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2CC DRIVE
THURSDAY, 7 NOVEMBER 2019

SUBJECT: Labor campaign review.

LEON DELANEY: As you know, Labor today released its self-examination of what went so horribly wrong at the May election. The report was prepared by Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill. It's a 92 page review. It's made 60 findings and 26 recommendations. In short, it says that Labor quote ‘lost the election because of a weak strategy that could not adapt to the change in the Liberal leadership, a cluttered policy agenda looked risky and an unpopular leader’. Joining me now is the Federal Member for Fenner and Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and Charities Andrew Leigh. Good afternoon.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Good afternoon, Leon. How are you?

DELANEY: Really well. How are you today.

LEIGH: Terrifically well.

DELANEY: Do you agree with the findings of this report?

LEIGH: Yes, I do. I think it's a hard hitting but important review, and one that talks about the importance of getting your digital strategy right, of making sure there's policy coherence and ensuring that we are focused in our message. We were very keen to solve as many of Australia's problems as we could, but in so doing - in pulling together the broadest policy agenda that Labor's taking for an election in my lifetime - I think we didn't carry that core message that a great campaign needs. And the review talks about some of those challenges.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC CANBERRA
THURSDAY, 7 NOVEMBER 2019

SUBJECTS: Labor campaign review; Innovation + Equality.

ANNA VIDOT: To talk through some of these tea leaves and entrails, Andrew Leigh is on the line, the Labor MP for Fenner. Andrew Leigh, good evening.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Good evening, Anna. How are you?

VIDOT: I’m well. This review's pretty blunt, that while there were a range of factors Labor was in many ways responsible for its own demise in 2019, that an adaptable campaign with a strong strategy would have won, the review says. I can't imagine this was an easy thing to read.

LEIGH: That’s right and not just for me, but also for the thousands of volunteers, trade union members, for the people who knocked on doors and made telephone calls, who worked their guts out for the progressive change that we hoped to be able to deliver on May the 18th. I think for those people, we owe it to go into a deep review and to release that publicly today, so everybody can read all about the campaign, warts and all. It does reflect the fact that we looked to solve many challenges - from the challenge of climate change to housing affordability, school fairness and access to medicines. In doing so, we thought we would be building trust with the Australian people by laying out a detailed agenda. Instead we left ourselves open to a scare campaign.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC RN BREAKFAST

THURSDAY, 7 NOVEMBER 2019

Subjects: Big banks appearing before the House Economics Committee tomorrow; Labor campaign review; Innovation + Equality.

HAMISH MACDONALD: The chiefs of Australia's biggest banks will be back in Canberra tomorrow for their twice yearly parliamentary grilling as they face pressure for not passing on the Reserve Bank's latest rate cut in full. The former Turnbull Government launched the hearings three years ago while fending off calls for a banking royal commission. The hearings have now been expanded in the wake of the Hayne Commission, and this time around it also examined the superannuation sector as well as smaller banks. Andrew Leigh is deputy chair of the Standing Committee on Economics. Welcome to Breakfast.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Thanks Hamish, great to be with you.

MACDONALD: We've had a royal commission. There's an ACCC inquiry into mortgage practices. So what will you be interrogating the chiefs of Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank about tomorrow?

LEIGH: At the heart of the Hayne Royal Commission was the notion that greed and short term profit had been put ahead of basic standards of honesty. The Hayne Royal Commission called not just for tweaks in procedure, but for deep cultural change in our biggest banks. So I’ll be asking the big banks how they're going about implementing those significant changes, how they're going about ensuring that customers are placed first and that there will never again be the sorts of scandals that we've seen.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TV INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS FIRST EDITION
TUESDAY, 5 NOVEMBER 2019

SUBJECTS: The Morrison Government failing to manage the economy; the Morrison Government failing to step up on the world stage; Labor election review.

LAURA JAYES: Let’s go live now to the Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury, Andrew Leigh. He joins me now from Sydney this morning. Andrew Leigh, thanks so much for your time.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Pleasure, Laura. 

JAYES: First of all, the RBA is meeting once again today to consider a rate cut, if another one is needed. What’s your tip on what decision they’ll make?

LEIGH: The markets have the Reserve Bank keeping rates on hold, but regardless of whether they cut by another 25 basis points or keep constant at 0.75 per cent, the RBA is running out of monetary policy firepower. We know that there's limited impact that quantitative easing could have, and so really the question is: will the Morrison Government step up and do with fiscal policy what the Reserve Bank can't do with monetary policy? We need structural reform. We need fiscal policy, and we need it now more than ever, given that we've had the worst retail sales numbers in a generation coming out yesterday. On a per person basis, the economy shrank over the last fiscal year. We've got unemployment a percentage point higher than in Britain or New Zealand or the United States. And we've got problems with wage growth being in the doldrums, which is really at the heart of the retail sales problem.

HONOURING THE BICENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF THE BAB, CO-FOUNDER OF THE BAHA’I FAITH

CANBERRA, 3 NOVEMBER 2019

It's an honour to be here today, on the lands of the Ngunnawal people. I pay my respects to elders past and present.

The Bab is to the Baha’i faith as Jesus is to Christianity - a leading figure whose life was cut short in his 30s, but whose teachings live on in the world today. At this moment in history it couldn't be more appropriate to be celebrating the Bab, for three reasons.

The first is the emphasis on inclusion in a world in which exclusion is becoming all too common, in a world in which people are being split into communities and there are too many of us seeking to divide us. His teachings resonated broadly. As Leo Tolstoy observed ‘I therefore sympathise with Babiism with all my heart in as much as it teaches people brotherhood and equality and sacrifice of material life for service to God.’