Andrew Leigh

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW 

ABC RN DRIVE

MONDAY, 19 NOVEMBER 2018

SUBJECTS: Levelling the playing field for first home buyers, Labor’s commitment to a National Integrity Commission.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: As house prices in Melbourne and Sydney continue to fall, there are fresh calls for Labour to abandon its planned changes to negative gearing. The opposition has proposed limiting negative gearing on existing dwellings, although the change would not apply to those already using the tax break. The government says the policy would hurt mortgage holders who've already seen the value of their home drop and they’ve won the backing of Aussie Home Loans founder John Symond, who described the impact as a nuclear bomb this morning. Andrew Leigh’s the Shadow Assistant Treasurer. Welcome back to RN Drive.

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

CRAWFORD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, 13 NOVEMBER 2018

In 1958, psychologist David Weikart took up the job of being director of special education in Ypsilanti, Michigan. At that time, schools were segregated, and all the African-American students in the town attended one primary school - the Perry School. Weikart noticed that the school was run down. Instead of a playground, it had a field filled with thistles. Many of the African-American students ended up repeating grades, entering special education or leaving school early.

Yet when Weikart gave a presentation to school principals about these problems, users responded defensively. One sat with arms tightly folded; others stood by the window smoking; a few left the room. When he pressed them to act, they said there was nothing they could do. Black students were just born that way. So Weikart came up with an alternative solution: 'Because I couldn't change the schools . . . well, obviously you do it before school.'

BAHASA, BUSINESS EXCHANGES AND MATCH-FIT LEADERSHIP: DEEPENING THE AUSTRALIA-INDONESIA RELATIONSHIP

KEYNOTE ADDRESS, AUSTRALIA-INDONESIA BUSINESS COUNCIL

SURFERS PARADISE, 13 NOVEMBER 2018

Selamat pagi. It’s good to be with you today.

When I was anak kecil, I lived in Indonesia for three years. My father Michael was at Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh, funded by the Australian Government to work on a special training program designed to improve social science research capacity throughout Indonesian Universities and Islamic Institutes. My mother Barbara was mostly looking after my brother and me, but was beginning the research into the Indonesian education system that would become her PhD thesis, and her studies of traditional Acehnese textiles that would become her book Tangan-Tangan Trampil / The Hands of Time.

It was a pretty extraordinary experience for a child to have. I attended the local Acehnese school, where lessons were conducted in Indonesian. We spent most of the day singing nation-building songs (with a burgeoning local independence movement, the Suharto Government was keen to remind people in Aceh that they were Indonesian first and Acehnese second). Then we played in the muddy playground. As my mother recalls it, the sole white kid in the class was the only one whose white shirt had turned brown by the end of the day.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

DOORSTOP

BRISBANE

THURSDAY, 1 NOVEMBER 2018

SUBJECT: Labor's plans to crack down on multinational tax dodgers.

ALI FRANCE, LABOR CANDIDATE FOR DICKSON: Good morning, it's really lovely to have Labor's Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh here today to talk to local businesses about how we're going to level the playing field and tackle multinational tax avoidance. 

Small businesses like the ones behind us, pay their fair share of tax. But we know there are big multinational companies and wealthy individuals who operate in Australia, who don't pay their fair share of tax. Labor wants to put a stop to that. So I'm now going to hand over to Andrew to talk a bit more about how that's going to work.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Well thanks so much Ali and it's great to be here with Ali France, Labor's hard-working candidate, taking our message of fairness to communities like Dickson.

LIONEL MURPHY LECTURE

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, 31 OCTOBER 2018

Executive Summary

Australia has a competition problem: there is not enough of it. Our industries are concentrated. Our markets show signs of weak competition.

The way Australia’s experts think about competition is partly to blame. Although it has been less influential in Australia than in the United States, the Chicago School’s views on competition have shaped our laws, policies and enforcement practices. The Chicago School views market concentration as a virtue more than a vice. Barriers to entry are surmountable, market power tends to be temporary, most mergers are good, vertical restraints and predatory pricing are either benign or efficient.

These views run counter to those of Lionel Murphy. Murphy saw market concentration as a problem. He saw strong competition laws as necessary to protect the competitive process, protect consumers and support the creation of new businesses. He found the Chicago School’s arguments unconvincing. The growing body of research and experience shows Murphy’s concerns were well-founded. The Chicago School’s faith in the ability of markets to self-correct and deliver competitive outcomes was misplaced.

There is a strong progressive case for repositioning how we think about competition. Focusing more on the competitive process, the structure of markets and the incentives those structures create for firms will play an important role in reducing inequality.

FEDERATION CHAMBER, 24 OCTOBER 2018

National apologies are a point for a country to look at its past through the harsh eye of the present, and to own up to the wrongdoings of current or past generations. We think of the moment when Britain apologised for the killing of protesters on Bloody Sunday, when the United States apologised for its internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, when the Papacy apologised for the persecution of Galileo, when Japan apologised for its treatment of comfort women and, of course, when Australia apologised for the treatment of the stolen generations.

These are not a moment in which the hurt goes away and in which all the harm is suddenly absolved by dint of an apology, but they are crucial moments for a nation to own up to its past and to say, 'We did the wrong thing and we will endeavour to do better in the future.' That's what this House is doing with this apology today to the victims of childhood sexual abuse by institutions.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

DOORSTOP

CANBERRA

WEDNESDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2018

SUBJECTS: The Coalition’s war on charities.

Good morning. My name is Andrew Leigh, the Shadow Minister for Charities and Not-for-Profits. This week is Charity Fraud Awareness Week, and there’s been no bigger fraud perpetrated on the charities of Australia than the appointment of a charities critic to head the charities commission.

Let's not remember just in the hours after Australia was celebrating the historic same sex marriage vote, the Coalition snuck out the fact that they were appointing Gary Johns to head the charities commission. Gary Johns is somebody who has a history as a charities critic.  He’s attacked the Indigenous charity Recognise, the mental health charity Beyond Blue. He’s criticised the ability of environmental charities to advocate and called for the repeal of the Charities Act 2013, which would throw Australian charities law back to the 1600s.

Under this government, we've seen an ongoing war on charities - attacks on environmental charities, social services charities, legal charities working to help the most vulnerable. We've seen from the Coalition six different ministers responsible for the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission. We've seen this prompt two open letters to the Prime Minister from the sector, complaining about the way in which they've been treated.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 17 OCTOBER 2018

I move the second reading amendment circulated in my name:

That all the words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1) notes that the Coalition Government has had six Ministers responsible for charities over the last five years; and

(2) expresses its disapproval of the appointment of prominent anti-charity advocate Gary Johns as chair of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission”.

Labor will be supporting this bill in the House. Schedule 1 of the bill makes a number of technical refinements to the income tax law so that the new tax system for managed investment trusts operates as intended. Following recommendations made by the Board of Taxation in its report on the review of tax arrangements applying to managed investment trusts in 2016, the new tax system for attributed, managed investment trusts was enacted. Labor supported that legislation. The new tax system was designed to increase certainty, provide flexibility, reduce compliance costs for managed investment trusts and improve the competitiveness of Australia's fund management industry.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 16 OCTOBER 2018

Fifty years ago today, a young Australian did two extraordinary things. At the Mexico City Olympics, Peter Norman won silver in the 200 metres with a time of 20.06 seconds. In the half century since, no Australian has run faster. It is still our national record. But the best was yet to come. As he walked out to the medal ceremony with Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two African American runners told him they planned to bow their heads and put their fists in the air in support of human rights.

When Carlos revealed their plans he said, 'I expected to see fear in Norman's eyes, but instead I saw love.' Peter Norman told the two athletes, 'I'll stand with you.' He borrowed an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge and pinned it on his chest. The famous photograph shows Peter Norman standing silently alongside the two athletes giving the Black Power salute. When he returned to Australia, Peter Norman should have been treated as a hero for racial equality, but he wasn't. He wasn't highlighted in the 2000 Sydney Olympics' opening ceremony. When he died in 2006, Smith and Carlos were among his pallbearers.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 16 OCTOBER 2018

In DC Comics in the 1960s there was a fictional place called htraE which was the home of Bizarro World, a place in which everything was backwards. It feels like we are in Bizarro World today, as we look at a government behaving like an opposition and an opposition behaving like a government.

Over the course of the last five years Labor have been stable under the excellent leadership of Bill Shorten, the member for Maribyrnong, and we have been producing a suite of important economic policies that will take us to the next election as the most policy-focussed opposition in a generation.