Andrew Leigh

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
PODCAST INTERVIEW
THE BRIEFING
THURSDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 2023 [RECORDED 6 SEPTEMBER]

SUBJECTS: Voice to Parliament, competition in aviation, Qatar decision, Qantas, cost of living.

TOM TILLEY (HOST): Andrew Leigh is Labor's Assistant Minister for Competition, so he's in the hot seat right now because competition is what the Qatar/Qantas issue is all about and it comes at a time where the Government is under a bit of pressure. More pressure than they've been under their whole time in office.

Support for the Coalition is at its highest level since the 2022 election last year. Opposition to The Voice is polling at 53 per cent. As I mentioned at the start, Albanese's net satisfaction rating is in negative territory, and of course the Qatar Airways decision made in June is causing them a lot of problems. There's now a Parliamentary inquiry that's going to happen into that decision.

So let's let into it with Andrew Leigh. Minister Leigh, thank you so much for joining us on The Briefing.

ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR COMPETITION, CHARITIES, TREASURY AND EMPLOYMENT ANDREW LEIGH: It's a real pleasure, Tom, great to be with you.

Higher Education Support Amendment (Response To The Australian Universities Accord Interim Report) Bill 2023
Second Reading Speech
House of Representatives, 4 September

There are hundreds of thousands of 18-year-olds who began university this year. Those people were born in 2005, and they'll be at university from 2023 to 2025 if they do a regular, three-year bachelor's degree. Those people won't be eligible for the pension until 2072. At the end of their working lives, they will be dealing with the advanced technology of a workplace in 2072. We don't know the exact contours of what that labour market will look like, but we do know that it will be the sort of labour market which will reward high levels of skills. Just as the level of skill in the Australian economy has steadily increased over the last couple of generations, it will continue to do so for the current cohort. That means that, to a school leaver today, who was born in 2005 and who isn't eligible for the pension until 2072, university looks increasingly attractive. University won't be for everyone, but, in an age in which artificial intelligence is increasingly taking more routine jobs—automation of mobile services and factory automation are filling niches once filled by workers—higher levels of education are valuable. Our crystal ball for forecasting the precise jobs that will rise is a bit cloudy, but we do know that it's a very good bet that the jobs of the future will require higher levels of formal education than the jobs of today.

Where will those new university graduates come from? They'll tend to come from groups that are currently underserved. At the moment around half of Australians in their late 20s and early 30s has a university degree, but that level differs quite markedly across Australia. In the outer suburbs of major Australian cities, only 23 per cent of young Australians have a university degree. In the regions, only 13 per cent of young Australians have a university degree. Among young adults from poor families, only 15 per cent have a university degree. Among Indigenous Australians, only seven per cent have a university degree. For a young Indigenous man today, you're more likely to go to jail than you are to go to university. Right across the population, 36 per cent of Australians have a university qualification today, and it's been forecast that by mid-century it's going to be necessary to have 55 per cent of the population with a university qualification.

Recording Government

Inside Story, 31 August 2023

In 2018 a US court ordered the Trump administration to reunite migrant families who had been separated at the US–Mexico border. The ruling forced a backflip on the administration’s policy of separating children from adults. Yet the administration’s border agents struggled for weeks to comply with the court ruling.

The problem turned out to be technical. The computer system used by the agents, designed on the assumption that unaccompanied minors were travelling solo, had no way of recording a link between them and their parents. Some agents stuck sticky notes on infants’ onesies. Others kept makeshift records that were lost when the children were moved.

In Recoding America, technology writer Jennifer Pahlka tells the stories of how technological successes and failures have affected the way the US government operates. As founder of the non-profit Code for America and deputy chief technology officer under president Barack Obama, Pahlka is ideally placed to show why government computer systems sometimes underperform (and occasionally outperform) our expectations.

SPEECH

THE ECONOMICS OF CORRUPTION

National Integrity Summit, Melbourne
Wednesday, 30 August 2023

I acknowledge the people of the Kulin Nations, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we gather today.

I pay my respects to their Elders, extend that respect to other First Nations people present today, and commit myself, as a member of the Albanese Government, to the implementation in full of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. including a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament. 

Thanks to Transparency International Australia and your CEO Clancy Moore for inviting me to speak today. I also acknowledge the National Anti-Corruption Commissioner Paul Brereton, Deputy Commissioner of Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission Kylie Kilgour, and longtime anti-corruption campaigner Professor A.J. Brown.

The Moonlight State

While Australia has had many corruption scandals, the Fitzgerald Inquiry and the systemic corruption among police and Queensland politicians it unearthed stands out both because of the scale of the corruption that it revealed and the long-term impact it had.

Historian Raymond Evans described the Fitzgerald Inquiry as ‘the most remarkable Commission of Inquiry in Australia’s history’.[1] In 2009 – in the lead up to the 20^th anniversary of the tabling of Fitzgerald’s report in Parliament – then Premier Anna Bligh said:

‘In many ways, the Fitzgerald inquiry was Queensland’s Berlin Wall. It washed away an old regime and heralded in a new era.  Nothing on Queensland’s political landscape has been the same since.’[2]   

The system whereby corruption police would take protection payments from the sex industry was called ‘the Joke’, but the cost was no laughing matter. By the 1980s tens of thousands of dollars in bribes were being paid each month to senior police the culture that grew up around the crooked cops went far beyond one industry. To quote the Fitzgerald Report:

The later segment of evidence involving political figures demonstrated that misconduct in the Police Force was not isolated, but part of a wider malaise to do with attitudes to public office and public duty.[3]

Indeed the Fitzgerald Inquiry may never have happened if then Premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson hadn’t been on a trip to the United States on the night the Four Corners show ‘Moonlight State’ aired.[4] As a result it fell to the Acting Premier Bill Gunn to initiate the inquiry. 

The Inquiry ultimately led to four former state ministers, and multiple senior police being found to have engaged in corrupt conduct, and the establishment of Queensland’s first anti-corruption body, the Crime and Misconduct Commission (now the Crime and Corruption Commission) in 1988. 

Corruption ultimately brought Joh’s premiership to an end. According to party-room records revealed years later – Joh was allegedly set to receive up to $20 million to facilitate the construction of what would have then been the world’s tallest building in Brisbane.[5]

His National Party colleagues refused to wave the deal through, so Joh tried to reshape his Cabinet. He demanded five Ministers resign – they refused. He demanded the Governor of Queensland, Walter Campbell call an election despite the Parliament only being a year old – which Campbell declined. Joh was ultimately challenged by Mike Ahern – ending 19 years as Premier.

Joh himself was put on trial for perjury in 1992 but the jury deadlocked.

According to another episode of Four Corners from 2008: ‘A later inquiry conducted by Justice Bill Carter found the [jury] selection process had been manipulated by ... ex-police officers ... helping to put Joh before a jury led by Young Nationals member, Luke Shaw’.[6]

When corruption really gets into the bones of a society the damage it does to institutions can take generations to heal.

The economic case for a First Nations Voice to Parliament

The West Australian, 30 August 2023

The moral case for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament is powerful. It is an opportunity to recognise that Australia is home to the longest continuing culture in the world – two thousand generations of Indigenous Australians have lived on our continent

But there is also an economic argument for constitutional recognition. Put simply, policies work better when policy makers listen to those people who are affected.

This isn’t just a theory. When schools are updating playgrounds they talk to the P&C committee. When councils are considering new developments, they speak with neighbours to get their views. When state governments are updating bus routes, they ask commuters to find out the underserved areas. When the federal government is designing tax policies, we meet with stakeholders to avoid unintended consequences. The point is decisions and outcomes are better when we listen to people.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ADDRESS
Q&A
TUESDAY, 29 AUGUST 2023

SUBJECTS: Australian Centre for Evaluation, multinational tax transparency, competition in the airline industry, supermarket prices, matters to be included in the Competition Review, Intergenerational Report, evaluation and public service capability building, industry policy, local manufacturing.

ANDREW TILLET (MODERATOR): Thank you Dr Leigh, unfortunately we’ve gone a little bit over time for this speech so we might have to get straight to the Choose Your Own Adventure part of the proceedings and go to questions from our colleagues. First up is Paul Karp.

PAUL KARP: Thanks very much for your speech Dr Leigh, Paul Karp from the Guardian. Could I ask on a different topic about country by country multinational tax transparency? Has Australia been warned that other countries might actually share less information if we enact these rules in their current form, and is the government preparing to water down the reforms so that we collect information in the same format as the EU?

ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT, CHARITIES, COMPETITION AND TREASURY ANDREW LEIGH: Thanks very much for your question, Paul. Our multinational tax agenda isn't just closing loopholes, it's about boosting transparency. The House recently passed one transparency measure, which will require all public firms to report on the country of tax domicile of their subsidiaries. So if a company is doing business in a tax haven, then their investors will know about it. Another part of it as you rightly point out is country-by-country reporting. We're going to make sure we get that right, so that the information that is currently reported to the Australian Tax Office by its counterparts in other countries isn't diminished. The European Union moves to country-by-country reporting on the first of July next year. And our view is that aligning the Australian timetable with European Union makes sense. We're keen to ensure that the maximum amount of information is out there, while guaranteeing that the ATO still gets the data it needs in order to do its job.

EVALUATING POLICY IMPACT: WORKING OUT WHAT WORKS*

National Press Club, Canberra
Tuesday, 29 August 2023

Introduction

Social workers in schools always boost student outcomes. Drug offenders shouldn’t be treated differently. Malaria bed nets are more likely to be used if people pay for them. Seeing inside a jail will deter juvenile delinquents from becoming criminals.

All four statements sound perfectly sensible, don’t they? Unfortunately, randomised trials suggest that all four are perfectly wrong. Let me explain.

In Britain, pilots of social workers in schools showed that everyone liked the idea. Teachers, social workers and students all liked it. Then researchers at Cardiff and Oxford Universities ran a two-year randomised trial across 300 schools to test the impact. The results, reported this year, showed no significant positive impact (Westlake et al 2023). As a result, the planned national rollout has now been scrapped (Molloy 2023).

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
CANBERRA
MONDAY, 28 AUGUST 2023

SUBJECTS: Pat Farmer's Run for the Voice; Indigenous Voice to Parliament. 

*Acknowledgements omitted*

ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR EMPLOYMENT, CHARITIES, COMPETITION AND TREASURY ANDREW LEIGH: Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for being here at the aptly named reconciliation place. My name is Andrew Leigh, the Federal Member for Fenner and it's a real privilege to be here this morning.

We've got the remarkable Rob de Castella former World Marathon record holder and founder of the Indigenous Marathon Foundation.

ROB DE CASTELLA AO: Good morning everyone and thanks Andrew. Pat, you are amazing. Isn’t this man amazing? (Applause) You’re two thirds of the way through the journey. The conviction and the drive and the effort to highlight the significance of this referendum that acknowledges First Nations people and gives them a seat at the table is absolutely amazing.

Joint media release with
The Hon Jim Chalmers
Treasurer

A MORE DYNAMIC AND COMPETITIVE ECONOMY

The Albanese Government is undertaking a review of competition policy settings to help build a more dynamic and productive economy. 

Greater competition is critical for lifting dynamism, productivity and wages growth, putting downward pressure on prices and delivering more choice for Australians dealing with cost-of-living pressures.

Australia’s productivity growth has slowed over the past decade, and reduced competition has contributed to this – with evidence of increased market concentration, a rise in markups and a reduction in dynamism across many parts of the economy.

We need to ensure our competition policy settings are fit for purpose in the face of the big shifts underway in our economy, so we can make the most of digitalisation, the growth in services, the net zero transformation, while supporting our nation’s most vulnerable.