Andrew Leigh

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

WEDNESDAY, 11 AUGUST 2021

I rise in continuation on the Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 2) Bill 2021. Mr Speaker, if you hear the Morrison government speak about charities, you'd think there is an outbreak of lawlessness among Australia's charities, yet the facts speak otherwise. Over the past 3½ years, the charities commissioner has deregistered just two of the nation's 59,000 charities for breaking the law in pursuit of activist goals. That means the annual chance of a charity being deregistered for illegal activism is about 10 in a million, which is about the same as the chance that a typical Australian will commit a murder. But facts have never stood in the way of the Liberals' crackdown on charitable activism.

Their latest proposal would go further than the current law, extending the ability of the charities commissioner to deregister a charity for a summary offence or because the charities commissioner anticipates that the organisation will commit a summary offence.

A summary offence might include blocking a footpath, trespassing or even failing to close a gate on a private property, and deregistration can occur because a charity promotes an event—for example, hands out flyers about it or simply puts it on their Facebook page.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

2SM MARCUS PAUL IN THE MORNING

TUESDAY, 10 AUGUST 2021

SUBJECTS: The Government pursuing pensioners but not billionaires for JobKeeper repayments; the Government’s vaccine failures; Scott Morrison leads the most anti-university government in Australia’s history; the Government’s lack of action on climate change.

MARCUS PAUL, HOST: All right, Andrew Leigh, Federal Member for Fenner. Good morning to you, Andrew.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES: Good morning, Marcus. Great to be with you.

PAUL: All right, look, I know there's a couple of other things you want to talk about, but I don't want to say I told you so, but it's almost reminiscent of RoboDebt. You have been working extremely hard. We don't call you #JobKeeper warrior for nothing. You've tried to call back tens of millions of dollars from big business that have done well out of the pandemic. We don't criticise them for putting their hand out at first, but once they've paid handsome dividends and made a profit and all the rest of it they should give our money back, us taxpayers. Most of the money is borrowed anyway, but they haven't, and they're not being forced to by the Federal Government, by the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, in particular. But when it comes to average income earners, people who've done the right thing, that obviously did receive JobKeeper, some of them a little bit too much, after they've done the right thing and put their tax returns in, they now have a debt and they're being chased for it - $32 million worth. Andrew, why are we chasing mums and dads and small-income, average-income earners and not big business?

LEIGH: Extraordinary double standard isn't it, Marcus? You'd think that the Government would, as its first port of call, look at those multinationals who've received JobKeeper and gotten rising earnings. Instead, they always seem to look to the little guy. The Government that developed RoboDebt, the illegal scheme that cost them a massive court settlement; the Government that wanted to put in place automatic assessments for people on the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Yet again, every time they look to raise money for the budget it's raising it from the most vulnerable rather than from the most affluent.

Events in India are devastating to watch, and my heart goes out to everyone in the Indian community in Canberra and around the country.

As I have been talking with community representatives over the past weeks, I have been struck by their determination to do what they could to improve the situation, and their determination that Australia should do the same.

AMERICA, LEARN FROM AUSTRALIA’S AGONY: HOW ONE COUNTRY REACTED TO ITS WORST-EVER GUN MASSACRE 25 YEARS AGO

The New York Daily News, 27 April 2021

A quarter of a century ago, on April 28-29, 1996, a lone gunman murdered 35 Australians at the historic site of Port Arthur in Tasmania. At the time, Australia’s population was 18 million, so as a share of the population, the death toll was the equivalent of a shooting spree in the United States today costing more than 600 lives.

AS PORT ARTHUR ANNIVERSARY APPROACHES, LET US NEVER SPEAK HIS NAME

The Age, 26 April 2021

A quarter of a century ago this Wednesday, a man shot Zoe Hall in Port Arthur, Tasmania. She’d been assigned as my mentor at the law firm where we worked. Zoe was a talented lawyer and a generous soul. She would be 53 today, and I imagine her with a loving family and admiring colleagues.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2SM MARCUS PAUL IN THE MORNING
TUESDAY, 13 APRIL 2021

SUBJECTS: Housing affordability; superannuation; JobKeeper; Canberra Marathon.

MARCUS PAUL, HOST: Now, on JobKeeper and all those payments, our #JobKeeperWarrior is Andrew Leigh MP. Good morning to you, Andrew.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR TREASURY AND CHARITIES:: Good morning, Marcus. Great to be with you.

PAUL: Thank you, mate. I just want to, before we get into it, I just want to read you something. Aspiring homeowners now need a whopping six-figure deposit to purchase a property, according to a new study. Finders First Home Buyers Report 2021, which surveyed 1,028 first home buyers found 11 percent, Andrew, required more than a decade to scrape their deposit together. This staggering result followed new Australian Bureau of Stats data that showed the average deposit needed to secure a mortgage was — I hope you’re sitting down mate —  $106,743. $106,743. That is an increase of 16 percent since January 2019. The report also found the average first home buyer put down 20 per cent of the purchase price as a deposit. But if you're saving for a decade, and you need on average $106,000 just to secure a property, does that not tell us that housing affordability is at an all-time low?

LEIGH: Sure does, Marcus, and home ownership is lowest it's been in a couple of generations. We've seen a drop right across the board, but particularly for 20- and 30-somethings. The poorest 20- or 30-somethings, 63 percent of them used to own their homes in the early 1980s. Now it's only 23 percent of that group owns their homes. The average house used to take six years to save for a deposit. Now, it takes 10 years to save for a deposit. So, we've got a real problem in terms of people being able to make it into the housing market. 

More and more of our homes are owned by fewer and fewer people. Increasingly, people are being forced into lifetime renting.

MATTER OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 12 FEBRUARY 2019

Last December I was contacted by the parents of a young man in my electorate who was given a $40,000 loan by one of the big four banks. At the time, he was sleeping in his car. He had precarious employment. According to his parents, ‘his understanding of finance and law was minimal’. He now finds himself hounded by a debt agency for that $40,000.