Andrew Leigh

1 October 2014

I spoke in parliament to offer my condolences for the death of Emeritus Professor Anthony McMichael AO, and recognise his major contribution to our understanding of the links between climate change and human health.

News that the federal government is going back to the drawing board with the budget because it can't get its unfair cuts through the Senate has further increased the focus on Australia's tax revenue. Are we collecting enough tax? And if, as Fairfax has been reporting, some big companies aren't paying their fair share, how do we fix that problem? I joined Janine Perrett on Sky to talk tax and the budget; here's the video.  

Over the past few days, there's been a lot of discussion about how much tax Australian companies pay and whether big firms are paying their fair share. This video from United Voice and the Tax Justice Network gives a great rundown of the facts and figures behind that debate:

The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission has released some new research showing how much time and money Australian charities spend complying with their regulatory requirements. Embarrassingly for Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews, the report reveals his whole rationale for scrapping the commission is completely wrong.

MEDIA RELEASE

RED TAPE? NOT FROM THE CHARITIES COMMISSION

Kevin Andrews’ main argument for scrapping the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission has been blown apart by a new report today from Ernst & Young.

The report finds that the charities commission has an critical role to play in reducing regulatory burden.

Multinational tax avoidance continues to be a hot topic of discussion across Australia, and this morning I joined John Stanley and Garry Linell on 2UE Mornings to talk about how we can tackle this challenge. Here's the transcript:

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

2UE MORNINGS

WEDNESDAY, 1 OCTOBER 2014

SUBJECT/S: Joe Hockey dragging his feet on multinational profit-shifting; New Senate inquiry

JOHN STANLEY: This is the question that we have been talking about for quite some time. This question of tax and the capacity of the Australian government to get some of these companies, particularly these big companies like Apple and Google to pay their tax.

GARRY LINELL: So we’ve got the big G2O meeting in Brisbane coming up later this year and the Abbott Government has pledged to tackle the issue there.  But there are now even more concerns that the Australian tax office is ill equipped to deal with the problems. I mean if you look at the money that’s going missing, it could actually solve all of our budget deficits. Now they are currently in the process of axing about three thousand jobs at the Australian tax office, including most of the international tax experts. Now many of these experts are being poached to work for the big four accounting firms.

STANLEY: Can we just get this straight. We’ve got people, thousands of them who have been trained at public expense in our universities, they’ve gone into the public service, they’ve become tax experts, they work in the tax office, they’re laid off and then they go and work for the big companies that are helping these big international firms avoid their tax.

LINELL: But the best ones are being poached anyway, long before they are being laid off. They are being picked up by both the major companies who want to know how to minimise their tax and the big accounting firms.

STANLEY: Dr Andrew Leigh is the shadow assistant treasurer and he is one the line with us now.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Morning John, morning Gary.

The Tax Justice Network and United Voice has just released new research showing many companies in the ASX 200 have an effective tax rate well below the Australian standard. I joined Jonathan Green on Radio National's Drive program to talk about how we can ensure that companies pay their fair share of tax. Here's the transcript:

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

RADIO NATIONAL DRIVE

MONDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER 2014

SUBJECT/S: multinational profit shifting; corporate tax avoidance

JONATHAN GREEN: This may not come as a shock, but it seems that some of our biggest companies are paying the least amount of tax. The latest evidence comes in a report from the Tax Justice Network, and it’s a report supported by the United Voice union. Dr Andrew Leigh is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer and he joins me now, Dr Leigh – welcome.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Thanks Jonathan.

GREEN: We all know that businesses try to minimise their tax, but this survey suggests that one third of top Australian companies pay less than 10 per cent. Is that extent a surprise?

LEIGH: Certainly there is a challenge with what's known as multinational profit shifting which a lot of developed countries are facing at the moment. It arises because increasingly a lot of production is being globalised and we're increasingly becoming a service economy. So it's easier for accountants to move the nominal country in which production takes place around to a low tax jurisdiction. A lot of countries are now working out how they can crack down on multinational profit shifting.

GREEN: So do we have particular vulnerabilities?

LEIGH: Australia – as a small, open economy – is particularly vulnerable to this. One of the things that Labor did last year, in our final year in office, was for Wayne Swan and David Bradbury to sit down and put together a multi-billion dollar package of measures to crack down on multinational profit shifting. What was disappointing to me was that when the Coalition came to office, they didn't say 'well, what's the next thing we can do beyond this?' Instead, they began to wind it back. So they shrunk the size of that package by $1 billion, effectively losing $1 billion of revenue which went back to multinationals in the form of extra tax breaks. 

With the release of a new report from the Tax Justice Network showing that some companies in the ASX200 have an effective tax rate of 10 per cent or less, I joined Sky's AM Agenda to talk about what we can do to tackle multinational tax avoidance. Here's the clip:

My father, Michael Leigh, has been working on Malaysia for the past half-century. In a series of articles for the New Straits Times, he's delved into recently declassified UK diplomatic cables to explore the intrigues behind Malaysia's formation. The articles are here, and they're well worth reading for anyone interested in this important country.

This week I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at the OECD-NBER Conference on Productivity Growth and Innovation in the Long Run in Paris. My theme was the relationship between inequality and social mobility; here's the details.

DOES TOO MUCH INEQUALITY PREVENT SOCIAL MOBILITY?

 OECD, PARIS

FRIDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER 2014

For much of the time we’ve been on the planet, humans have led a static existence. We lived where our parents lived. We did the jobs our parents did. The chances of moving up or down the ladder were limited.

 Indeed, that era was so recent that most of us still carry the mark of it. Most Anglo-Saxon surnames denote occupations (Smith, Archer, Miller) or places (Marsh, Hill, Lake), reflecting a time when few left their village or rose above their station.

 There’s nothing wrong with living in the same town as your parents, or following them into the same career. But for many of our forebears, this wasn’t a choice: it was a necessity. As recently as a few centuries ago, virtually everyone on the planet was consigned to a caste system.

 The lack of mobility wasn’t just unfair – it was extraordinarily inefficient. Imagine how many talented youngsters from poor backgrounds lived and died without a chance to use their skills. How many potential Mozarts were lost because they never got to hold an instrument? How many would-be Darwins were denied a decent schooling? How many budding Bill Gateses languished because they couldn’t get financial backing for their entrepreneurial idea?

Curtin University has just released the most comprehensive study of the Australian not-for-profit sector ever. The research tells us plenty that is useful about how the sector works. But if Kevin Andrews gets his way in scrapping the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, we'll lose that opportunity again.

MEDIA RELEASE

CHARITIES COMMISSION REVEALS MORE ABOUT NOT-FOR-PROFITS THAN EVER BEFORE

Thanks to the creation of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, we now know that the charity sector generates income of around $100 billion a year and employs over 900,000 Australians.

These findings are detailed in the first comprehensive report on what makes Australian charities tick, released today by Curtin University.

The report was made possible because in 2013 the charities commission began collecting Annual Information Statements from every registered not-for-profit detailing their finances and operations.