Andrew Leigh

One of the hottest topics in my shadow portfolios at the moment is the Harper review of competition policy. It's the first time Australia has taken an in-depth look at competition issues since the Hilmer review of the 1980s, and the recently-released interim report has a lot of interesting things to say about how we can make competition work for Australian consumers.I've jotted down some thoughts on what the report's strengths and weaknesses are in an opinion piece for Business Spectator.

Harper review sets the right course, Business Spectator, 16 October

When the Whitlam Labor government introduced the Trade Practices Act in 1974, it chose to do something rather novel for the time. It put consumers front and centre in the discussion.

Whitlam and his Attorney-General, Lionel Murphy, believed that the ultimate goal of competition was to make goods and services more accessible for Australian consumers. The old days of regulation as a protection racket for inefficient firms and near-monopolies were over

Through further competition reforms under the Hawke and Keating governments, the first question and fundamental test remained the same: how can policy reform help families doing their weekly grocery shop or paying their utility bills get a better deal?

This emphasis on consumers is a welcome feature of the interim report from the Competition Policy Review panel led by Professor Ian Harper. The panel has taken the view that competition policy should strive to make markets work in the long-term interests of Australia’s shoppers, users and buyers.

During the last sitting of Parliament, the Senate voted to establish an inquiry into corporate tax avoidance and multinational profit shifting. The Senate's Economics Committee has now kicked off work on this; you can make a submission any time until 2 February 2015.

MEDIA RELEASE

CORPORATE TAX INQUIRY GETS UNDERWAY

The Senate inquiry into corporate tax avoidance has kicked off today by asking 40 ASX-listed companies to explain the taxes they pay.

This week, committee chairman Senator Sam Dastyari has written to a range of major firms which have been alleged to pay as little as 10 cents in the dollar on their local earnings.

They have been asked to explain why their effective tax rate is so far below the 30 per cent company tax rate paid by other Australian firms.

Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh said cracking down on corporate tax avoidance is fundamentally about creating a level playing field for all Australian businesses.

Equal to our core: making the case for egalitarianism as Australia’s national value 

Speech at the launch of the Bachelor of Economics (Advanced)

University of Adelaide

14 October 2014

 

 

 

I could not be more delighted to be with you this evening on this terrific occasion, the launch of the university’s Bachelor of Economics (Advanced) degree.

I know your degree will be one of only two available in Australia – and as the other one is being offered in Melbourne, I’m serenely confident yours will be the better. When I was Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister Gillard, I am sure she once told me she was glad to have had the dual benefit of a Melbourne degree and an Adelaide education. 

Or perhaps I made that up. Never mind. I read in the publicity that the degree will be both a “pathway” to Honours and a “springboard” into leadership…I suppose as long as there’s a “ladder of opportunity” at the end of the “pathway” providing access up to the “springboard” it’ll all work just fine.

I kicked off the week by joining Phillip Clarke and Senator Zed Seselja on 666 ABC's Political Panel. Here's the transcript:

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC 666 CANBERRA

MONDAY, 13 OCTOBER 2014

SUBJECT/S: ACOSS poverty report; national curriculum; national security legislation

PHILIP CLARK: Welcome to our federal political panel. Senator Zed Seselja, ACT Liberal Senator joins me in the studio. Morning Zed.

ZED SESELJA, SENATOR FOR THE ACT: Good morning.

CLARK: And Andrew Leigh, the Labor member for Fraser and Shadow Assistant Treasurer here in the studio as well. How are you?

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Very well.

CLARK: Just back on that ACOSS report – it’s not good news, is it? It suggests that on the trendline, poverty in Australia is increasing. Something like two-and-a-half million people, 1 in 6 children, are struggling to fulfil basic needs. One third of children in single parent households live below the poverty line, more than 600,000 children in total. We're heading, as ACOSS suggests, in the wrong direction. What are we doing wrong, Senator?

SESELJA: Well look, I'm still getting across these figures, these I think are 2012 figures. But I think it's always concerning if we're seeing Australians who are doing it tough. We want to have a range of policies that will help people to get out of poverty, help people to better themselves, give them the safety need they need. But fundamentally, to encourage people to have productive work if that's possible, and where that's not possible, to get whatever kind of assistance they can. These are challenging areas of policy; this isn't an issue for one government or one side of politics.

CLARK: Of course not, but it seems to suggest things are getting worse not better?

SESELJA: I think it often depends, and without going into all the detail that I haven't pursued yet, it often depends on exactly how you look at the various figures. I think that there's no doubt that many Australians are doing it tough. And we don't want to see that. We want to see people improving their life, we want to see people at least having the basics of life and certainly going well beyond that where it is possible.

CLARK: There seem to be two things here, Andrew Leigh: there's income support – and in that sense I mean the welfare system – and there's also the issue of whether our economy is being resilient and flexible enough to provide jobs for people. After all, for most people, a job is the difference between poverty and being able to meet your bills. Most people are a month away from poverty in that sense.

LEIGH: You're right about that Philip, it's more true in Australia than most developed countries. Unemployment is a reasonable predictor of poverty in most countries but especially so in Australia. We do a better job than many developed countries in ensuring that we don't have a working poor. Over the last generation we've seen a rising gap between battlers and billionaires and this is seen in the data on relative poverty. So just as the gap between the middle and the top distribution has increased, so the gap between the middle and the bottom distribution has increased as well. I'm really concerned about it and particularly in the context in which we've had a budget brought down which is redistributing resources from the most vulnerable to the most affluent. There’s been a whole host of cuts to supports for the vulnerable but then giveaways for those at the top, such as a gold-plated parental leave scheme. This report really comes at an important time for Australia. We’re at a crossroad on inequality, and we have to work out whether we stay true to our egalitarian traditions.

The government might prefer talking about issues other than the budget, but we can't let them off the hook that easily. In today's Hobart Mercury, I've taken a look at how two particular budget measures favour the lucky at the expense of creating opportunity for all.

Government has an obligation to society's unlucky, Hobart Mercury, 13 October

In the pantheon of Australian sport, no-one sits higher than Don Bradman. Like Babe Ruth in baseball and Wayne Gretzky in ice hockey, Bradman dominated cricket like no other player.

And yet, even for Bradman, luck played a role.

In international cricket, half of all batsmen make their debut at home, and half abroad. That means half get to play their first international test on a familiar wicket, while the other half must confront an unknown one.

That difference matters: a cricketer who makes his debut at home averages one-third more runs than one who happens to play his first match overseas.  What’s more, the scoring differential is persistent: a batsman who debuts at home will go on to have a career batting average that is one-fifth larger than a player who walks out on a foreign wicket. 

A lot of Australia's economic and financial forecasting relies on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So it's worrying to see what's happening at the bureau under Joe Hockey's watch.

MEDIA RELEASE

ABS TURBULENCE COMES FROM TREASURER'S NEGLECT

The troubles at the Australian Bureau of Statistics are a direct result of the Abbott Government’s decision to hack millions from its budget, while also leaving the bureau languishing without a permanent head for almost a year now.

Comparing the Coalition’s May budget with Labor’s 2013-14 numbers shows it has slashed the bureau’s funding by $62 million over the next four years. 

There has been an explosion of interest in behavioural economics over the past few years, and many interesting studies have shed new light on the often-irrational nature of human decision-making. I was fortunate enough to be invited along to the Grattan Institute in Melbourne to discuss how the insights of behavioural economics can help guide public policymaking. 

‘WHAT ROLE FOR BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS IN PUBLIC POLICY?’

ADDRESS TO THE GRATTAN INSTITUTE 

WEDNESDAY, 8 OCTOBER 2014 

MELBOURNE

While I was in graduate school, two of my classmates, Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier, carried out a study on gym visits. They obtained data from three Boston gyms, and analysed the attendance patterns of members.

Dividing annual fees by the number of visits, they found that the typical gym member spent $17 per visit, even although casual visits cost only $10. In total, the average member loses $600 compared with if they had just paid as a casual. The title of the paper? ‘Paying not to go to the gym’.

It's really disappointing to hear that the Abbott Government is considering making further cuts to Australia's aid budget after already slashing $7.6 billion from it in the May budget. The government's approach is especially galling when there's clear evidence Australians support foreign aid and want to see us do our bit in the region.

Foreign aid cuts are counter to Australian generosity, Canberra Times, 8 October

In the beachside town of Tibar, in Timor-Leste’s Liquiçá District, there is a little community school where local children come each day to learn reading and writing. For a long time, the school’s staff taught only from a couple of outdated textbooks, while the children ground stubs of chalk down to nothing writing on battered slates.

That changed in 2010 when an Australian Government aid program began providing Tibar’s school with brand new textbooks, reading tools and learning materials. For the first time, the school could offer its students an education that fed and inspired their young minds.

Following news that the Abbott Government has finally discovered the connection between international economic conditions and the state of the Australian budget, I joined Peter Van Onselen's show on Sky to talk about what it should do next. Here's the clip:  

For the past few months, the Abbott Government has been seeking feedback on its plans to abolish to Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission. Despite promising to make this feedback public by September, there's still no sign of Minister Kevin Andrews releasing it. So the question is:

WHAT IS KEVIN ANDREWS KEEPING FROM US?

MEDIA RELEASE

Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews is keeping us all in the dark about how his plans for replacing the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission have been received by the sector.

In July the government released an options paper which recommended that the dedicated charities commission be replaced by a mix of oversight from the Australian Tax Office and self-reporting by not-for-profits.

Minister Andrews called for public submissions responding to this paper, and his department also held 10 forums around Australia for representatives of the charity sector.

The department promised to publish the findings from this consultation process on its website in September. Yet here we are in the second week of October and there is still no sign of the submissions being released.

Could it be that the Minister is holding back the submissions because they rubbish his idea of scrapping an agency which is making life easier for charities and increasing transparency across the not-for-profit sector?