Andrew Leigh

The Real Cost of the Coalition’s Public Service Cuts

Published in The Canberra Times

17 February 2025

When Labor took office, veterans seeking support after serving their country faced an unthinkable situation—a backlog of 42,000 claims, with some veterans waiting over two years just to have their case looked at. This was not an accident. It was the direct result of a decade of deliberate underinvestment in the public service, of staffing caps that starved frontline services, and of an ideological obsession with outsourcing.

Labor set out to fix it. Today, 97 per cent of that backlog has been cleared. Veterans’ claims that once took over 100 days are now allocated within two weeks. But the lesson from this crisis is clear: when governments neglect the public service, Australians suffer. And now, the Coalition wants to take us back.

The Coalition have made their priorities clear. They plan to cut 36,000 public service jobs, slashing the workforce by 20 per cent. This is not speculation. Nationals leader David Littleproud has said outright, “the first thing we’ll do is sack those 36,000 public servants in Canberra.” Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor has dismissed investment in the public service as “unnecessary spending.”

Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025
House of Representatives
13 February 2025

My three boys are now in secondary school or graduated, but this bill certainly brings back memories of the great benefits that they got from their time in early childhood, attending the Acton Early Childhood Centre. I would sometimes cycle, with one of my boys on the back of the bike, to the campus at ANU. It's a lovely spot, surrounded by areas where the kids could walk and where they could enjoy playing. They had little carts and so they could be out and active in the play spaces. There were chickens for the kids to engage with, and there were educators who were dedicated to spending time with the kids—reading to them, singing to them, nurturing them.

Later, we moved our youngest to the Wiradjuri Preschool and Child Care Centre on the campus of the University of Canberra. Their motto is, 'We care, we share, we love to learn.' Wiradjuri had a smaller outdoor space, but they made terrific use of it. They enjoyed taking the kids for walks across the University of Canberra campus. I'm not quite sure what the young students made of these little tackers being taken across the campus, but the educators used the space to their best abilities.

What we really appreciated about Wiradjuri was the way it operated as a kind of teaching hospital model, where those students who were studying early childhood would come in and be mentored by experienced early childhood educators. They had two pictures on the wall, one of Gough Whitlam and one of Vincent Lingiari. They would tell the kids about that wonderful moment when, in the land handback, Whitlam poured a handful of sand into Vincent Lingiari's hand and Vincent so generously, so extraordinarily said, 'We are all mates now.'

Opinion Piece: Clearing up Charity Change

Published in Gladstone Today

13 February 2025

The definition of chutzpah is the guy who spills a drink and then complains that the waiter is taking too long to clean it up. In his column, Colin Boyce complains about the impact of reporting requirements for non-profits. What he fails to tell readers is that it was his party - the LNP - who put in place this requirement.

Before 2021, not-for-profit organisations that self-assess had not been required to report annually to the tax office. In their 2021 budget, the Morrison Government changed that, requiring non-charitable not-for profit organisations that self-assess as income tax exempt to lodge an annual self-review return with the tax office.

Under the change made in 2021 by the LNP, the first self-review return was due between 1 July 2024 and 31 October 2024.

Unfortunately, while the LNP parties changed the law, they left the hard work of implementing it to Labor. It was up to Labor to ensure that the change operated as smoothly as possible.

Under our government, the tax office allocated additional staff to process these annual self-reviews. Lodgement has been extended by five months, to 31 March 2025.

Mandating Cash for Essential Services
House of Representatives
12 February 2025

We've seen a significant change in Australians' spending patterns over the course of the last couple of decades. As the government's consultation paper on the cash mandate makes clear, in 2007, the Reserve Bank estimated that about three-quarters of retail transactions were conducted by cash. In 2022 that number was down to 13 per cent. That's why, on 18 November last year, the Treasurer and the Assistant Treasurer announced a cash mandate for essential services which would ensure an ongoing place for cash in society.

Right now, 94 per cent of businesses accept cash. We know that the risk of cash not being accepted looms large for particular groups of vulnerable Australians. Some of those have been mentioned in this debate: older Australians, migrants, lower income Australians and the unbanked. These are Labor's people. These are the people who typically suffer when the coalition is in office and who Labor has fought to look after in every budget we've brought down since we've come to office. There are around 1.5 million Australians for whom cash makes up over four-fifths of their retail transactions. For them, it's more than a payment method; it is a lifeline.

But cash is also an important backup in instances of natural disasters. It is a form of financial system resilience. The government's consultation paper quotes numbers from the Reserve Bank around the frequency of such outages. They have occurred hundreds or, in some categories of outage, thousands of times per year. While the system has a resiliency rate of over 99 per cent, those outages, when they occur, can be extremely damaging. We've seen, in the instance of floods and fires, the online payment systems struggle to keep pace. It is therefore critical that cash is available.

So the government has announced a mandate to ensure that Australians can continue to pay cash for essential items if they want to, while providing appropriate exemptions for small business. That announcement has been well received by community groups, by the business community and by individuals who prefer to use cash. Cash Welcome campaign spokesperson Jason Bryce said: ‘This is exactly what we have been asking for.’

Whether it's at the supermarket or filling up at the petrol station, when Australians are paying for things they need they will have the comfort of knowing that they can pay in cash.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC MELBOURNE MORNINGS WITH RAFAEL EPSTEIN

Subjects: Labor’s plan to make it easier for first home buyers with HECS-HELP loans to get a mortgage; Comparative Advantage; Free Trade; Tariffs

12 FEBRUARY 2025

Rafael Epstein, Host: Pretty big announcement from the Federal Government today. They're going to let the banks, when they lend you money for a mortgage, they can relax the rules when it comes to the debt you owe for your university degree. So, you might say, woohoo, fantastic. You can borrow more or borrow sooner. Is it financially smart? Andrew Leigh joins us. He speaks for the Albanese government on this.

Andrew is the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment. Andrew Leigh, good morning.

Andrew Leigh: Good morning, Raf. Great to be with you.

Epstein: Is it a good idea?

Leigh: Certainly is. We need to make sure that more Australians get into housing and to the extent that lenders have been taking into account your HECS debt, that can sometimes hold young people back from home ownership. And the fact is HECS is not a debt like any other, it's a debt whose repayments stop if you lose your job. It's proportional to your income. It is a repayment that occurs through an income contingent loan. And so, taking that off the table when lenders are considering how to allocate funding and who to lend to is really important in terms of boosting home ownership rates.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2CC WITH STEPHEN CENATIEMPO

Subjects: Social media and the mental wellbeing of young Australians; Parliamentary comity; Making it easier for schoolchildren to visit Canberra

11 FEBRUARY 2025

Stephen Cenatiempo, Host: Time to talk federal politics with the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury and the Member for Fenner Andrew Leigh. Andrew, good morning.

Andrew Leigh: Good morning, Stephen, great to be with you.

Cenatiempo: Lots to talk about this morning. I want to talk about some research that was released alongside Dr Steve Robson on social media's impact on young Australians. Now there's a bunch of sources that are documenting substantial worsening in the mental well-being of Australians aged 15 to 24. Look, I think this wouldn't be anything that surprises anybody.

Leigh: We wanted to document it as well as we could exactly what we've seen about young people's mental health since the emergence of social media. Now other people have looked at one or two surveys, we wanted to look at every possible bit of data out there.

What we found is consistent and really troubling. A share of young people reporting a mental disorder is up 50 per cent, the rate of self-harm, hospitalisations in young people is up 35 per cent. The suicide rate among young people is up 34 per cent.

The increases in all of those cases are worse for young women than for young men, which is consistent with what we know about social media, that it tends to damage the mental well-being of young women more than it does the mental well-being of young men.

Speech - Australian Public Service 
House of Representatives
10 February 2025

When Labor took office, veterans seeking support faced a backlog of 42,000 claims, with some waiting over two years to have their case looked at. This was the direct result of a decade of public service cuts and outsourcing. Labor set out to fix it. Ninety-seven per cent of the veteran claim backlog has been cleared. Veterans' claims that once took over 100 days are now allocated within two weeks.

But the coalition wants to backtrack. The coalition plan to cut 36,000 public service jobs, reducing the workforce by 20 per cent. This isn't speculation. The Nationals leader has said outright: ‘The first thing we'll do is sack those 36,000 public servants…’. The Shadow Treasurer has dismissed investment in the public service as 'unnecessary spending'.

But what they call ‘unnecessary spending’ are essential services. Public servants process 121 million Centrelink and Medicare claims each year, manage aged care and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, handle border security and protect our nation from cyber threats. Under the coalition, the public service was deliberately hollowed out. A staffing cap forced departments to rely on 54,000 private contractors. Between 2013 and 2022, departmental spending increased 35 per cent, yet public service staffing fell four per cent. The result? Longer wait times, declining service standards and essential government functions outsourced to overpriced consultants.

Randomised Trials: The Seventh Phase of Good Government

OECD International Workshop on Rigorous Impact Evaluation Approaches Including Randomised Controlled Trials

5 February 2025 – (Delivered virtually)

As is customary in Australia, I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, on whose lands I am recording these remarks, and all First Nations people joining this international workshop.

Thank you to our OECD Public Management and budgeting colleagues, Jon Blondal, Andrew Blazey and the team for helping to coordinate this event and offering me the opportunity to provide this opening address. This event is being run by the OECD in collaboration with the Australian Centre for Evaluation in the Department of the Treasury. The Australian Government is delighted to be contributing to global efforts to advocate for better evidence. And we are keen to connect with international endeavours that promote its generation, synthesis and sharing in public policy.

Today, I want to discuss how countries can collaborate to better create and use evidence. This is a substantial reform. Indeed, I argue that randomised trials and better use of evidence isn’t just another worthy public policy tweak. It’s bigger than that. Much bigger. Effectively using evidence to make policy decisions is a public administration reform on par with the biggest changes in good government that humanity has put into place. It is the seventh phase of good government.

Let’s take a quick moment to run through the major milestones in the history of public administration.

Well, they've been out to lunch for three years, and now they want taxpayers to pay for the bosses' lunches. A good economic policy should boost growth, boost fairness and put downward pressure on inflation. But this policy announced by the opposition does none of those things.

We should have got a bit of a hint of the Leader of the Opposition's economic capacity when he ran to roll Malcolm Turnbull back in 2018. It's been a little forgotten since then, but he had a big policy idea then, and that was to smash a big hole in the GST. It was a policy so bad that it was described by Scott Morrison as an 'absolute budget blower' and by Malcolm Turnbull as ‘very expensive’. The Leader of the Opposition's economic chops have been summed up in Lech Blaine's Quarterly Essay, where he wrote as follows:

Dutton is the paperback version of Howard: the same message but less weight. Economics is not his emotional priority, beyond a tribal allegiance to tax loopholes for the rich; penalties for the poor; and hostility to trade unions. This is why he spends most of the time fighting culture wars. His grievances are well practised and sincerely held. But the moment he moves off his preferred turf, Dutton becomes clumsy and unconvincing.

Lech Blaine went on to interview former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who said of the Leader of the Opposition:

"Peter is not an original thinker … I cannot recall him ever having a positive idea in the times when I was with him in government."

If you thought it's just former prime ministers who have that view of the Leader of the Opposition, I would note the words also quoted in that Quarterly Essay by the member for Bass:

"When I go to Canberra and sit in the party room with Peter Dutton, Tony Pasin and Alex Antic, I think: who are these people?"

She goes on to say:

"The Liberal Party has become One Nation lite."

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2CC WITH LEON DELANEY

Subjects: Same Job, Same Pay; Cost of Living Relief; Antisemitism; Taxpayer-funded long lunches for bosses

4 FEBRUARY 2025

Leon Delaney, Host: Today is the first day of sitting for the Federal Parliament this year some say it might be the last sitting session of the year ahead of the election which must occur sometime before mid-May although there are some who are brave enough to predict the Prime Minister might chose to go to the polls a little earlier. Our local member for the seat of Fenner who is also the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment Dr Andrew Leigh, good afternoon.

Andrew Leigh: Good afternoon, Leon, great to be with you.

Delaney: Thanks for joining us first day back at the Parliament today but of course you live here so you managed to quite neatly sidestep the opportunity to meet with disgruntled United Workers Union members at the Canberra airport, who were there to welcome the returning politicians and let them know of their concerns about their employment conditions. In your view, Andrew, is it fair that workers who have worked in a job sometimes for many years should suddenly have to reapply for their own job simply because a contractor has changed? Still the same workers, still doing the same job, not their fault?

Leigh: Well, Leon, certainly the details of that will be a matter for others, but we've aimed to provide more job security. The same job, same pay laws that we put through the Parliament were about ensuring that temporary labour is being used to fill temporary skill shortages, not in order to set up a shadow workforce. That legislation has seen significant pay increases for some working in the mining sector. There have been people who were working alongside others effectively doing the same work, who now have gotten a better deal as a result of those laws.