Andrew Leigh

John Bonnett 

28 November 2016

When I ran for Labor Party preselection in 2010, two of the first people whose support I sought out were John and Kathy Bonnett. I remember the conversation in their lounge room. It was gentle and generous and focused on the big issues: the values the Labor Party stood for and whether or not I really believed that music had an important role in the good life. When I left their lounge room, it was with the support of John and Kathy, and without that, I might not be standing here today.

John was born in England and, after migrating to Australia, he served in the Royal Australian Engineers and the Royal Australian Corps of Transport, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He was a true believer and a great friend to many in the Labor Party and served as president of the Gungahlin subbranch in the years shortly after its establishment.

Sadly, John lost his battle with cancer on 18 November, dying age 81. He leaves behind his widow, Kathy, and his children and children-in-law, Kevin and Catherine, Jonathan and Kate. He was the proud grandpa of Tatum, the brother of Christine and Linda. He was loved by his extended families in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the immortal words of Emily Dickinson:

Let no Sunrise' yellow noise

Interrupt this Ground

Vale, John Bonnett.

Ingram Family of Watson 

28 November 2016

I rise to speak on behalf of the Blackfriars Parish in Watson, who have organised this petition to advocate on behalf of the family that they have come to accept as important contributors to their community. It is one of the strengths of our system of representative democracy that private citizens can petition a minister directly when they disagree with the result of a ministerial decision. The organisers of this petition describe a humble and hardworking family that are making a valuable contribution to the disability support sector in our city.

I pay my respects to the Blackfriars parishioners and to the many members of the broader community who have joined their cause on behalf of the Ingram family. I acknowledge the value of this earnest and spontaneous expression of the community's shared values. On behalf of Jacquie Cortese, Carmel Lewis, Lucy Esau and others who have written to me about the Ingram family, and on behalf of all the signatories to this petition, I seek leave to table this document petitioning the House of Representatives regarding permanent residency for Mr Clive Ingram and Family, which was found to be in order by the petitions committee.

The Cost Of Inequality Can't Be Priced In Dollar Terms, Huffington Post, Monday, 28 November 2016

Why should we care about inequality? The starting point is to acknowledge what economics lecturers everywhere teach their first years. Economics is about maximising wellbeing, not money. If one person had all the money in Australia, we’d be just as wealthy, but much less happy.

Globally, there are about one billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. Most of it goes on keeping hunger at bay. But then there are about 1800 people who have more than a billion dollars. For them, more money means a faster jet, fancier jewellery or another holiday home. If you believe that moving a person from $1 a day to $2 a day brings more happiness than giving a billionaire another dollar, then you’ve accepted the idea of diminishing marginal utility of money. There is no better argument for caring about inequality.

Putting numbers around this can be tricky, but an analysis by Lateral Economics finds that to get the same increase in life satisfaction, you either have to give someone on $15,000 another $6000, or someone on $100,000 another $100,000. Lateral Economics estimates that the cost of inequality to national wellbeing is the equivalent of $54 billion, making it a bigger problem than mental illness, obesity or long-term unemployment. 

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

TV INTERVIEW

SKY AM AGENDA WITH KIERAN GILBERT

MONDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 2016

SUBJECT/S: Education funding; Senator Brandis’ shonky deals; Ipsos poll

KIERAN GILBERT: Joining me now the Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh. This Grattan Report, I want to start with your thoughts on that. It seems to me to be a no-brainer – that you can have the same funding envelope, achieve the aims that the Gonski reforms intended without all of the additional costs simply by reining in some of the over-funding of just three per cent of schools?

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Kieran, Pete Goss has done a lot of careful work on this report – it's certainly something that Labor will be engaging with. I had the privilege of seeing a draft copy of the report last week and I think it’s a thoughtful contribution. Obviously we'll work through it methodically. We need to make sure that the schools that need the resources get them, and that was what a good part of the last election was fought over. Labor's plan for funding schools where they needed it versus the Coalition's plan for a $50,000,000,000 corporate tax giveaway. 

GILBERT: But the government's also taking it seriously as we heard from Minister Birmingham there. If you've got some schools with 280 per cent of the funding required per student, surely there needs a re-think in that regard? 

Companies that lie must be hit harder, Herald Sun, 28 November 2016

When it comes to household brands, who do you trust? That’s the question Australians were asked earlier this year as part of a Reader’s Digest survey. The top three were vacuum cleaner manufacturer Dyson, and battery makers Energizer and Duracell. But what’s more interesting is who came in at number four: paint manufacturer, Dulux.

Unfortunately, Dulux’s time atop the trust list might be short-lived. Earlier this month, the company was fined $400,000 by the Federal Court for misleading its customers. Dulux claimed that its outdoor paint could reduce the temperature of a house by up to 10 degrees.

If true, Dulux’s outdoor paint would’ve been a cool product indeed. Unfortunately, as soon as the temperature rose on Dulux, their claims began to peel away. When they couldn’t brush off the criticisms any longer, Dulux admitted that they didn’t have the evidence.  

Alas, Dulux is not the first coat in Australian false advertising. Every year the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission receives 14,000 complaints of misleading and deceptive conduct. The competition watchdog can only take a small share of these complaints to court. The list of companies that have been reprimanded by the competition watchdog or the Federal Court over the last 12 months reads like the ‘who’s who’ of big companies, including Jetstar, Virgin, Arnott’s, Uncle Tobys, Optus, Harvey Norman franchisees, Kogan, Nurofen, Unilever and Volkswagen.

What would modern Australia look like without China? The Australian Financial Review, 25 November 2016

Over recent years, there’s been no shortage of commentary on China from the glass-half-empty brigade. So it’s sometimes useful to ask the basic question: what would Australia be like today had China not opened its economy in 1978?

Based just on merchandise exports, Australia’s economy would be almost 5 per cent smaller. That’s $8,000 less for every Australian household every year.

Prices would be higher. Since 2007, the price of goods we import from China has fallen 20 per cent while the price of goods we produce at home has increased by 20 per cent.

Our universities would be nearly $6 billion poorer each year. They would educate almost 100,000 fewer students.

Our tourism sector would earn $6 billion less each year with 1.2 million fewer visitors visiting our attractions, eating in our restaurants and buying our souvenirs. 

Today the Senate Economics References Committee tabled its report into Malcolm Turnbull’s stuff-up of the 2016 Census.

The report details the damning evidence heard by the Committee about how the ABS was underfunded to meet its objectives for the Census and that current levels of funding for other ABS functions are inadequate.

An effective government could have delivered the 2016 Census, but the chaos and dysfunction at the heart of the Turnbull Government means it mismanages everything it touches.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, CANBERRA

THURSDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2016

Suppose for just a moment that the 10 minutes allocated to this speech was distributed as unequally as Australian wealth. If that was true, I would spend the first six minutes and 13 seconds talking about the richest fifth, then two minutes and three seconds speaking about the next fifth, just a minute and eight seconds speaking about middle Australia, 31 seconds speaking about the second-bottom fifth and the last five seconds speaking about the poorest. In short, it would sound an awful lot like the typical Liberal speech.

This is a government that says it fights for freedoms. But the problem is that the sorts of freedoms they fight for are not the freedoms ordinary Australians care about. They fight for the freedom to stash your cash in a tax haven. The freedom for big banks to avoid a royal commission. The freedom to buy a negatively-geared home for your one-year-old baby. The freedom to tax deduct a $6,000 toaster. The freedom to be named in the Panama papers.

Plutocratic politics is on the rise. We on this side of the House thought it was pretty bad when John Howard said he would not move into the Lodge. Now we have a Prime Minister who is too good to move into Kirribilli House. Yet he lectures us about elites. Let's face it: being lectured about elites by this Prime Minister is like being lectured about sportsmanship by John McEnroe, about abstinence by Ozzy Osbourne, about driver safety by Troy Buswell, or about loyalty by the Member for Cook.

This is a government that never takes responsibility. When Adam and Eve were caught in the Garden of Eden, the Liberals sent around talking points saying it was all Labor's fault and that if only we had supported a company tax cut the serpent would not have got there at all.

AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT HOUSE

WEDNESDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 2016

I rise representing the member for Blaxland, who is Labor's shadow minister for trade and investment and is presently on parental leave. At the outset I note that the opposition were not provided in advance with a copy of the statement or the document that the minister has tabled, so my comments will be of a general nature responding to the minister's speech and discussing the coalition's role in the fall in Australian investment that we have seen over recent years.

Labor acknowledges the benefits to Australia of foreign investment. As Senator Wong recently noted:

“Last year Australians saved just over $363 billion, yet investment in our economy was nearly $425 billion. This was, of course, nothing out of the ordinary. Over the last four decades, the gap between Australia's national savings and investment has averaged around 4 per cent of GDP.”

By tapping into foreign investment Australia is using the savings of other nations in order to finance investment in our own country. Foreign investment ensures that we enjoy higher living standards and that we have a more productive economy and more sustainable industries. To do away with foreign investment would be to see employment decrease, wages fall, prices rise and the choices offered to consumers decrease. 

E&EO TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC NEWSRADIO WITH MARIUS BENSON

WEDNESDAY, 23 NOVEMBER 2016

SUBJECT/S: “Trumponomics”; Trans-Pacific Partnership; Sugar Tax

MARIUS BENSON: Andrew Leigh, good morning.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Good Morning Marius, how are you?

BENSON: I'm well. "Trumponomics" – entirely unknown in practice obviously at this early stage – but people are seeing and Kim Beazley saw Donald Trump as a very left Republican and particularly they are pointing to this proposal to use the government as the agency to revive the American economy and particularly those rust-belt states. Just on that specific proposal – big government spending – what do you think of the virtue of that for the United  States and for Australia?

LEIGH: The United States clearly has infrastructure challenges, particularly around its airports, but the challenge for them naturally is to make sure that they do that within a reasonable budget envelope. Some of the estimates that I've seen from independent experts put the impact of Mr Trump's tax plan as being between $5,000,000,000,000 and $10,000,000,000,000 additional debt. And that would be a big challenge for the United States going forward.

BENSON: I've seen figures of $5,000,000,000,000, in particular when you add together the proposals for big government initiatives in spending and to reduce taxation, and he's promising at the same time to reduce debt?

LEIGH: Naturally you want to make decisions for the long-term, but the challenges for the United States include dealing with climate change, tackling this huge inequality gap which has been rising and which has seen so many Americans suffering real wage losses over recent years. Many business people have this notion that they'd like lower-paid workers and higher-paid consumers. The problem is that when you move from running a business to running an economy, workers and consumers are actually the same thing.

The United States will benefit Australia most if it's engaged with the world. My real fear with Trumponomics is that these threatened tariffs could well see the United States retreat into protectionism, as it did indeed in the 1920s and 30s, with adverse impacts for Australia.