Andrew Leigh

I called today for Canberrans to 'dob in a Black Spot'.

MEDIA RELEASE

30 May 2012

Andrew Leigh MP
Federal Member for Fraser

IDENTIFYING BLACK SPOTS IN THE ACT

Each year, the ACT Black Spot consultative panel allocates over $1 million of Australian Government funding to make local roads safer. Safety measures include better line markings, upgraded traffic signals and improved lighting.

Chair of the ACT Black Spots Consultative Panel, Andrew Leigh, is again calling for Canberrans to suggest hazardous locations that require attention.

‘Our local drivers are best placed to identify dangerous spots on ACT roads,’ said Dr Leigh. ‘With your help, we can improve the conditions and safety of our roads and help protect the lives of our drivers.’

‘The Black Spot program has funded over eighty projects in Canberra to date, including some that have been nominated by the community. By working with the local community through taking site suggestions, these achievements will continue.’

To qualify for inclusion under the program, a location must have suffered at least one traffic accident. Work is only funded under the program if the benefits (in reduced deaths, injuries and property damage) are at least twice as large as the costs of doing the work.

Nominations may be emailed to andrew.leigh.mp^@^aph.gov.au, or by telephoning Andrew Leigh on 6247 4396. For consideration in the 2013-14 Black Spots funding round, nominations must be sent by the end of June.

Volunteering is a strong tradition in Australia, nowhere more so than in the ACT. More than 6 million Australians volunteer each year - about 36% of the population. This number has grown significantly in the last decade and I hope we can raise it again this year.

To boost youth volunteering in our communities, the Gillard Labor Government is calling on budding young film makers aged 15 to under 25 to enter the volunteering video competition for young people.

Entrants are asked to create a video that will promote ways for young people to be involved in their community and capture the enjoyment, fun, and social interaction that volunteering brings.

The theme for this competition is "Your Passion, Our Nation. Volunteer Now!"

The competition closes 5pm on Sunday 22 July.

Find out more at the competition website.

This Sunday is the 20th anniversary of the High Court's Mabo judgment. Because parliament is sitting, I won't be able to attend Mabo Day celebrations being organised tonight by the ACT Torres Strait Islanders Corporation at the National Museum of Australia. But here's the statement I've prepared to be read out.

Statement from Andrew Leigh, Federal Member for Fraser

Born on Murray Island one can only imagine what it would have been like to witnesses the moment Eddie Koiki Mabo realised that his land was owned by the Crown and not him and his people.

Noel Loos and Henry Reynolds recall of that moment in 1974: “Koiki was surprised and shocked”. They remember him saying “No way, it’s not theirs. It’s ours”.

From that moment to the High Court decision of June 3^rd 1992, Eddie Mabo showed us that understanding is the responsibility of all Australians.

That an appreciation and understanding of Indigenous Australia, its history, culture and challenges is not an optional part of being Australian. It is essential to who we are.

Eddie Mabo Day helps further the understanding that is critical to reconciliation, through acknowledging and celebrating all Indigenous Australians and their contribution to our nation.

It is an opportunity to celebrate the life of a great Australian, to remember a man of extraordinary vision, warmth and intelligence. It encourages us to reflect upon a national identity with Aboriginality as a central and distinguishing theme.

With Indigenous stories taking their place as fundamental parts of the Australian story.

My apologies for not being able to be with you today to celebrate the remarkable contribution and life of Eddie Koiki Mabo.

The Australian Women’s Coalition will be running a series of workshops for young women aged 18-30, who live or work in the ACT region.

The workshops are designed to provide young women with the opportunity to develop transformation projects focusing issues that they most care about. The workshops are particularly aimed at reaching young women from migrant and refugee communities.

Funded by the Australian Government Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the SHOUT! workshops are free and will run from April 2012 to March 2013.

Find out more about the AWC and about the new SHOUT! workshops at: www.awcaus.org.au

In today's Drum, I have an op-ed with Senator Lisa Singh.

Malaysia Trade Deal: In Praise of Openness, The Drum, 29 May 2012

The rise of Asia is often seen as the rise of Asia’s big nations, like India and China. But even taking these two giants out of the equation, Asia’s share of middle class consumption is expected to outstrip that of the United States and the European Union combined by the middle of this century. A growing Asian middle class means a massive increase in consumption and spending on imported goods and services. Those goods and services include the kind of things that Australians produce and expect: a wide range of yummy food; high-quality education; and elaborately transformed manufactures.

As well as providing a market for our exports, the rise of Asia has also benefited Australian consumers. The past 20 years have seen real prices for imported furniture, handbags, clothes, shoes and medical products roughly halved. Real prices of computers, telephones and other electrical goods have fallen by about two-thirds.

A generation ago, Australians missed out on this because of high tariff walls. As primary school children growing up in the 1970s, we both recall our parents having to pay large sums for our school shoes. Back then, tariffs had the effect of doubling the price of imported shoes. Today, thanks to technology and trade, Aldi sells school shoes starting at $6.49. Indeed, market-opening has helped keep prices low across the board. From 1950-85, inflation averaged 6.7 percent. Since then, it has averaged just 3.7 percent.

Australia is perfectly positioned to be part of Asia’s growth. Working with our neighbours to the north, Australia can both sow the seeds of economic and social progress in Asia, and reap the benefits of new markets and better relations. Last year, the Prime Minister asked Ken Henry to head a review of Australia’s place in the Asian Century. While that White Paper isn’t due until July, the Australian Government continues to improve our engagement with the region.

On May 22, Trade Minister Craig Emerson signed the Malaysia-Australian Free Trade Agreement (MAFTA). Malaysia is already Australia’s tenth largest trading partner. MAFTA is about deepening that engagement, and removing the barriers to doing business and building relationships between the two countries.

More and more, Australians and Malaysians are working together. Australian companies operate in Malaysia, and Malaysians seek the skills of our business leaders and professionals. MAFTA increases the number of Australians allowed to live and work in a range of sectors, like finance to architecture, in Malaysia and allows them to stay for longer periods.

This is especially important for Australian higher education institutions who have facilities in Malaysia, like Monash University and Curtin University. Australian service providers will now be able to increase their ownership in education services to 70 percent by 2015, moving to 100 per cent by 2015. Malaysia has also raised the limit on Australian lecturers at a single institution from 20 to 30 percent, meaning that it’s easier and more profitable to take the expertise of our higher education sector to Malaysia. MAFTA will strengthen ecotourism accreditation used by Australian tourists, while Malaysia will work with our scientists to the carbon emissions of the region. While economists have sometimes criticised bilateral free trade agreements for diverting rather than boosting trade, this one has been crafted with an eye to our long-term goal of free trade in the Asia-Pacific.

Opening international markets has long been an Australian aspiration. In the 1980s, we established the Cairns Group of agricultural free-trading nations, and in the 1990s, we set up the APEC Leaders’ Meetings. Under Labor Governments, Australia has had a strong preference for multilateral free trade agreements. But with the Doha negotiations at the World Trade Organisation having stalled, Australia has championed regional trade freedom.

MAFTA is one part of that. The other is the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A stepping stone to the APEC goal of a free trade area across the Asia Pacific, the Trans-Pacific Partnership allows other countries to ‘bolt on’ at a later date.

As an island nation, Australia depends on trade for our prosperity. By reducing our tariffs, we help our consumers. By improving market access into Asia, we boost wages and create jobs. The Malaysian-Australian agreement is a downpayment on the opportunities that will flow to Australia in the Asian Century.

Andrew Leigh is the Member for Fraser. Lisa Singh is Senator for Tasmania.

I spoke today on a private member's motion, moved by Adam Bandt, to raise the level of Newstart by $50 per week.

Private Member's Motion - Adam Bandt
28 May 2012

The issue of movement from welfare into work is one that has long concerned me. It was the reason that I chose 12 years ago to study overseas, researching on the topic of poverty and inequality, looking at the issue of how to move people from welfare into work and the relative effectiveness of interventions such as government jobs, wage subsidies and training programs.

It is important that we make that transition from welfare into work as straightforward as possible, particularly for families with children. We know that there are intergenerational cycles of joblessness and we know that high-quality programs that increase employment are at the core of a civilised society.

The Henry Review, in approaching the issue of income support payments, wrote of the iron triangle of means testing. The triangle was payment adequacy, program affordability and the incentive for self-support. In the Henry Review a great deal of attention was given to the effective marginal tax rates faced by income support recipients. It was an issue that Labor focused on a great deal while in opposition. The Treasurer and the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs spent many years focusing on the issue of high effective marginal tax rates. Thanks to much of the advocacy from Labor in opposition, those effective marginal tax rates have been decreased.

Today we are debating the appropriate level of the Newstart allowance. I do not think any of us in this House would argue that the current level of Newstart is generous. But the Henry Review argued that there ought to be a difference between levels of pensions and levels of what were called 'participation payments', of which Newstart is one. The Henry review argued for restructuring income support into three categories: a pension category, a participation category and a student category. It argued that pensions would be paid at the highest rate in recognition that people eligible for them are likely to rely on them fully for a long time. Participation payments would be paid at a lower rate to maintain incentives to work, the Henry Review argued. The Henry Review further argued that while there ought to be a difference between the levels of those payments, the same indexation levels ought to apply to all three sets of payments.

The challenge for those of us in considering a question like the level of Newstart payments is twofold. The first is that, as I read it, the bulk of the evidence suggests that higher unemployment benefits have the effect of decreasing transitions from income support into work. This effect is not as large as some have claimed and there are theoretical reasons where you might think it could go the other way—for example, if someone is having difficulty affording the costs of work. But the bulk of economic evidence—and I tend to go where the evidence tells me—papers such as Peter Fredriksson and Martin Söderström’s and the work of Anthony Atkinson and John Micklewright, seems to go in that direction. At the same time, we know that while we would like the Newstart payment to be a temporary payment, a significant number of Australians are on the Newstart payment for long periods of time. The Henry Review reported around one-quarter of Newstart recipients have been continuously on the payment for over two years. The issue of adequacy is therefore a large challenge.

If we had substantially more money in the budget, I would see no reason to oppose this measure. I would ideally like to be in a position in which we had the waves of tax revenue that were flooding into this country in mining boom mark I. But we are not in that situation at the moment and so worthy measures, such as this one, sometimes do not get supported.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/kNh9960f4rY

I put out a media release today with my ACT colleagues on the pension increases that are being provided as part of our carbon pricing plan.

MEDIA RELEASE

SENATOR KATE LUNDY
Senator for the ACT

GAI BRODTMANN MP
Member for Canberra

ANDREW LEIGH MP
Member for Fraser

Extra cash for thousands of local pensioners

Thousands of Canberra pensioners are set to get extra support to help them make ends meet, with $6.6 million worth of new cash payments hitting local households from today.

ACT Senator Kate Lundy said more than 30,100 pensioners in the ACT would receive a cash payment over the coming weeks, ahead of the introduction of the carbon price on 1 July.

“All full and part pensioners in the ACT will receive a lump sum payment of $250 for singles and $380 for couples combined.

“This extra cash will go straight into pensioners’ bank accounts to help them keep on top of their bills,” Senator Lundy said.

Member for Canberra, Gai Brodtmann said local pensioners will get another boost next year, with an ongoing increase to their fortnightly payments from March.

“In total, local pensioners will get about $338 extra a year for singles and $510 extra a year for couples combined.

“As part of our Household Assistance Package, we’re taking extra care to make sure pensioners have the support they need to keep up with the cost of living,” Ms Brodtmann said.

Member for Fraser, Andrew Leigh said about 93 per cent of all pensioner households will be at least 20 per cent better off because of these new payments.

“In fact, many pensioners will end up coming out ahead after the carbon price starts on 1 July.

“We get how tough it is for pensioners, which is why we’ve already delivered historic increases to the pension, as well as delivering this extra boost right now.

“And at a morning team in Amaroo on the weekend, Canberra pensioners spoke directly with Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin, and heard first-hand how they will benefit from the introduction of a carbon price,” said Dr Leigh.

To find out more by visit australia.gov.au/householdassistance or call 132 300







ELECTORATE BREAKDOWN OF PENSIONERS RECEIVING HOUSEHOLD ASSISTANCE PAYMENTS FROM TOMORROW

Electorate	Pensioners	Total of payments (rounded)
Canberra	15,000	$3,317,402
Fraser	15,100	$3,339,518
TOTAL	30,100	$6,656,920

I spoke in parliament today about Canberra hosting the Girl Guides' regional jamboree - for the first time in 47 years.

Girl Guides Jamboree
24 May 2012

On 16 April I attended the Girl Guides NSW & ACT Jamboree held at Exhibition Park, with the member for Canberra Gai Brodtmann, and Trudy McIntosh, an intern in my office. There were over 550 guides aged between 10 and 17 who pitched their tents for a week of fun-filled activities and leadership workshops. This was the first jamboree to be held in Canberra since 1966. Margaret Norris, a long-time girl guide, attended the opening night's celebrations and shared with the girls her experiences. Margaret had attended the first camp in Canberra in 1966 and her reflections were insightful.

There were Canberra girl guides from four local districts—Ginninderra, Gungahlin, Black Mountain and Murrungundie—who met with others from 261 districts across New South Wales and regions surrounding the ACT, including Queanbeyan, Goulburn, Yass and Bega. Kylie Gray, a guide leader staying in the camp all week, was dressed in a completely orange outfit, and brought along her polished tea set to make the girls feel more at home. Dressed in an orange feather boa, hat and orange overalls, she even had an orange camera to document the occasion.

Girl Guides NSW & ACT State Commissioner Belinda Allen spoke on the ability of guides to foster leadership skills. Youth leader Sam Chenney from Port Macquarie spoke of her love of Girl Guides and said that the best decision her mum ever made was to let her join the Girl Guides, given that she has had so many fantastic opportunities and met lifelong friends.

My review essay in Inside Story discusses offending rates and incarceration in Australia and the United States.

Crimes and Punishments
Inside Story, 24 May 2012

WITH his casual dress sense, ready laugh and broad vowels, Bruce Western immediately strikes you as the expatriate Queenslander he is. The Harvard-based sociologist is also one of the leading scholars of crime in the United States, and a few years ago he presented a seminar about his research at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney.

Now, I’ve attended hundreds of conferences and academic seminars, and I don’t recall ever gasping out loud. But I did when Western’s PowerPoint presentation began reeling through the following facts.

US jails currently hold over two million people, more than 1 per cent of the adult population. Among men aged twenty to thirty-four who didn’t complete high school, the imprisonment rate is a jaw-dropping 12 per cent for whites and 37 per cent for blacks. That’s right – 37 per cent of young, black high school dropouts are currently behind bars.

But it gets worse, because that’s just the proportion behind bars on any given day. By the time black high school dropouts reach their mid thirties, Western estimates that 69 per cent of them will have been imprisoned. In other words, if you’re a black man who doesn’t finish high school, the chances are two-in-three that you’ll see the inside of a prison cell.

As Western points out, one of the things that a high incarceration rate does is to make other statistics look good. For example, official employment surveys exclude the prison population. If the official statistics counted prisoners, then the employment rate among young black dropouts would fall from 40 per cent to 25 per cent. A similar effect is likely to show up in other measures, such as income inequality and ill health. Because numbers often drive policy, this kind of invisible disadvantage can readily be missed in public debates.

Another feature of a persistently high incarceration rate is its intergenerational impact. In the United States today, 2 per cent of white children have a parent in jail. Among African-American children, the figure is 11 per cent. One-in-ten black children – 1.2 million kids – have a parent behind bars.

The extraordinary thing about this pattern is that while more people are being sent to jail, fewer people are committing crimes. From 1960 to 1990, the US homicide rate doubled. From 1990 to 2010, it halved. Most other violent and property crimes have followed a similar trajectory. So with the US murder rate lower than at any other time in the past generation, the incarceration rate is at an all-time high. In fact, while the US murder rate has halved over the past twenty years, the incarceration rate has doubled.

Over recent years, a number of good books have analysed the interplay of factors that have brought the United States to this point. Economists like Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs have pointed to the stagnation of middle-class wages as proof that the American dream is in danger of slipping away. Sociologists and criminologists like Bruce Western and Mark Kleiman have argued that US criminal justice policies need to be fundamentally rethought. And political scientists like Larry Bartels and Jacob Hacker have laid the blame at the feet of ideological polarisation, as the Republicans moved sharply to the right.

STILL, none of those authors has actually gone quite as far as James Gilligan’s Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others. Gilligan has written a book about how Republicans kill people. Specifically, Gilligan shows that when a Republican president occupies the White House, the homicide and suicide rates tend to rise. Conversely, when the president is a Democrat, the homicide and suicide rates tend to fall. He also shows that the same pattern holds across the United States: states that have traditionally voted Republican tend to have higher homicide and suicide rates than those that have traditionally voted Democratic.

At this point, you might expect a Labor politician like me to use these findings to beat up on my ideological opponents. But the more time I spent with Gilligan’s book, the less convinced I became that the associations he describes are truly causal. First, the empirical evidence turns out to be fairly fragile. There aren’t that many presidents, particularly if you omit those who served at times of national crisis, such as world wars and depressions. And taking a snapshot across states means that you’re capturing plenty of things that have nothing to do with policy, like a state’s racial composition. (The same problem plagues Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level.) If you ask more nuanced questions like “Does homicide rise significantly when a Republican governor replaces a Democratic governor?” the answer is no.

Then there’s the causal channel. On the face of it, you’d think that both Republicans and Democrats have pretty strong incentives to reduce the rate of violent death. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever run for election on the slogan “Let the killing spree begin.” So it’s not obvious why we should expect to see a relationship between election outcomes and violent crime. Gilligan argues that Republicans cause bad economic outcomes (higher unemployment and more inequality) and these outcomes cause homicide and suicide. But careful economic studies (such as those by Bruce Weinberg and Naci Mocan) suggest that the effect of joblessness and inequality on crime is weak or non-existent, so this can’t be the answer. At the end of Gilligan’s book, I was left feeling that there still might be a relationship between politics and violent death rates; but that if it exists, it’s a good deal more complex than he proposes.

SO IF simplistic partisan models don’t explain crime rates in the United States, what does? In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner famously showed that one factor that explains the drop in crime rates in the 1990s was the legalisation of abortion in the early 1970s. The decision in Roe v Wade allowed women who didn’t feel they were ready to raise a child to have a legal abortion. Because criminal careers typically peak in the early twenties, the timing fits the data, but the implications shocked many. In his academic work, Levitt has also attributed the crime drop to more police and the waning of the crack epidemic. And he argues that higher incarceration rates cut crime – an issue to which I’ll return.

But the drop in crime wasn’t uniform across the country. In New York City, crime rates fell about twice as much as they did in the rest of the country, and continued falling through the noughties. The crime-ridden New York that features in Crocodile Dundee bears little resemblance to what’s there today. The chances of a New Yorker being killed are a fifth of what they were in 1990. The odds of a New York woman being sexually assaulted are a quarter of what they were two decades ago.

In The City that Became Safe, criminologist Franklin Zimring asks what can be learned from the dramatic fall in crime in the Big Apple. Having previously written a book on the nationwide crime decline, Zimring is keen to see what made New York different. How could it be that the chance of being robbed in the Times Square precinct is now one-twentieth of what it was two decades ago?

The conventional view on New York’s crime decline is that it was due to “broken windows policing.” The theory goes that cracking down on minor offences – street prostitution, riding the subway without a ticket, public gambling – changed the social norms about offending. By signalling that the city had a “zero tolerance” for criminal behaviour, this policing strategy changed the norms around misbehaviour.

Economists like me tend to be dubious of theories based on social norms, and Zimring’s book shows that scepticism to be well founded. Despite the public rhetoric, he finds that arrests for street prostitution and public gambling actually fell during this period. Broken windows may have been a good public story, but it’s a flawed account of what New York’s police officers were doing.

Yet other policing strategies appear to have been deployed successfully. Zimring credits part of the crime decline on “hot spots” policing, which targets locations (such as open-air drug markets) that have a history of criminal activity. Another approach that seems to have worked is the Compstat policing database, which allows top cops to see in real time the crimes that are being reported around the city. More controversially, Zimring concludes that “stop and frisk” policing helped to reduce crime. Although he acknowledges that the burden fell disproportionately on minority communities, he points out that they also enjoyed the benefits of the crime decline. For example, a strategy of stopping and searching cars with darkened windows was disliked by the young minority men who tended to drive such vehicles but was effective in reducing handgun deaths.

Despite this, there is still much that we don’t know about successful policing. As Zimring points out, many policing tactics are based on intuition rather than evidence. A few US criminologists – such as Lawrence Sherman – have collaborated with police departments to run randomised experiments. Very often, their findings challenge conventional wisdom. And yet most police departments still rely more on anecdotes than data, much as medicine did in the nineteenth century.

The most interesting aspect of New York’s crime decline was the extent to which it occurred without a commensurate increase in incarceration. If New York had followed the national trend, there would be five times as many black and Hispanic men in its jails. Somehow, New York has managed to stop the school-to-prison pipeline that plagues so many other parts of the United States. Understanding this is perhaps the most important lesson of the New York crime success, since it suggests that the whole country could potentially have both low crime rates and low incarceration rates.

America’s mass imprisonment is one of the most troubling features of an extraordinary country. In a recent article in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik pointed out that more than 70,000 prisoners are raped annually – and yet the subject remains standard fodder for comedy. On our television screens, lovable cops often use the threat of prison rape to force a suspect to confess. Gopnik surmises that future generations will look back on our society’s sadistic attitude to prison rape much as we look back at “eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows.”

Mass imprisonment is also a symptom of a broader illness in the US polity. If you’re a high school dropout there, your inflation-adjusted wages have barely budged since the 1970s. Adjusted for inflation, the typical American family was $4000 poorer in 2010 than in 2000. Over the past two decades, more than half the income gains in the United States have gone to the top 1 per cent.

AS WITH so many things, Australia’s social trends look like a smoother version of America’s. Our crime rate never rose as high, but our rise and fall followed a similar pattern. Your odds of being a homicide victim are half what they were in the late 1980s. And yet our incarceration rate has risen to record highs.

Last year, my colleague Shayne Neumann and I moved a motion in the House of Representatives aimed at reducing crime and incarceration. The motion pointed out that over recent decades, Australia has invested in prison-building at an astonishing rate. In 1991, the national imprisonment rate was 117 prisoners per 100,000 adults. By 2011, it had risen to 167 prisoners per 100,000 adults. Each prisoner costs the taxpayer nearly $300 per day – about the price of a nice hotel room in the CBD.

The story is even worse for Indigenous Australians. When the royal commission into black deaths in custody reported in 1991, there was widespread shock about the level of Indigenous incarceration in Australia, at 1739 prisoners per 100,000 Indigenous adults. Yet over the next two decades the Indigenous incarceration rate increased even further. In 2011, 2248 out of every 100,000 Indigenous adults were behind bars; in Western Australia, 4 per cent of all Indigenous adults are currently in jail. Even adjusting for the fact that Indigenous people tend to be younger, they are still fourteen times more likely to be in jail than non-Indigenous people. By their mid twenties, 40 per cent of Indigenous men have been charged by police with a crime.

As in the United States, Australia’s prison population has increased while crime has fallen. The drivers are changes in the law, such as tougher bail conditions and mandatory non-parole periods. Longer sentences have an incapacitation effect, but probably not much impact on deterrence. Increasing sentence lengths from five to ten years may sound tough, but if you’re dealing with someone who lives from day to day it could have no impact on crime rates.

With few exceptions, the Liberal and National Party speakers on the motion seemed unconcerned by the rise in imprisonment. If this is the pattern in the federal parliament, it bodes ill for state jurisdictions, where it’s harder still to escape the shock jocks. Progressive legislators like Western Australian MLA Paul Papalia, NSW attorney-general Greg Smith and ACT attorney-general Simon Corbell are thinking about approaches such as justice reinvestment, but we need more politicians who are willing to adopt evidence-based criminal justice policies.

One solution may be for Australia to invest in a blue ribbon commission on “what works in criminal justice.” Accompanied by a commitment to conduct more randomised policing experiments, such an approach would strengthen the hand of politicians accused of being soft on crime.

The lesson of New York is that we don’t need to rebuild the gulags to keep the streets safe. Mass incarceration may cut crime temporarily, but at a huge cost to the budget and to the prospects of those locked up. And that’s before we consider the impact on children. There’s nothing family-friendly about the fact that around 40,000 Australian children currently have a parent behind bars. If we care about breaking the intergenerational poverty cycle, we need to reduce incarceration rates.

Unlike Gilligan, I believe that the solution must be a bipartisan one. In the heat of an election campaign, slogans often trump facts. This is particularly true of issues that strike an emotional chord. It’s not for nothing that the most famous negative advertisement in political history is the Willie Horton attack ad deployed by George H.W. Bush against Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Featuring Horton’s bearded mugshot, the ad described in chilling terms how Horton used weekend prison leave (a policy permitted in Massachusetts while Dukakis was governor) to kidnap a young couple, stabbing the boy and raping the girl. Faced with such a horrific set of facts, our minds shift away from facts and reason towards thoughts of anger and revenge.

As books by psychologists like Daniel Kahneman and Drew Westen have pointed out, the political landscape is replete with the hulks of logical arguments that were defeated by emotional appeals. And yet it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to imagine that we can achieve a better set of justice policies than we have today. As the United States shows us, a strategy of “lock them up and throw away the key” has a massive social cost. There are smarter ways to keep our streets safe.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and a former professor of economics at the Australian National University. His most recent book is Disconnected (UNSW Press, 2010).

Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others
By James Gilligan
Polity | $32.95

The City that Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control
By Franklin Zimring
Oxford University Press | $59.95

I spoke with host Kieran Gilbert and the very reasonable Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham about the importance of parliament not playing judge and jury, about Australia's strong economy, and about why Aluminium smelters are more affected by a $1000/tonne world price drop than a $1/tonne carbon price effect.