Andrew Leigh

This morning I spoke to ABC NewsRadio's Marius Benson in the wake of Labor leader Bill Shorten's spirited budget-in-reply speech in which he hit back at changes to Newstart and Medicare.

 

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC NEWSRADIO   
FRIDAY, 16 MAY 2014

SUBJECT/S: Debt levy; Budget deficit; Newstart cuts for people aged under 30; GP tax.

MARIUS BENSON: Andrew Leigh good morning. 

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER, ANDREW LEIGH: Good morning Marius. 

BENSON: It was very clear from some of the things Bill Shorten said last night you will be opposing measures some of which we just mentioned in that lead, it's not entirely clear some others, the fuel excise indexation, the reintroduction of that, you are opposing that?

LEIGH: Yes we will Marius, we've been very clear about number of issues: raising the pension age, putting a GP co-payment in place, and the cuts to unemployment benefits are measures that will definitely be opposing. 

Yesterday I spoke about the federal budget with ABC Radio National Drive host Waleed Aly and the Liberal's Josh Frydenberg. Here's the full transcript:

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC RADIO NATIONAL DRIVE WITH WALEED ALY 
WEDNESDAY, 15 MAY 2014

SUBJECT/S:  Tony Abbott’s Budget of broken promises; manufactured debt crisis and debt levy; fuel excise indexation; budget impact of losing mining tax and carbon price; premiers angry about cuts to schools and hospitals funding

HOST WALEED ALY: What do you make of the Budget? The Prime Minister said it’s tough and fair. The Opposition leader Bill Shorten says it is full of broken promises and bad news. Joining me now to thrash this out is Josh Frydenberg, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, and Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh. To both of you, thank you very much for joining us.

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER, ANDREW LEIGH: Pleasure.

JOSH FRYDENBERG: Good to be with you.

ALY: I might start with Josh, with this whole idea, the overarching aim of this, the overarching promise was to get the Budget back into shape. We had a fiscal crisis, a budget crisis, yet at the end of all this, the deficit has been reduced by $4.1 billion for the next year, which is not really crisis proportions. What happened to the crisis? 

Yesterday I spoke in the Parliament on the most recent amendments to tax law.

Labor will not be opposing the measures in this bill, which go to farm management deposit accounts and the repayment of overpaid GST. But it is vital that we see this bill in the context of the broader picture of taxation reform, or lack thereof, and last night's budget.

I want to do this by commencing with a few stories.

RADIO INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

ABC 666 CANBERRA - MORNINGS  
WEDNESDAY, 15 MAY 2014

SUBJECT/S:  Budget:  Australian Public Service cuts bigger than promised and impact on ACT; Zed Seselja; Infrastructure spending ignores public transport; State schools and hospitals budgets slashed and prospect of a rise in the GST

 

HOST GENEVIEVE JACOBS: Let’s do some excavation on what the budget means for the Territory’s economy. The Member for Fraser, Andrew Leigh, is on the line. Andrew Leigh, good morning to you.

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER, ANDREW LEIGH: Good morning Genevieve. How are you?

JACOBS: I'm well. Now there's a lot of heavy lifting here according to the Treasurer. Does Canberra end up with the hernia?

LEIGH: I think we do Genevieve. I mean we were the place that was targeted the most by the Coalition's pre-election promises and I think the place that was most entitled to think that was as bad as it was going to get, that when Zed Seselja said there would be 12,000 public service job cuts that there actually would be 12,000 job cuts, not 16,500.

Andrew Leigh, Gai Brodtmann and Senator Kate Lundy have condemned the Abbott Government’s first budget as an attack on Canberra that Liberal Senator Zed Seselja has failed to stop.

The Abbott Government will cut 16,500 jobs from the Australian Public Service, with over 7000 of those jobs slated to go in the next financial year.

This is an even bigger cut than the Coalition promised. It demonstrates that Senator Seselja is a limp defender of Canberra.  

In her terrific book Dirt Cheap, the late Elisabeth Wynhausen decided to take leave from her journalism job and try life as a low-wage worker. In one job, Wynhausen moved to a country town and worked packing eggs. She earned near minimum wage in a job that started at 6am, left her body aching at the end of the day, and where the smell from the nearby chook sheds was constant. Three weeks in, the manager, a millionaire several times over, came to tell the workers they were losing their jobs.

I thought of Wynhausen's story again last night as I looked at the budget papers.

Today I spoke in Parliament about the National Day of Mourning and the importance of workplace safety.

Kane Ammerlaan was a 16-year-old building apprentice when his boss asked him to do some cash work on the weekend. His job was to carry overloaded buckets of concrete up to a roof with no safety harness and no railings. If he carried to the buckets half full, his boss would throw concrete at him and send him back down to fill up the bucket. One day the buckets were overloaded and he fell. Concrete went into his eyes. He told his boss it was hurting, but his boss laughed and told him to get back to work. Eventually, he phoned his girlfriend rather than an ambulance and, by the time he got to the hospital, the concrete had set on his eye. He lost 100 per cent vision in his eye.

I led off the Matter of Public Importance debate in parliament today, focusing on the issue of inequality.

This morning I received an email from one of my constituents which read in part: 'I am 48 years old and unemployed. The fact that I have not been able to find another job makes life difficult but just manageable because my husband works. He is 52 years old and works for the federal government. He is very good at what he does but unfortunately the program he works with has been cut and he finds out today if his job has been cut.'

TELEVISION INTERVIEW
BREAKING POLITICS - FAIRFAX MEDIA 
MONDAY, 12 MAY 2014

SUBJECT/S:  Budget to axe or privatise Commonwealth agencies; Deficit levy.

CHRIS HAMMER: Well, the federal budget is now just one day away and you have to wonder what's left to announce, so comprehensively has features of it been leaked during the past week or more. Joining me to discuss it is Andrew Leigh, the member for Fraser here in the ACT, the Labor member.  

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER, ANDREW LEIGH: Morning Chris. 

HAMMER: Also Shadow Assistant Treasurer. So a big week for you. And from Brisbane, Andrew Laming, the Federal Member for Bowman. Andrew Leigh to you first, the stories in the papers today are about cutting or merging government agencies and depending on which paper you believe, somewhere between 50 and 70 government agencies are going to be either abolished or merged. If that's delivering the same services with greater efficiencies, surely that's something to be supported. 

LEIGH: That's a big ‘if’ Chris. We look at the Preventative Health Agency, an agency which is investing and making sure that we reduce of rates of obesity, rates of smoking – including cigar smoking – and other preventable health conditions. We look at Indigenous Business Australia which is aiming to increase the number of entrepreneurs in the Indigenous community. These are just some of the agencies that are on the chopping block with no clear plans to replace them. Then there's the expert agencies. [This is] a government that thinks it doesn't need experts to provide advice on climate change. Now we've seen the National Water Commission being cut into and corporate advisory groups which provide vital advice to governments on markets. You just let it all rip, guided only by your big business donors and your gut. Good governments take advice from great experts and they draw-in a wide range of views which is why these bodies were established.

Minister for Business Services and Consumers Gail Gago today called on the Abbott Government to abandon its plans to axe the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC).

Ms Gago today joined Federal Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh and Uniting Communities Chief Executive Simon Schrapel to highlight the potential of the ACNC to cut red tape and support the work of local charities.

“Charities need a nationally consistent approach, which is why the ACNC is so important,” she said.

“The charities commission strengthens organisations that work with some of our most vulnerable citizens.