Andrew Leigh

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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.

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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."

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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.

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RADIO INTERVIEW
2CC WITH STEPHEN CENATIEMPO

Topics: Australia Day; International Holocaust Remembrance Day; Middle East Conflict 

28 JANUARY 2025

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

Andrew Leigh: Great to be with you. 

Cenatiempo: Is this the first? 

Leigh: No. 

Cenatiempo: We've spoken this year already, haven't we? 

Leigh: We have indeed, yeah. 

Cenatiempo: Okay, well, hoping. Yeah. 

Leigh: I love summer so much. I don't mind saying Happy New Year a few times. 

Cenatiempo: No problem. Let's talk about Australia Day first. The Australia Day long weekend. What did you get up to? 

Leigh: So, I was out and about in the community, including an event with the Muslim community and an event with the Jewish community. It really speaks to Canberra's multiculturalism that both of those communities had events. The one yesterday in particular, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was part of the announcement of a National Holocaust Remembrance Centre, which will be located in Forrest, near the heart of the parliamentary triangle. That's really important because on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we need to remember the horrors of the Holocaust and keep on reminding successive generations. We can't take it for granted that young Australians will know the stories of what was done in World War II. Reeducating each generation is an important legacy that we hand on to those who follow.

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RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO | 666 CANBERRA WITH ROSS SOLLY

Subjects: Australia Day; Investing in our Apprentices; Mobile broadcasting units to backup ABC radio during natural disaster and power outages

24 JANUARY 2025

Ross Solly, Host: Yeah, you're with Ross Solly. Kate Medina, as I said, will be in with us very soon. Andrew Leigh joins us. He is the member for Fenner, of course. He is out today, out and about. He's in Gungahlin because the Federal Government has been unveiling this mobile broadcasting system. It's basically a system which is set up to back up local radio during natural disasters and power outages. Now, as part of the programme, they're going to build five or fund five mobile broadcast assets and one of them is going to be located in Gungahlin, and it's going to be serving a wide part of the region around here. Andrew Leigh joins us this morning. Good morning to you, Andrew Leigh.

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

Solly: And with you as well. Look, before we talk about that, Andrew Leigh, a couple of other quick issues. Are you surprised that majority of Australians now, according to the Sydney Morning Herald poll, would like to see Australia day remain on the 26th of January? Or do you think that reflects where we are as a nation right now?

Leigh: Look, I think that reflects where we are and certainly that's the government's position, that Australia Day should stay on the 26th of January. Our focus is on issues such as getting more apprentices, getting more homes built, ensuring that people have the support they need as they deal with the global inflation challenge. They're the big priorities for the government right now.

Solly: Yeah. Do you think it's still as divisive an issue as it once was?

Leigh: It's an annual issue. It comes up every year. I was elected in 2010 and I don't think there's been an Australia Day where there hasn't been that conversation about the date. So, that's a hardy perennial, but certainly the government's focus right now is on making sure that we help people as much as we can, that we're building a more prosperous and egalitarian Australia.

COMPETITIVE SEAS AHEAD

Shipping Australia Limited Annual Review

20 January 2025

The Albanese government recognises that the economic performance of Australia’s maritime logistics is critical to sustaining the nation’s trade and prosperity. As global trade continues to expand, competition in the container shipping industry has become a vital topic, and ensuring efficiency and affordability in this sector is high on the government’s agenda. With the shipping industry handling approximately 99 percent of Australia's trade by volume, this sector is essential for both the national economy and consumers.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in global supply chains, causing disruptions and highlighting the impact that container shipping has on daily life. As ports became congested, shipping prices soared, and product shortages became more apparent. These disruptions affected businesses and consumers alike, underlining the need for stronger competition, regulatory oversight, and modernising Australia’s ports.

Expressions of Interest for the Stronger Communities Programme Round 9 are now open for organisations based in Fenner.

The program supports the Australian Government’s commitment to deliver social benefits in communities across Australia and is part of its 2024-25 Budget initiatives.

Grants of between $2,500 and $20,000 are available for infrastructure projects that are aimed at delivering social benefit to the community. The total cost of your project must be below $50,000.

Grant funding will be up to 100% of eligible project costs except for local governing bodies where grant funding will be up to 50% of eligible project costs.

More information on the eligibility criteria can be found in the Grant Opportunity Guidelines.

If you are interested in submitting an expression of interest, please fill out the Expression of Interest Form by 16 February 2025.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact my office at 02 6247 4396 or [email protected], and my team will be happy to assist.