Andrew Leigh

MEDIA RELEASE

Federal Member for Fraser, Andrew Leigh, has today called on the Abbott Government to explain why it is ripping money away from early childhood workers across the ACT.

Early this year, Labor introduced a $300 million Early Years Quality Fund to be used to increase wages in the sector, recognising that awfully low pay rates have been an impediment to early childhood quality and workforce retention.

The Abbott Government has said it may not honour provisional contracts signed by directors of long-day care centres to access the fund over two years. They include early childhood centres in north Canberra.

"If the Coalition Government is going to raid the pay rises of early childhood workers to cover a mining tax cut that will benefit Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, their ministers needs to visit one of Canberra's centres and explain why billionaire miners need that money more than early childhood workers," said Dr Leigh.

"To justify a review of the Early Years Quality Fund, the Coalition claims the Fund was set up to boost union membership. It's nonsense. Early childhood centres need an enterprise agreement to tap into the Fund. There is no requirement that unions be involved."

“Stopping the fund could result in in many early childhood workers leaving because they will earn more elsewhere, even stacking shelves at the supermarket.”

"There is a great deal of uncertainty and frustration in the sector. Centres and parents want to urgently see that early childhood, under an Abbott Government, is a valued service that prepares children for school and lifelong learning.”

"I call on the new assistant minister for education and childcare, Sussan Ley, to join me in visiting an early childhood centre on Canberra’s northside. There, the talented early childhood workers can explain to her how the Early Years Quality Fund will directly improve the lives of Australian children," Dr Leigh said.

MEDIA RELEASE

The Abbott Government’s decision to integrate AusAID into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is extremely short-sighted.

“AusAID is not an ATM for diplomats,” said Andrew Leigh, the Federal Member for Fraser in the Australian Capital Territory.

“The purpose of development assistance is fighting poverty. Absorbing AusAID into DFAT signals that fight - to save and improve the lives of the world’s absolute poor - is not valued.”

“This takes us back to 1973. Like Tony Abbott’s decision to scrap the science ministry and his choice to have only one women in a cabinet of twenty people, this shows that this is a back-to-the-future government,” said Dr Leigh.

“As a developed and wealthy nation, Australia has galvanised international efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals. AusAID’s reduced status and capacity will undermine that work and muddy the prime objective of poverty alleviation, mixing that objective with trade and diplomatic goals.”

Shadow International Development Minister Melissa Parke has been one of the most articulate advocates of using aid to combat poverty. In a speech delivered this month, Ms Parke told her audience:

“Labor believes that helping people and nations escape from suffering and deprivation is core to our national ethos, and that creating safety, peace, wellbeing and self-sufficiency, especially in our region, is central to the Australian project.”

"Under Labor, Australian aid rose to 0.37 per cent of Gross National Income. We became one of the world's top ten donor nations. The Coalition's decision to cut $4.5 billion from the aid budget will hurt the world's poorest, so they can pay for abolishing the mining tax, to help some of the world's richest people," Dr Leigh said.

This morning I spoke to Tim Lester of Fairfax Media about the healthy contest underway for the Labor leadership and the incoming Abbott Government's cabinet which, unfortunately, looks set to promote only one woman.  Here's the transcript:

BREAKING POLITICS

FAIRFAX MEDIA VIDEO

____________________________________________________________



Subjects: Labor leadership, Coalition cabinet and ministry, gender

___________________________________________________________



TIM LESTER: A regular on Breaking Politics on Monday is the Labor MP for Fraser in the ACT, Andrew Leigh. He's actually in Sydney and he joins us via Skype. What takes you to Sydney today? What's on the agenda?

ANDREW LEIGH: Spending some time with family. One of the things about the election is, you end up drawing a lot on your family to help out and it's nice to be able to be able to give a little bit back and spend a couple of days with my parents this week.

LESTER: What do you think of the process Labor is now in to select the leader, for the first time is going to go the rank and ask for a vote on the issue.

LEIGH: I think it's enormously healthy that we go to our party membership on this. Looking from afar, I really enjoyed watching the contest of the British Labor leadership in 2010. I thought it was one that saw leaders talk very much of the direction they wanted British Labor to go. Theirs was a party that had been riven between the Gordon Brown and Tony Blair camps for quite a long time and all of the candidates spoke about wanting to move beyond those divisions and about the kind of party they wanted to craft. I expect we'll have a similar conversation over the next month, conducted respectfully between two outstanding candidates, who will talk about their visions for modern Labor.

LESTER: Are you being lobbied by those two outstanding candidates yet, because presumably they're out their looking for votes?

LEIGH: Yes, I've spoken to them in the past week as I have over recent years being in Parliament.  What's great about both Anthony and Bill is they're really serious about engaging with colleagues and listening to what they have to say. You see that out in the community too. I've been at road openings with Anthony where he's been keen to hear the views from the bulldozer driver. I've been at disability events with Bill where he's immediately gravitated towards somebody sitting on their own in a corner and just wanted to have a yarn with them about how their disability affects their life.

LESTER: What happens if caucus goes for one, and the rank and file go for the other? How do you resolve it?

LEIGH: Well it simply depends on the majorities in the two cases. One candidate will end up with a majority overall, and the great thing about this is that these are two candidates who are respected across the party and across the caucus. We simply can't go wrong in choosing between Bill and Anthony. We're fortunate to have Bill's passion for ideas, his deep understanding of issues of disability and economic development versus Anthony's knowledge in the transport and infrastructure portfolios and in broadband. His huge experience in a very difficult parliament, which managed to get a couple of former National Party members to back around 600 bills through the House of Reps. These are formidable parliamentarians and we're fortunate they're both putting their hands up.

LESTER: Have you decided which one you'll back yet Andrew, or not?

LEIGH: I have Tim, but my view is that I would rather not project that view out publicly. Partly, that's out of respect for my own branch members who I want to have the freedom to make the choice that they think is best. So I'm very much following in what Bill Shorten said the other day in only having positive words for my colleagues.

LESTER: We expect the new ministry to be announced today. The prime minister to give us the [inaudible] and it's almost certain that it will only be one woman in cabinet. The [inaudible] Julie Bishop and that [inaudible]. How does that strike you?

LEIGH: Well it does strike you Tim, that Tony Abbott is really putting the man back into mandate. He seems to be putting together a cabinet whose gender mix reminds you more of the 1950s than the 2010s. This is not a Cabinet that I think would pass the respect of many boardrooms, many corporate firms, and many government departments who have recognized that having a gender balance that looks like Australia is important to being able to do an effective job. I certainly think it's a pity if Mr Abbott is to go for only one out of 20 women in his cabinet.

LESTER: And also the question of finance minister. We understand from the Financial Review that Mathias Cormann is now favoured over Senator Arthur Sinodinos. You have a particular interest in that area. What do you make of that?

LEIGH: Well I think Arthur Sinodinos is one of the sharpest economic minds on the Coalition front bench. Probably the only other person who'd hold a candle to him on the area of economics would be Malcolm Turnbull.  He's somebody who I very much admire. We have a regular media slot on one of the radio stations together. We held an economic debate in the ACT during the election. Arthur's somebody who's extraordinary thoughtful about how he does policy and I think has garnered a respect right across the parliament. I think it would be a pity if he weren't to be given that key finance portfolio. It might send a message out that Mr Abbott values more highly the skills of attack than the skills of constructively managing to build.

LESTER: You've said, but I assume Malcolm Turnbull won't run [indistinct] think that two best economic minds of the opposition are going to be sidelined in terms of economics.

LEIGH: I think that's certainly a risk, and I think it would be a mistake particularly in the case of Mr Abbott, who's said in the past that he was bored by economics, who when challenged about the fact he couldn't find an economist to back his direct action plan, said well, that’s maybe that a reflection on the quality of economists rather than on the quality of the plan, and who doesn't himself, I think, have a natural affinity for markets. I think in that instance, it's all the more incumbent upon him to promote high quality economists like Arthur Sinodinos and it would be a pity if he didn't do that.

LESTER: Andrew, we're grateful for your time today. Enjoy a couple of days off.

LEIGH: Thanks Tim, good to be with you.



ENDS

My op-ed in today's SMH sets out some of the questions the incoming Prime Minister has to answer.

Ten Challenges for Tony Abbott, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times, 13 September 2013

As a poll sceptic, I’m fairly rare in Parliament House. Most of the building watches opinion polls with the eagerness of sailors looking for land. For those on the Coalition side, the fact that almost every opinion poll in the past three years has gone in their favour has given them a strong sense of confidence that they would form government at this election.

The Coalition won the election with a convincing margin, and I congratulate Mr Abbott on becoming our 28^th Prime Minister. But given the length of time the Abbott Government has had to prepare for office, the real surprise is the number of major policy questions that lie unanswered. Here are ten for starters.

First, given that we know from independent experts such as the Grattan Institute that Direct Action will not meet the bipartisan target of cutting emissions by 5 percent by 2020, how does the government intend to reduce our carbon emissions? Given that Australia has just had the hottest summer on record, is it really acceptable for the developed nation with the highest emissions per person to back away from action on carbon emissions?

Second, we know that one of the leading causes of Indigenous disadvantage stems from incarceration, which is why both parties are committed to adding it into the Closing the Gap targets. But given that he has committed to cutting funding to Aboriginal Legal Aid, how will Mr Abbott ensure that this doesn’t lead to more Indigenous people ending up in jail?

Third, how will Mr Abbott manage to reduce public service numbers by 12,000 without firing anyone? Won’t public servants simply stay in their jobs once the hiring freeze takes effect? And what if a key infectious disease specialist leaves the Department of Health – will she really not be replaced?

Fourth, does the cancellation of Steve Bracks’ diplomatic appointment signal that the era of bipartisanship public appointments is at an end? Labor in government appointed Brendan Nelson and Tim Fischer to key diplomatic posts, put Peter Costello onto the Future Fund board, and appointed Brendan Nelson as head of the Australian War Memorial. Will an Abbott Government put loyalty before ability in making similar appointments?

Fifth, is the government now abandoning negotiations for a free trade agreement with China, given that its plan to reduce the foreign investment threshold for agribusiness is a direct slap in the face to Chinese interests? What Australian exporters miss out on when this deal falls over?

Sixth, has the government decided which countries will miss out as a result of its $4.5 billion cut to foreign aid? How have those governments reacted to the reduction in assistance? How many fewer children will be vaccinated as a result of these cuts?

Seventh, will the government’s ‘turn back the boats’ policy be raised in the first bilateral meetings with Indonesia? And how will the Australian Government go about buying back Indonesia’s 750,000 fishing boats? Will it use eBay, or will Scott Morrison just stand on the wharves with a fistful of Rupiah?

Eighth, how does the government respond to the prospect of a ‘digital divide’ in suburbs where some families will now get fibre to the home, while others will have to make do with an inferior service? Will those on the wrong side of the road have to pay $5000 to obtain the service their neighbours received free?

Ninth, what is Mr Abbott doing about the ‘budget emergency’ he alleged was plaguing the nation a few months ago? If the nation’s finances are in such parlous shape, why is he introducing a wage-replacement parental leave scheme rather than sticking with the current flat-rate scheme?

Tenth, is the government’s abolition of the low-income superannuation contribution going to be retrospective? This affects 3.6 million workers (2.1 million of them women), working as sales assistants, kitchen hands and bricklayers. Does Mr Abbott honestly plan to make a retrospective raid on their superannuation accounts, in order to help fund a tax cut to mining companies?

Like George W. Bush before him, Mr Abbott appears to like using corporate analogies for government, stating on election night that ‘Australia is under new management’. But like President Bush, he may find that heading a government requires a little more nuance and sophistication than running a campaign. He could start by answering these simple questions.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and his website is www.andrewleigh.com.

Launch of Gordon Peake’s Beloved Land: Stories, Struggles and Secrets from Timor-Leste
Australian National University
11 September 2013

I acknowledge that we are meeting on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal people and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

I recognise Ambassador Abel Guterres, Paul Hutchcroft and of course Gordon Peake this evening.

Australia’s relationship with East Timor is akin to the way a parent thinks about a child that they adopted out at birth.  It’s a strong bond but it’s a relationship you don’t think about all the time.  And if you do think about it probably the predominant emotion that governs the relationship is one of guilt.

And Australia should feel a sense of guilt towards East Timor.

In 1942, the East Timorese fought alongside Australian troops.  Australians left, and many of the East Timorese who fought alongside were then left to face the Japanese alone.

In 1975, we failed to speak up about the invasion of East Timor.

In 1978, we extended de jure recognition of Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor.

And in 1999, we could have done better in the process that led to the referendum and the many thousands who lost their lives.

But when East Timor comes into the Australian consciousness, it’s just little shards that penetrate into our news cycle.  The news cycle was penetrated in 1999, when Laurie Brereton gave an extraordinary speech to parliament – speaking straight after Alexander Downer.  And he talked in parliament about how just two weeks earlier Father Francisco Barreto had sat in his office and spoken to him about what would happen after the referendum.  And then this hard man of the NSW Right had his voice crack in parliament as he spoke about how Father Barreto had been one of the first of the Catholic priests to be assassinated following the announcement of the ballot results.

And then the story of East Timor came into the Australian media if anything through a sense of pride about how our forces had acquitted themselves in East Timor. Peter Cosgrove tells the story of an Australian corporal who requested a doctor for the local village.  The previous day the corporal had helped a local woman deliver her baby – a first for the woman and a first for the corporal.  And Cosgrove had said “Oh well, all’s well that ends well”.  And the corporal had replied “well yeah, but yesterday a lady presented with a breech birth and I’m not real good at those”. Cosgrove told the story as a way of speaking about how Australian soldiers had that sense of social justice.  How for the Australian soldiers it wasn’t for them to sit back behind the sandbags, but for them being good soldiers meant getting out and helping to deal with local people.

A few years later another little shard of our relationship with East Timor penetrated into the local media when Glebe Coroner’s Court, was the site of an inquiry as to whether Indonesian forces had deliberately killed the Balibo five.  It is such an unusual place for this discussion to have taken place about the events that took place in 1975.

East Timor today is a poor nation.  Gordon gives us a few of the statistics of this in his book.  It’s ranked 120^th out of 169 on the Human Development Index.  Forty nine per cent of East Timor lives on less than 88 US cents a day.  East Timor has relatively low education rates, a high birth rate and high levels of inequality.  Gordon describes the stories of those who have a second home in Bali, who wear $750 sunglasses, who drive Hummers.

There’s a police force, which as he reports it, has a disciplinary case for every 2½ officers.  And yet there’s a budget that’s grown thirty two fold over the past decade which has the potential to turn a resource curse into a resource blessing.

But that’s about it for the statistics in Gordon’s book.  His is not an economic treatise which makes your eyes droop as you move past page on page of numbers.  His is a book full of stories not statistics.

It’s something that Scribe does extraordinarily well – this is just one in a series of terrific Scribe books that I’ve read which bring out fabulous stories to help us better understand issues, problems and places.

You read in Gordon’s book about Jose Antonio Belo who after Independence went to interview his torturer.  You read about Gordon’s conversation over was it half a case - or an entire case? - of mid-strength Australian beer getting to know Australian Jimmy, the ‘White Bat’, who fought alongside FALINTIL troops in the hills and who has stories which Gordon struggles to identify fact from fiction. You’ll hear about Xanana Gusmao who had the extraordinary strength of character to be able to hug the Indonesian generals who a few years earlier were out there trying to kill him.

As a university student in 1993, I interviewed Jose Ramos Horta.  So I knew a bit about Jose, but I never knew that the reason that he was kicked out of East Timor was for writing a positive review of the movie Ned Kelly (which starred Mick Jagger). It’s a fantastic rendition – one which is worth watching for many reasons not least, and this is kind of departing slightly from the script, the moment in which a member of the gang rides by Mick Jagger wearing a dress on the horse and no-one says a thing. But apparently writing a review of Ned Kelly was seen as sufficiently revolutionary that Horta was exiled – ultimately to his good and that of the nation of East Timor.

You’ll read about Rogerio Lobato, the East Timorese Minister, later gun runner, and the story of how he lost his wife, his parents and twelve siblings in the 1975 attacks.

You’ll hear Gordon talk about pre-Independence East Timor in which someone says fifty per cent were informing on the other fifty per cent.

And the sheer stories of the incompetence of the Portuguese in 1879.  A lovely despairing letter which the Governor wrote to his superiors in Macau – ‘I have a total of forty-eight Civil and Military officers, of which ten are competent, ten are mediocre and seventeen are useless... the Judge Delegate tells me he knows nothing of his duties.’

Gordon tells the story of Boaventura who raised a mutiny only to find thousands of his followers executed over two days and nights.

The story of finally when the Portuguese pulled out, leaving a country with a thousand primary school students, no electricity, no paved roads, and conditions that were so close to the way they’d left them, Gordon writes, that it drew anthropologists to the country because they wanted to see how traditional groups lived in a country which had been undisturbed by colonisation.

You’ll read stories about bureaucratic incompetence – the moment on which Gordon turns up to an office only to be told that he lacks the requisite red folder that should contain his documents.  That obtaining such a red folder cannot be done on the spot and will require returning five days later.

You’ll hear stories of the language.  I love the Portuguese phrase that Gordon teaches you in the book: Somos todos primos (‘We are all cousins’).  And he talks about a land of magical goats in which things are about alliances and friendships.  About his own attempts to map those alliances and friendships to understand Timorese politics.

You learn about the challenges of Tetun.  About the embarrassment of UN workers who don’t understand Tetun themselves.  And about the challenges of understanding Tetun, as Gordon puts it, “there are three different ways of addressing an individual, each one indicating the speaker’s position in relation to the person being addressed.  There are no verb tenses, but a much more complicated way of coding family relationships” which includes not only the blood relationship but also the age relationship.

At the end of it all you’re left with a sense of the challenges of development.  Gordon talks about the people that he meets, so many of them in some way flawed.  There’s the occasional worker, the occasional parliamentarian, the occasional public servant who is doing extraordinary work.  But ultimately you’re left with the sense that development is about individuals, flawed, most of them, trying to do their best.

I was reminded of an essay that George Orwell wrote about Charles Dickens.  And he says that early in his life he was deeply frustrated when he read Dickens. Because Dickens is all about individuals.  But Orwell said what frustrated him as a young man was that Dickens had no structure to understanding the challenges of the poor – no strategy for dealing with development.  For him, it’s all about character and the individuals. And Orwell says it took him until late in life to finally realise that that’s what life is.  It’s not about policies and structure, it is actually fundamentally about individuals and their flaws and their qualities.

If you take one lesson out of Gordon’s book it should be this – that ultimately development is more about character than it is about capital.  If you want to change a society you’ve got to change individuals.

And it’s such a hard lesson for those of us on the progressive side of politics to learn.

Because we want to be able to implement these grand plans - we want this notion that we turn on the tap and the cash flows and things get better.  But ultimately, Gordon’s right.  It’s about character, it’s about individuals, it’s about stories and sometimes you can put a lot of money in and end up with a society in which forty nine per cent of the people live on 88 cents a day or less.

But the thing is that if we understand that, if we understand the flaws, if we understand the lessons of Dickens that Orwell only understood late in life, then we’re actually placed to do a whole lot more good.

So I want to thank Gordon for writing an extraordinary book that will teach you a great deal about East Timor.  But that fundamentally should teach us all an important lesson about doing good in developments overseas and perhaps even here at home.

Go and read it – it’s an extraordinary book.  Thank you.

The Cranleigh School Artshow is being held in late-October. They have asked me to publicise it on my blog, and I am happy to do this. Details below.

Art Show October 2013

The Cranleigh Capital Chemist Artshow is an annual event held at Cranleigh School, Starke Street in Holt on the third week of October. The show raises money for the school and promotes well known Canberra and regional artists. It also showcases the abilities of our students.

This year we are hoping to raise more than $25,000 for a specialised music program at Cranleigh.

Friday 18th - Opening Night

6.00pm for sponsors.

7.00pm - 9.00pm for the public

Opening night includes

• Robyn Archer AO, Centenary of Canberra Creative Director, will be opening the show.


• Featured Guest Artist Kylie Heslop.


• Wine and delicious food served by students from The Woden School.


• Live jazz music by the Radford jazz band.


• Silent auction.

19-20 October gallery open for viewing 9.00-5.00pm

The AFR today runs a short op-ed on the question of whether the ALP should now vote for soil magic.

Point of order on carbon tax, Australian Financial Review, 10 September 2013

A ferociously fought issue in the 2010 election was whether to move to a profits-based mining tax. Labor won the election, yet Coalition MPs and Senators voted in parliament against the mining tax.

Today, Prime Minister Tony Abbott is telling Labor members that we should vote to repeal carbon pricing. Having been a weathervane on both climate science and emissions trading, he seems to think we should do likewise.

Mandates authorise – and enjoin – individual parliamentarians to act on the issues that they campaigned upon. For example, having gone to the 2007 election promising an ETS, Coalition representatives should have voted for an ETS when it came to the parliament in 2009. Alas, only a handful did so.

Mandate theory has never meant that oppositions should roll over like poodles after an election, particularly on an issue as fundamental as tackling climate change, following the hottest summer on record.

Since the carbon price began, electricity emissions are down 7 percent, and Westpac estimates the impact on the CPI was 0.5 percent, which is less than the forecast 0.7 percent. Pricing carbon uses the ingenuity of the market to improve the environment. In the 1990s, the US used an ETS to deal with acid rain, which met its targets at one-third of the projected costs.

By contrast, Direct Action has been rubbished by everyone from the Grattan Institute to Malcolm Turnbull. It will cost households more – yet do less for the environment.

If the Coalition wish to repeal the carbon tax, it should take the sensible path of moving straight to an ETS from 1 July 2014. Both parties have a mandate for that.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and his website is www.andrewleigh.com.

I spoke on ABC RN Drive tonight with Arthur Sinodinos and Waleed Aly. We discussed mandates, micro-parties and Labor's future. Here's a podcast. And, here's the transcript:



TRANSCRIPT OF ANDREW LEIGH

RADIO NATIONAL DRIVE INTERVIEW

MONDAY 9 SEPTEMBER 2013



PROOF ONLY

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­_____________________________________________________________



Subjects: Campaigning, senate preferences, minor parties, mandates, carbon tax

___________________________________________________________



WALEED ALY: I’m joined one last time for an election panel, Arthur Sinodinos who is possibly the incoming finance minister if he can hold onto his seat and Dr Andrew Leigh, the re-elected Member for the Canberra seat of Fraser, one of the few Labor MPs just to romp it in.

ARTHUR SINODINOS: Congratulations Andrew.

ANDREW LEIGH: Thank you very much Arthur. I very much hope you get back and get that finance role.

ALY: Yes, the congratulations can't be reciprocal at this point Arthur.

SINODINOS: No, we're still waiting. It looks like I'm number six, with postal votes close to come, so fingers and toes crossed. If you have any calculators, send them my way.

ALY: I don't know that any calculators which change the result. How much trouble are you actually in?

SINODINOS: Well look, the venerable and respected ABC election calculator has me winning the sixth spot based on the preference flows. But we'll wait and see. I don't want to jinx myself by calling these things.

ALY: I guess it's not my job to worry about you jinxing yourself (laugh) so I'll keep asking the questions. The thought was that Pauline Hanson might take your seat. That threat seems to have faded. Who do you think most likely to be your main competition?

SINODINOS: The Liberal Democrats took the number five position. They took eight per cent of the vote, largely I think because people thought they were the Liberals.

ALY: They've admitted that. They may have got votes by mistake. How does that make you feel?

SINODINOS: We had made representations about this to the AEC but that aside, we have to work with what we've got. That also cleared the pitch for people like Pauline Hanson. The way the distributions are going, I'm ahead of the Greens at this stage. So, hopefully, it'll stay that way. But that's life. That's politic arithmetic.

ALY: I suppose it is. Before we get to Labor side of the equation, given what we are about to see in the senate, and Arthur is caught up in that, but, we're likely to see in Victoria, the Motor Enthusiasts Party (MEP) apparently is in with a real chance for a seat with a minuscule, unbelievably small vote. Have we got a problem here?

LEIGH: It does seem an odd situation, doesn't it? A party that gets a very small share of votes are able to translate into a lot of electoral power. But you would need, I guess, strong support across the parliament for something like allowing optional voting below the line for the Senate. As I read it, there's not strong support for reform of that kind.

ALY: Is that because we've not seen a situation like this before. This could become high farce.

LEIGH: Well, Steve Fielding is as I recall, got a fairly small share of the primary vote.

ALY: Yeh, but that's one senator. If you have now, the MEP in Victoria and The Sports Party in WA.... It's starting to become a laughing stock.

LEIGH: A good voting system is definitely one in which people don't make mistakes in terms of translating their true value into the people that they elect. So, that's an important point. But you need very strong support to change the voting system and you don't want to do it unless carefully mapping out what it means for everyone and making sure it's fair.

ALY: Arthur, I know you're wrapped to have returned to government... I would have thought this is a silver cloud with a dark lining, given that the magnitude of the victory is really quite modest, given the swing against the government and the swing against the Greens and really only a fraction of that finding its way into the Coalition's hands.

SINODINOS: Ah, look, it's been a pretty solid victory when we get 87 or 90 seats or whatever. It's a pretty good majority. I think what happened during the campaign is that there were some unknowns that the published polls underestimated including the potential influence of the Palmer United Party both in the house and senate. There seemed to have been in some states a tendency to use the Palmer party as a protest vehicle so disaffected Labor votes went there and their preferences went all over the place after. That's a complication no one had really facted in, then of course, as usual afterwards, you can rationalise everything.

It's a solid victory and I'll just go back to what Bob Hawke said on Saturday night. Labor lost. It was a big, big loss. But we don't take anything for granted. These days the volatility of the electorate means you can be out in three years, let alone six or nine.

ALY: That seems unlikely. You're not in a position to take anything for granted. I would have thought that what these results show is that Labor lost but you’re certainly didn't win. You describe it as solid but actually it was quite patchy.

SINODINOS: No, no my friend, we came first. They came second. We're the government and with the benefit of incumbency if Tony behaves in the way he that he suggests he'll behave, we can potentially build on what was a solid victory. I don't buy this idea that somehow you lose by winning.

ALY: No, I'm not saying you lost. I'm just saying there's a difference here. This is not the landslide that you perhaps would have expected in just about any other election. This was a very different result.

SINODINOS: I think that was conditioned by some of the expectations in some of the polls, particularly some of the seat by seat polls that I think were quite unrepresentative because they were based on fairly small samples. I think the real complication in this election is not so much the house of reps but what's happened in the senate and the implications of that for us, being able to deliver our program. In some ways it could actually prove to be a better situation than having a Labor-Green alliance solidly blocking everything, but we're going to have to work; it's back to the old days as I recall, where you had to graft your way through the senate to a get a majority but, I mean, we're used to that. We'll have to do what's required to achieve our outcomes.

ALY: Possibly with a senate now one has ever confronted before. Andrew Leigh, what now for Labor? It seems to me that Labor has a massive hole that it can't fill in its constituency.



LEIGH: We need to recognise the things that went wrong. I think we spend too much time talking about internal issues and we weren't as unified as the Coalition. It's striking that their leader won an internal ballot by one vote back in 2009 but yet the Coalition very effectively united behind Mr Abbott. Nonetheless, we need to be careful not to trash our legacy. Disability Care, I had a woman come up to me on polling day, by the name of Deb who asked me to bend down to her wheelchair and she just said 'thank you for Disability Care'. That reminded me that there is an awful lot to be proud of in the last six years; the seat on the UN Security Council, the better schools reform, the tripling of the marine park network. So, we need to be careful that as we rebuild, we don't lose those golden threads of reform that link us back to successful past Labor governments.

ALY: Sure, but at the same time you had a party that was trying to outflank Coalition policy on asylum seekers, apparently not to great effect. You had a party that moved young single mothers onto the Newstart allowance, depriving them of money, something many in the party had trouble with. And again, apparently to no affect. The Vote Compass results were really interesting, that seemed to be showing that Labor supporters, the old block has seemed to have disappeared and Labor now has to chase people to the right and the left and it doesn't know where it's heading.

LEIGH: I think Labor has always been a party of the left Waleed. We've discussed the asylum seeker and single mother payment before around the questions of how do you stop drownings at sea and is it an appropriate policy setting that has a parent remaining at home until a child turns 16. Is that the best thing for a child? But I think in broad terms, ours was a centrist reforming government in the open economy tradition of Hawke and Keating. Our challenge now, if I look back on past Labor oppositions, to get that you need unity of purpose that was in the Beazley Opposition from 1996 through to 1998 when they won a majority of the popular vote, but without having, I think, making the mistake that that Opposition made of turning their back on what they did in government.

ALY: Okay. But, who are your constituency now. Can you describe to me the modern Labor voter?

LEIGH: Labor voters are people who aspire for a better future for themselves and their children, who care about fairness, who care for the environment and who are open and tolerant and want to build on the success of a multicultural Australia.

ALY: Okay, Arthur, let me ask you, of that description, what doesn't apply in your mind to the modern Liberal voter.

SINODINOS: All of that applies to the modern Liberal voter in the sense that, um, we try and cater for all aspirational Australians, including people of ethnic backgrounds and just across the board. I think the big difference between the two parties over the last few years, to an increasing extend, and Andrew is a bit of exception to this, the Labor party hierarchy and central machine has been people who have come up through the union movement or through ministers’ offices and the like. The Liberals on the whole tend to be a more grassroots sought of movement across the board, whether it's small business, working families, the big end of town. We try and build a big tent, and it's important we keep trying to do that.

ALY: Andrew Leigh, does it alarm you, the description you've provided of the Labor voter, is the description that Arthur provided of the Liberal voter? Thirty, 40 years ago that would never have happened.

LIEGH: It comes down to your question Waleed. The way I would define parties, is not by saying, who are your voters but what are your values. So, if you ask about our values, I would point to egalitarianism which I think is something that the conservatives wouldn't claim. I might have been tossed out of Arthur's party for writing a book about inequality and why it's bad.

SINODINOS: What, what?

LEIGH: Or at least, been poked in the ribs in the party room meeting. And then also, I think, small l-liberalism which is something that Arthur and people like Malcolm Turnball stand for but I think, less so, in the case of people like Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott.

SINODINOS: Can I give you a factoid Waleed? Exit polls from the Brisbane electorate on Saturday night, the number one issue - this is the inner city electorate of Brisbane that Terese Gambaro won with about 54-55 per cent of the vote. The number one issue for them was the economy, right. Now this is your inner city electorate which would the stereotypical electorate that might even favour the Greens a bit and be interested in, what you may describe, as higher issues once they've dealt with getting a job and having a reasonable standard of living. I found that really interesting. It goes to the point about peoples' hierarchy of needs and aspirations. Same-sex marriage and other issues did not rate very highly, interestingly enough.

ALY: One thing I want to ask you Andrew Leigh, before we wrap up, is what do you do now, especially on the issue of the carbon tax? Is that settled within the Labor Party - they know exactly how to respond to that in the senate or will we only find that out once the leader is chosen and is there an internal debate to be had?

LEIGH: Certainly my view is that we as a party have been committed to pricing carbon for at least six years now. We went to the 2007 as the Coalition did, supporting an emissions trading scheme because it's the most efficient and effective way to reduce carbon pollution. If you don't do that, then you have to answer the big question, how are you going to meet those bipartisan emission reduction targets. I think the question for Mr Abbott, if he intends to really pursue 'direct action' or soil magic as people tag it, is the question the Grattan Institute has raised, that Malcolm Turnball has raised, how do you actually keep those emission reductions targets when no expert says you can do it without really biting into household budgets? But if Mr Abbott wants to repeal the carbon tax, in the sense of going to an ETS from the middle of next year, then in fact both parties have a mandate to do that and we would of course, back him in that.

ALY: It will be interesting to see what decisions Labor as a party makes on this and how Tony Abbott will negotiate a new senate.



SINODINOS: Waleed, my advice to the Labor Party is, if you want to demonstrate to the public that you're listening, that's one of the first things you do, is accept there's a mandate from the Coalition over three years to abolish the carbon tax and go from there. You have to demonstrate when you go into opposition that you picked up the message from the electorate as we did in '07 when we passed the abolition of WorkChoices.

ALY: But then you didn't pass an ETS that they [Labor] came in with a mandate for and that you indeed when to the election on. This argument goes on forever.



SINODINOS: Well, they can pass our legislation on this now and go to the next election saying they will impose a carbon tax.

ALY: Yeh, well, I suspect it won't be that easy for you. Anyway, gentlemen, our time is up. I hope to have you again soon. I'm getting tweets already saying we need to make this permanent. I don't know that your staff would necessarily agree with that.

LEIGH: I think we might even have a mandate for that Waleed.

ALY: One tweet, definitely.

SINODINOS: I'm still trying to get my mandate [inaudible].

ALY: Arthur might have a lot of time of his hands.  We'll find out. Gentlemen, it has been great to have you on the show. Thank you very so much and I hope to do it all again soon.

SINODINOS: Thank you.

LEIGH: Goodluck

ALY: Arthur Sinodinos and Andrew Leigh joining us from the Liberal and Labor parties respectively.

ENDS

I did two interviews on local radio this morning about the lessons for Labor from the election loss, attempts to repeal the emissions trading scheme, how Canberra will fare amidst job-shedding, questions Mr Abbott needs to be asked (such as the impact on Indigenous incarceration of cutting Aboriginal Legal Aid), and the achievements of the ALP over the past six years:

• Podcast of 2CC conversation with Mark Parton


• Podcast of 666 conversation with Jo Laverty

On 9 September, I spoke with host Tim Lester and Liberal MP Kelly O'Dwyer on the achievements and mistakes of the Labor Government, why we should stick with the most affordable way of dealing with climate change, and the questions for the incoming government to answer (such as how it will build links with the US administration, given that most of the personal ties are to the Republican side of politics). Here's a video.