Andrew Leigh

ANDREW LEIGH MP

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

MEMBER FOR FRASER



MEDIA RELEASE

Labor Forces Government to Back Down on GST Plan

Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh today welcomed the Abbott Government’s back down on imposing the GST on moveable homes.

“Over the past two months, Labor has been campaigning strongly in the community against the government’s plan to charge GST to people living in moveable homes,” said Dr Leigh.

“The Government’s back down will provide some welcome relief to pensioners and other vulnerable Australians, who had joined the grass roots campaign against this wrong-headed measure.”

“I particularly acknowledge Labor members Justine Elliot and Jill Hall, who have worked tirelessly with their communities to protect moveable home parks from the GST.”

THURSDAY 19 DECEMBER 2013

I spoke with Marius Benson on ABC NewsRadio about Joe Hockey's MYEFO, government spending levels and threats to DisabilityCare.

ANDREW LEIGH

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMPETITION

MEMBER FOR FRASER





E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC NEWSRADIO WITH MARIUS BENSON

WENDESDAY, 18 DECEMBER 2013

SUBJECT/S: MYEFO, Coalition spending decisions, Coalition spending cuts, National Disability Insurance Scheme.

MARIUS BENSON: Andrew Leigh, good morning.

ANDREW LEIGH: Good morning, Marius.

BENSON: The MYEFO statement from Joe Hockey yesterday showed that Federal Government spending is running at 25.9 per cent of Australia’s GDP, that is just below the only 26 per cent that was achieved during the GFC when the Rudd Government then was flooding the economy with cash to keep the economy going at a time when the world was contracting. Was 25.9 per cent just too high? Are cuts needed?



LEIGH: Well it depends on which particular programs you’re talking about Marius and politics is always –



BENSON: But before you go to individual programs, is that overall grounds for cuts? Are cuts needed at that level?



LEIGH: But my answer to your question Marius is that you need to think about how government spending is being done. Productive government spending, that’s on things like education, infrastructure like the National Broadband Network, that’s laying the foundations for future prosperity. Cutting that would be a bit like getting rid of your house because you’ve got a mortgage. But you want to think very carefully about items of spending, and one of the things we did in the last term was to achieve the first ever cut in nominal spending by an Australian government in Australian history. In other words, even after inflation, we were spending less in our last year in office than the year before that. That’s very difficult to do, you’ve got to go through the Budget line by line and look at your values and your priorities, and I think now, something like a paid parental leave, $75,000 for millionaires and billionaires to have children, is probably something that Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey ought to rethink. I think now is probably not the time to be going into a program which is going to have probably no impact on productivity or participation if you judge by, say, somebody like Saul Eslake.



BENSON: Ok well accepting you have to choose where you cut, can I go back to that original point, overall, if the federal government take is 25.9 per cent of GDP, is that too high historically?



LEIGH: But Marius, the question is how you spend that money, and households have exactly this analogy. We know bad spending, that’s going on a debt-fuelled gambling binge, and we know good spending, that’s fixing up the roof so you don’t get damage to the house later on. I think really the debate around the quality of the spending is the most important debate for us to be having.



BENSON: In that context, the NDIS has been isolated for a likely area for savings based on what Mathias Cormann was saying yesterday. Labor never really had it funded fully, did it?



LEIGH: Labor had funded the NDIS, and we’d built the NDIS based on advice from the Productivity Commission. This is reform which, when you ask people with disabilities, is just so overdue. I remember on polling day, I had a woman in a wheelchair come up to me, and just very simply say ‘Thank you for DisabilityCare.’ It was one of those moments that  you just choke up immediately. Because people with disabilities and their carers have been waiting for far too long for a system that looks after their needs.



BENSON: But the merit of the scheme is not questioned by either side, it’s simply funding it, and the funding for Labor, it only kicks in fully in what, 2019 or something like that, and that was not something that Labor had dealt with.



LEIGH: Well the system ramps up, and it ramps up through the use of what we had referred to as launch sites in which the current government have now downgraded to trial sites. But you need to also of course, work in with states and territories. You need to make sure that they’re doing things like making sure the state insurance schemes are appropriately folded in. And that requires some difficult conversations, federalism is a tough beast, but a good prime minister, in the legacy of somebody like Bob Hawke or Julia Gillard works very hard with those states and territories to try and get reform happening. We look at the schools example, Mr Abbott doesn’t seem that interested in getting into the nitty-gritty of how to make policy work, and if he doesn’t do that on DisabilityCare, then yes he may well find it’s more expensive than if he did work with the states to achieve reform.



BENSON: Andrew Leigh, thank you very much.



LEIGH: Thank you Marius.



ENDS

On 17 Dec 2013, I spoke with 2CC's Luke Bona about Joe Hockey's budget update, and the series of broken promises by the Abbott Government. Here's a podcast.

On Sky News Showdown, I discussed the Abbott Government's first budget update, showing a significant deterioration in public finances, a significant potion of which is due to decisions made by the government.

ANDREW LEIGH

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMPETITION

MEMBER FOR FRASER





E&OE TRANSCRIPT

ABC QUEENSLAND

TUESDAY, 17 DECEMBER 2013

SUBJECT: MYEFO

NICOLE DYER: With me Andrew Leigh, Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Member for Fraser. Mr Leigh, good morning.

ANDREW LEIGH: Good morning Nicole.

DYER: So Labor fudged the figures, what's your response to that?

LEIGH: It's a worthy try on, but unfortunately it's an approach which was foreclosed by none other than Peter Costello, the former Liberal Treasurer. He put in place a thing called the Charter of Budget Honesty back in the mid-1990s. When he put that in place, he said that the reason he was doing it was so that there would be a Pre-election Fiscal and Economic Outlook and elections could be conducted on the basis of facts and not on the basis of deceit.

DYER: Well how much responsibility then does Labor take for the budget deficit?

LEIGH: We take responsibility for taking on debt to save jobs in the Global Financial Crisis. We also take responsibility for the fact that when we took office, ours was the 15th largest economy in the world, and when we left office it was the 12th largest economy in the world. So that debt that we took on saved jobs in the global downturn. If you think we shouldn't have debt, basically you think that we should have lost more jobs. But everything since the election, that's Joe Hockey's - the $9 billion that he's given to the Reserve Bank, the multi-billion dollar tax cut he wants to give to mining billionaires...

DYER: But you can understand, Mr Leigh, you can understand why people are so confused because at one stage while Labor was in power, we were going to be in surplus and then of course that didn't happen and then it had to be re-forecast, so were you stalling? Was Labor stalling to get to the federal election? I mean for how long did you know that there were major problems within the budget that would mean that there would be no surplus?

LEIGH: Nicole we take responsibility for the state of the books at the time when Labor left office. That was clearly set out in the Charter of Budget Honesty, and that gave us a deficit for this year of $30 billion.

DYER: Yeah, but how did Labor get it so wrong? I mean how realistic was the pre-election budget proposing to bring the budget back into surplus in four years, and it now looks like it will take over a decade?

LEIGH: Well, this isn't Labor getting things wrong, this is decisions made by the Treasurer. The Treasurer has chosen to give $9 billion to the Reserve Bank - not $9 billion they've asked for, $9 billion he's giving to them because he wants a bigger dividend later. The Treasurer is choosing to walk away from $3 billion of tax savings such as closing tax loopholes. The Treasurer is choosing to give a big tax cut to Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer. The Treasurer is choosing to move from our current, fair Paid Parental Leave scheme to an unfair scheme that will give $75,000 to millionaire parents when they have a child. They're the Treasurer's decisions and they're what's going to take the budget backwards in the statement that Joe Hockey's bringing out today.

DYER: Andrew Leigh, thank you very much. Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Member for Fraser. No doubt, there'll be a lot of poring over figures when the mid-year budget is handed down in Parliament today.

Today I issued a media release regarding the news that two ATO offices will close, potentially resulting in hundreds of job cuts.

ANDREW LEIGH MP

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

MEMBER FOR FRASER



MEDIA RELEASE


JOB CUTS AS ATO OFFICES CLOSE



The Tax Commissioner’s announcement that over 600 jobs are at risk due to the closure of tax offices in Hurstville and Southport is a cruel blow to families ahead of Christmas, said Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh.

The head of the Australian Tax Office, Chris Jordan AO, announced the job cuts in an email to Australian Tax Office employees today. The ATO’s Hurstville office in Sydney employs around 540 people and the Southport office on the Gold Coast employs 90.

“The Member for Banks, David Coleman, needs to explain why he hasn’t been able to stand up for his community and instead will stand idly by while over 500 jobs are lost in his electorate,” Dr Leigh said.

“Mr Coleman’s protestations in the media that ‘the ATO is an important employer in Hurstville and we need to maintain jobs in the local community’ have obviously drawn little support from his colleagues,” Dr Leigh said.

“Similarly, the Member for Moncrieff, Steven Ciobo, needs to explain to his electorate why he hasn’t been able to stop these job cuts” Dr Leigh said.

“Mr Ciobo’s position as Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer didn’t seem to carry much influence when it came to looking after jobs in his own electorate.”

“The Abbott Government must explain to these Sydney and Gold Coast workers why they should lose their jobs just so mining billionaires can get a tax cut.”

TUESDAY, 17 DECEMBER 2013

DAVID BRADBURY GIVEN MAJOR INTERNATIONAL AWARD

Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh today congratulated former Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury on his inclusion in the International Tax Review's Global Tax 50, the most influential figures in global tax policy over the last year.

“David Bradbury’s efforts on reducing tax avoidance and profit-shifting were a vital part of the tax agenda of Labor,” said Dr Leigh.

“Great Labor governments not only target spending where it is needed most – they also work hard at the revenue coalface, ensuring that our tax system is fair and that it keeps up with changes in the global environment.”

“I congratulate David Bradbury for his tax achievements, recognised in this important international award.”

TUESDAY, 17 DECEMBER 2013

My op-ed in the SMH Online today looks at Joe Hockey's attempt to find someone else to blame for his decisions.

Joe Hockey, it's your economy now, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 December 2013

As a very junior lawyer, I once worked on a case representing a restaurant owner, who had sold his business. The new owners complained that they could not make as much money as he had done. When we looked into it, the reasons quickly became apparent. They had taken on their relatives as staff, fired the chef, and allowed grime to accumulate in the kitchen. They claimed that our client had misrepresented the true state of the restaurant when it was sold. But as the judge found, it was the new buyer’s shabby management that led to the losses.

Today, Joe Hockey is trying a similar trick. It’s been 101 days since the election, but rather than acting as the Treasurer of Australia, he’s frozen in Opposition mode, looking for someone to blame.

Mr Hockey today is going to attempt to argue that he has discovered ‘spiders in the cupboards’, and pretend that he is showing the state of the books at the time he became Treasurer. Unfortunately for Mr Hockey, that particular trick has been made impossible, thanks to the fiscal equivalent of Mortein: the Charter of Budget Honesty.

Created by Peter Costello after the 1996 election, the Charter does something very simple: it requires the Secretaries of Treasury and Finance to prepare a Pre-Election Fiscal and Economic Outlook (PEFO). That document sets out the nation’s public finances at the time of the election. It ensures, as Mr Costello put it at the time ‘that the Australian people know the situation before an election begins and so that elections can be conducted on the basis of the facts and not on the basis of deceit, as governments in the past have sought to do.’

The PEFO for the 2013 election showed an economy with solid growth, unemployment that was low by historical standards, and gross debt projected to peak at $370 billion in 2016-17. That is the spider-free economy Joe Hockey took on.

As Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen has pointed out, Labor’s six years in office saw our economy grow from the 15^th largest in the world to the 12^th largest. In terms of income per person, we rose from 17^th to 8^th. This success has been recognised by respected international institutions such as the IMF.

Through the deepest global downturn since the Great Depression, our economy continued to create jobs. And for someone with a $300,000 mortgage, Labor’s lower interest rates meant a saving of over $100 a week.

In our budgets, we made a series of tough decisions. Indeed, Labor’s final budget achieved a reduction in nominal spending – the first time in Australian history this had ever occurred. Cracking down on multinational profit-shifting wasn’t easy policy, but closing that loophole saved taxpayers billions. We were on track to repay the debt that had been incurred in order to save over 200,000 jobs during the economic crisis.

Alas, Mr Hockey’s early days in the job suggest a Treasurer who struggles to win the key economic arguments. He is the first Treasurer to knock back a foreign investment bid by a US company, potentially imperilling growth and jobs in rural Australia. His decision to give $9 billion to the Reserve Bank is bewildering, given the lack of evidence that they ever asked for such a princely sum. A tax cut to mining billionaires and removing the carbon price will cost billions in lost revenue. A parental leave scheme that gives $75,000 per baby to the highest-earners will further blow out the budget.

And let’s face it, if you really believed the nation was facing a ‘budget emergency’, and that the Greens were the most extreme party in Australia, would you strike a deal with the Greens to remove the debt cap entirely?

Today, Mr Hockey should take responsibility for his own decisions, and admit that his budget update reflects changes made on his watch. Rather than trying to shove PEFO down the memory hole, he should outline his positive plans to maintain labour productivity growth, running at a respectable 2 percent under Labor. Having lost a game of high-stakes poker with Holden, he needs to outline his plans for the South Australian economy.

It’s hard to see how productivity can continue to grow if school funding is cut, if fibre-to-the-home NBN is cancelled, and if pork-barrelling is brought back into the infrastructure decision-making process. These are big questions for the Treasurer, and I hope he has some serious answers.

It’s your economy now, Joe. Time to step up to the mark.

Andrew Leigh is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer, and his website is www.andrewleigh.com.

Yesterday I issued a media release celebrating the Coalition's failure to abolish the new statutory definition for charities that will take effect on 1 January 2014.

ANDREW LEIGH MP

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

MEMBER FOR FRASER



MEDIA RELEASE

A win for Australian charities as they enter the modern age

Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh, says the charitable sector can breathe a sigh of relief that a long-awaited reform will go ahead in the new year.

“From January 2014 a new statutory definition of charities championed by Labor will apply – one that reduces costs, provides clarity for charities and protection for those doing advocacy.”

Without consulting the not-for-profit sector Minister Kevin Andrews tried to scuttle the change with an amendment that would have forced charities to continue to rely on 400 years of common law.

“Mr Andrews has failed. The new definition will apply from January and until such time as a repeal passes the Senate,” said Dr Leigh whose portfolio involves charities and tax.

“The charitable sector overwhelmingly supports a statutory definition of charity. No one wants to wade through court cases to decide if they’re a charity.”

This has been a long time coming. Back in 2000 former Prime Minister John Howard announced the establishment of the Charity Definition Inquiry saying:

“We need to ensure that the legislative and administrative framework in which they operate is appropriate to the modern social and economic environment. Yet the common law definition of a charity, which is based on a legal concept dating back to 1601, has resulted in a number of legal definitions and often gives rise to legal disputes.” – John Howard

“The sector, which employs up to a million Australians and fought hard for the Charities Bill 2013, has been alarmed that Minister Andrew sought to delay the new definition and keep charities stuck in the 17^th century,” said Dr Leigh.

During a committee hearing this week, World Vision Australia CEO and Community Council of Australia Chair, Reverend Tim Costello gave evidence supported by other sector representatives that the sector was very surprised by the Government’s attempt to take Australian charities back four centuries.



“This new definition is extraordinarily important for all of us. With the consultations and over 200 submissions made, I have not heard of anyone in the sector who was troubled by this definition.”’ – Tim Costello

“Advocacy is not a dirty word. It gives individuals and disadvantaged groups a voice. I’m delighted the new definition will apply from January – positively affecting many organisations working with vulnerable Australians this Christmas who seek to create lasting change,” added Dr Leigh.



SUNDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2013

Yesterday I issued a media release highlighting Labor's concern regarding the Coalition's tax loopholes.

ANDREW LEIGH MP

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

MEMBER FOR FRASER



MEDIA RELEASE

Government Backs Down on Closing Tax Loopholes, Blows $3 Billion Hole in Budget

The Coalition has increased the budget deficit by $3 billion as a result of abandoning savings measures, Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh said today.

“Late on Saturday afternoon, the government announced that it would not proceed with 48 tax savings measures that had been announced but not yet enacted,” said Dr Leigh.

“Combined with similar decisions made on 6 November, this will cost the budget $3 billion.”

“In abandoning these savings measures and proceeding with a tax cut for mining billionaires, the government is showing that it has the wrong priorities.”

“The Government of ‘no surprises and no excuses’ can't persist in blaming Labor for its budget woes, when it won’t follow through with responsible savings measures.

“No wonder the Government needed to strike a deal with the Greens for unlimited debt.”



The Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) out on Tuesday had been expected to show a budget deficit of at least $40 billion. The government’s latest decisions are likely to make that larger still.

SUNDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2013

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