Andrew Leigh

[caption id="attachment_3740" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="In about 12 months, people living in the shaded area will be able to connect to the NBN"][/caption]Yesterday, I welcomed the release of detailed maps by NBN Co, showing where construction of the National Broadband Network (NBN) will start in Civic.

This is really exciting for local families and business in the Civic area. In around 12 months’ time, people in Civic will be able to start connecting to the National Broadband Network. The map shows that NBN fibre is being rolled out Civic, Acton and parts of Braddon which will allow more residents access to faster, affordable and more reliable broadband.

The map is another sign that construction of the National Broadband Network is continuing to accelerate, with work now having commenced or been completed to over 784,000 homes and businesses across Australia. The release of this map means that work is starting in this area and over the next few months, we’ll start to see NBN Co workers locally doing the detailed planning and inspection work, and then rolling out the fibre. Within around twelve months, construction of the NBN in Civic will be completed. This means that families and businesses will be able to connect to faster, more reliable broadband services. A standard NBN connection to the home or office is free – and NBN retail services are available for similar prices to what people are paying now, but for a much superior service.

The National Broadband Network is about preparing Australia for the future. It’s about ensuring that our local communities in places like Canberra are not left behind as the world and our local economy changes. From seeing your local doctor from home, to your kids being able to take a specialist class at another school – the NBN will change the way we live, work, and access services. It will lead to a new wave of innovation, and I’m delighted that people in Civic will be among the first to benefit.

On ABC666, I spoke with Adam Shirley about the challenge of balancing local ALP democracy with having a caucus that looks like the rest of Australia. While rank and file preselections are at the heart of the ALP, it's also true that in twelve decades, that system has failed to put a single Indigenous Labor member into the federal parliament.

2CN Morning Show - Nova Peris by Andrewleighmp on Mixcloud

Eight hours to go before voting closes for Triple J's Hottest 100. Here are my choices.

On the ABC website, I have an opinion piece on the upcoming Israeli election.

We owe it as friends to warn Israel, The Drum, 15 January 2013

Israelis will go to the polls next Tuesday to elect a new government.

If early signs are to be believed, Israel's most conservative government ever may be replaced by one even further to the right.

Already, there are signs that settler activity will intensify after the election.

The question for Australia is: what can we do to bring about peace in the Middle East?

First, some background.

In last November's United Nations vote on Palestinian status, Israel lost the support of 95 per cent of United Nations members (including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany). If there was one reason, it was the remorseless spread of settlements.

Around 510,000 Israeli settlers now reside in the West Bank. Since the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord, the number of Israeli settlers has doubled. With every block of settlements, a Palestinian state gets harder.

All these settlements are illegal under international law.

The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a party, says "the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies".

This isn't just a matter of legal niceties. From a practical standpoint, settlements make it vastly more difficult - if not impossible - to set up a Palestinian state.

This is a view shared by most mainstream foreign policy makers around the world.

For example, the Conservative British Government could teach a lesson to our timorous Coalition. UK Foreign Minister William Hague said Israel's settlements plans would "alter the situation on the ground on a scale that makes the two state solution, with Jerusalem as a shared capital, increasingly difficult to achieve."

New Zealand's conservative government went further still, voting yes to the UN resolution.

The final United Nations vote last year saw 138 countries vote in favour of giving Palestine "non-member state" status (akin to the Vatican). Forty-one nations (including Australia) abstained. Only nine voted in favour.

According to news reports, Foreign Minister Bob Carr subsequently phoned the Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riad Malki, and warned him to proceed cautiously at the UN now that Palestine's status had been upgraded.

Australia does not want to see early reference to the International Criminal Court or for the Palestinians to use their newly-gained status to seek membership of other UN bodies.

But the response from Israel was deeply troubling.

Within 48 hours of the UN vote, the Netanyahu Government announced it would build 3,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and unfreeze planning in the area known as the E1.It was difficult for reasonable observers to see this as anything other than the Israeli Government using settlement policy as punishment.

Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Israel had "repeatedly betrayed" the Obama Administration. The European Union said that the viability of a two-state solution was threatened by this systematic expansion of settlements. A two-state solution is the key to Israel's long-term security.

Yet that isn't the view from everyone.

In a recent article in The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland quoted two hardline members of Israel's right.

Referring to a Palestinian member of the Knesset, Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home Party said: "When you were still climbing trees, we had a Jewish state here... We were here long before you."

Projections have the new Jewish Home Party winning as many as 18 of the 120 Knesset seats.

Moshe Feiglin of the Likud party reportedly said: "You can't teach a monkey to speak and you can't teach an Arab to be democratic. You're dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers ... The Arab destroys everything he touches."As former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin has pointed out: "Israel's right-wing parties - which in 1993 rejected the Oslo Accords that envisaged Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the establishment of Palestinian autonomy in those areas - are now using, and abusing, that same agreement to prevent Palestinian statehood".

In this atmosphere, Australia has one responsibility above all: tell the Israelis, as one friend to another, that the path they are on is self-destructive.

Consider what happens if there is no Palestinian state, but only a Greater Israel as some settlers seek: Israel ends up governing a large Arab population.

As David Ben-Gurion famously argued, Israel can be a Jewish state, it can be a democratic state, and it can be a state occupying the whole of historical Israel. But it cannot be all three.

The risk, in the words of Tzipi Livni, leader of centrist party Hatnuah, is Israel becoming a "boycotted, isolated and ostracised state".

As a strong friend of Israel, Australia has a duty to highlight this danger.

The Australian Government has a warm regard for Israel as the strongest democracy in the Middle East. We acknowledge the power of its courts, of judges who can overrule its executive. We respect its freedom of expression, the lively political debate and acceptance of dissent like its vocal peace movement.

As an economist, I am a particular fan of Israel's vibrant culture of innovation, as exemplified in Dan Senor and Saul Singer's terrific book Start-Up Nation.

The Australian Government has firmly asked the Palestinians not to be provocative.

We have stressed that a return to negotiations based on recognition of Israel was the way to get a Palestinian state. But that won't work if Israel imagines it can count on our support even when it pursues a policy rendering a two-state solution unachievable.

There can be no peace without a Palestinian state. And there can be no Palestinian state if settlement activity roars ahead.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser.

Please post any comments on the Drum website.

Update: On a similar theme, David Remnick's New Yorker piece on Israel's rightward shift is well worth a read.

702 ABC Sydney with Richard Glover

2CC Breakfast With Mark Parton - 14 January 2013

I spoke with both Mark Parton and Richard Glover about Australia's gun buy-back program. We chatted about Philip Alpers' new paper for a Baltimore gun summit, and some of the issues it raised. Can population growth explain the increase in the number of guns in Australia? And has the number of households with a gun increased? Have a listen...

Yesterday I spoke with Mark Parton about Australia's gun buy-back program. We had a chat about the latest research coming out of Sydney University and some of the issues it raised.

Yesterday I spoke with Mark Parton about Australia's gun buy-back program. We had a chat about the latest research coming out of Sydney University and some of the issues it identified.

I have an opinion piece in today's Fairfax papers, drawing on research that I did as an ANU professor with Christine Neill, in which we looked at whether the 1997 National Firearms Agreement caused national gun deaths to trend downwards, and whether states that had more guns bought back subsequently had fewer firearms deaths.

Tougher Laws, Buyback on Target, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 2012
Guns Policy Saving Lives, The Age, 15 January 2012
Guns Policy Saving Lives, Canberra Times, 15 January 2012


Since the 1997 gun buyback, your chance of being a victim of gun violence has more than halved. Yet as yesterday’s Herald/Age pointed out, the number of guns in Australia has increased by nearly one-fifth over the same period. What’s going on?

The simplest answer is that Australia’s population is a fifth larger than it was in 1997. In reality, Australia has about as many guns per person as we did after the gun buyback. The only way you can conclude that the gun buyback has been undone is if to ignore a decade and a half of population growth.

Moreover, the figure that really matters is the share of gun-owning households. In 1997, many households used the chance to clean out the closet, and take a weapon to the local police station that hadn’t been used in years (the most common weapon handed in was a .22 calibre rifle). So the share of gun-owning households nearly halved, from 15 percent to 8 percent.

It’s quite possible that the new firearms in Australia are being bought by people who already have a weapon in the home. Adding a tenth gun to the household arsenal is much less risky than buying the first. Trouble is, surveys of household gun ownership are rare, so we don’t know whether the share of gun-owning households has risen.

To understand the policy success of the National Firearms Agreement, it’s important to recognise precisely what happened. Alongside the gun buyback, what had been a patchwork of state and territory regulations were strengthened and harmonised. Self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns and pump-action shotguns were banned. Firearm owners were required to obtain licences and register their weapons.

While the changes were backed by the then Labor Opposition, political credit must go to then Prime Minister John Howard and National Party leader Tim Fischer for standing up to the hardliners in their own parties. While they may have paid a short-term electoral price, history will judge them well.

In the 1990s, some argued that the gun buyback would make no difference to the firearms homicide and suicide rates. Yet a series of careful studies have shown otherwise. In the decade prior to Port Arthur, Australia experienced an average of one mass shooting (involving five or more deaths) every year. Since then, we have not had a single mass shooting. The odds of this being a coincidence are less than one in 100.

The gun buyback also had some unexpected payoffs. As an ANU economics professor, I collaborated with Wilfrid Laurier University’s Christine Neill to look at the effect of the Australian gun buyback on firearm suicide and homicide rates. Shocking as mass shootings are, they represent a tiny fraction of all gun deaths. If there’s a gun in your home, the person most likely to kill you with it is yourself, followed by your spouse.

Neill and I found that the firearm suicide and homicide rates more than halved after the Australian gun buyback. Although the gun death rate was falling prior to 1997, it accelerated downwards after the buyback. Looking across states, we also found that jurisdictions where more guns were bought back experienced a greater reduction in firearms homicide and suicide.

We estimate that the Australian gun buyback continues to save around 200 lives per year. That means thousands of people are walking the streets today who would not be alive without the National Firearms Agreement. Other work, including by public health researchers Simon Chapman, Philip Alpers, Kingsley Agho and Michael Jones, reaches a similar conclusion.

For the United States, reform is tougher. According to the General Social Survey, 32 percent of US households own a gun, and a patchwork of city and state laws means that restrictions in one jurisdiction are often undercut by people travelling interstate to buy a weapon.

Historically, the US National Rifle Association was a moderate body, akin to some Australian shooting bodies. It supported the first federal gun laws in the 1930s, and backed a ban on cheap ‘Saturday night specials’ in the 1960s. Yet after the ‘‘Cincinnati Revolt’’ in 1977, the NRA was taken over by the likes of Harlon Carter, Wayne LaPierre and Charlton Heston. It began opposing all restrictions on firearms ownership, including bans on assault rifles and armour-piercing bullets (‘cop killers’). Members of Congress rate the NRA the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation.

The challenge for American legislators today is to stand up to these powerful extremists, and follow the example of Australia’s leaders in 1996. With 86 Americans dying each day because of gun accidents, suicides or homicides, perhaps our experience can persuade sensible US legislators that there is a better way. As in Australia, the onus is on the conservative side of politics.

For Australia, the challenges in firearms policy are more modest, but real nonetheless. All states and territories should heed the call from federal Justice Minister Jason Clare to implement a national firearms register. This will help to keep track of weapons when they are sold or their owners move interstate. And it will help to ensure that Australian firearms do not fall into the wrong hands.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and a former professor of economics at the Australian National University. His website is www.andrewleigh.com.

Note to the curious: Yesterday's Fairfax report by Nick Ralston implied that Australia had imported 1 million guns since 1997. In fact, the research (here) shows that the figure of ‘1 million more guns’ is from 1988/89 onwards (not 1997). If you look at post-buyback imports, there have been about half a million guns imported into Australia since 1997/98. Off a firearms base of 2½-3 million, that’s approximately a 20 percent increase. Over the same period, Australia’s population rose from 18½ to 22.9 million (24 percent).

On the first AM Agenda for the year, I spoke with host David Lipson and Liberal Senator Mitch Fifield about how the declining tax/GDP share affects the government’s bottom line, why a profits-based mining tax beats royalties, and the complexities of providing arms to Syrian rebels.http://www.youtube.com/embed/ccBATNXvEPk?list=UUlVptSw61_R-JruxdSWQtTw

My column in the Chronicle this week is on local Canberra history, and a chance to get to know your neighbours a little better.

A good year to have a street party and make new friends, The Chronicle, 8 January 2013

January in Canberra. The cicadas in the Northbourne Avenue eucalypts are singing by 9am. Lakeshore paths are pounded with the determination of many new year’s resolutions. Most of us are heading back into the office (hopefully a bit more relaxed than when we left, and perhaps gently sunkissed).

I’m particularly excited for 2013 to get underway, because – as you would no doubt know – this year marks the Centenary of Canberra. It’s a great chance to learn more about the city’s past, to experience all the wonderful things it has to offer, and to have conversations about its future.

Centenary Director Robyn Archer and her team have a splendid variety of celebrations mapped out, from competitions to exhibitions, musical events to street theatre. As northsiders would’ve seen from the ‘Andrew Leigh’ fridge calendar that recently landed in your mailbox (please phone my office on 6247 4396 if you didn’t get one), many of the festivities will culminate on Canberra Day: 11 March 2013.

As part of reconnecting with our city’s history and stories, the centenary organisers are encouraging Canberrans to learn about the person after whom their street is named. I live in a suburb where the roads recall famous scientists, and our street is named after a man who apparently had a ‘hasty temper’, but whose 19^th century geological survey of Victoria was considered one of the best of its time.

Behind the hundreds of leafy streets of the Bush Capital lie hundreds of fascinating stories. In checking out the history of your street’s namesake, you might be surprised at what you find. The ACT Government’s place name search is an easy place to start, and can be found at http://goo.gl/TGk1u. If your research goes further, you can upload what you find to www.portraitofanation.com.au.

While you’re finding out more about your street name, why not get to know your neighbours better? Between my personal life of raising a young family and my public life of holding street corner meetings and community forums, I know for a fact that ours is a welcoming city with a strong sense of camaraderie.

Holding a street party is a brilliant way to get to know your neighbours better. Name your time and place, ask people to bring their favourite refreshment, and drop a photocopied invite into letterboxes: it couldn’t be easier. All you need to foster a greater sense of community is to make that first move. It’s also a lovely way to spend those long, warm Canberra evening hours while waiting for the cool evening breezes to blow in.

The Centenary of Canberra gives us all the opportunity to find out more about our history – those little stories that contribute to the bigger story of our beautiful city. While learning about our past, we can also reconnect with our current surrounds and maybe look at them with a new perspective, and maybe even with some new neighbourhood friends.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and a patron of the ‘Portrait of a Nation’ project. His website is www.andrewleigh.com.