Andrew Leigh

ANDREW LEIGH MP

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER

SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMPETITION

MEMBER FOR FRASER

 

ED HUSIC MP

SHADOW PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY

TO THE SHADOW TREASURER

MEMBER FOR CHIFLEY 

 

ENTREPRENEURS TO KEEP AN EYE ON ESS CHANGES

Labor will task our recently announced Treasurer’s Entrepreneurial Council with an ongoing responsibility to recommend improvements to the employee share scheme changes introduced in Parliament today.

Employee share schemes are a vital support for start-ups seeking to attract the best talent in their early days.

That is why in March 2014, Bill Shorten called on the Government to consider changes to the scheme to encourage entrepreneurs to do what they do best.

A true tax package would tackle profit shifting on all fronts, Australian Financial Review, Wednesday 27 May 

Imagine, for a moment, that Bill Shorten had fronted up to announce Labor's multinational tax package back in March, and told the assembled media it would add a grand total of $30 million to the budget bottom line. Imagine he'd said that he hoped this figure would turn into billions, but he didn't have enough confidence in the estimates to count on more than $30 million.

If Labor had presented a package of this kind, we would have been laughed off Capital Hill, and rightly so.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

RADIO NATIONAL DRIVE

TUESDAY, 26 MAY 2015

SUBJECT/S: Marriage equality; GST on sanitary items; Budget fairness

PATRICIA KARVELAS: In the studio with me I have Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh, representing the Labor party - hello Andrew.

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER ANDREW LEIGH: G'day Patricia.

KARVELAS: And also Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinos, welcome Senator.

SENATOR ARTHUR SINODINOS: Representing the Liberal Party.

KARVELAS: Representing the Liberal Party! Well, let's hear about that. Let's go to an issue which is just breaking. It is going wild on social media and no-doubt, I think, leading news bulletins as well: Bill Shorten wants to bring on the marriage equality debate. He is tabling his own bill in the lower house next week, bringing it on. Arthur Sinodinos, I'll start with you: does this mean that next week the Liberal party room will finally discuss this issue?

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC NEWSRADIO

TUESDAY, 26 MAY 2015

SUBJECT/S: NATSEM modelling on Budget unfairness; Marriage equality

MARIUS BENSON: Andrew Leigh, the Prime Minister has called on Labor to release the research on which you are basing your claims that the Budget is going to damage low income families in particular. Are you prepared to release that research?

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER ANDREW LEIGH: Marius, the model that we're using for this is the same model that the Government has used when it has asked NATSEM to do work for the Treasury and the Department of Social Services. It's the same model, indeed, that the Liberal Party had NATSEM use when NATSEM did work for the Liberal Party a couple of years ago, leading the PM to call them Australia's top modeller. So I'm really not sure what the puzzle is out of this. Labor has had to do this research because the Family Impact Statement that had been in the Budget going right back to Peter Costello's time was taken out of the last couple of budgets.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

ONLINE INTERVIEW

FAIRFAX BREAKING POLITICS

MONDAY, 25 MAY 2015

SUBJECT/S: Budget hurting low income families; Marriage equality

CALLUM DENNES: Joining me now are our Monday regulars Andrew Leigh and Andrew Laming. Good morning to you both. Andrew Laming, do you accept NATSEM's modelling that the budget disproportionally affects lower-income families?

FEDERAL MEMBER FOR BOWMAN ANDREW LAMING: I don't accept any evidence until I've seen the backend of the analysis. We haven't seen that and we won't see it for some time. There's great detail in a budget, I doubt that they've looked really closely at the childcare measure or that they're capable of even working out the impact of the extra subsidies that are available to families. But let's go back a step, this is not a race to see how much welfare you can get, this is a race to give Australia the best possible future and moving people off welfare and into a job is an absolutely legitimate goal that may not be picked up in a NATSEM report. But Australia has $5.5 billion to reactivate and kick-start small business, it's going to have a huge impact that wouldn't have occurred had there not been that stimulus.

DENNES: So this modelling found that the poorest 20 per cent of families lose the most, whereas the top 20 per cent of families don't lose anything. On the face of it, that doesn't seem fair, does it?

LAMING: Well it seems to come out of the NATSEM report each year, it seems to be their conclusion even before they've started to do the analysis and yet again they've said the same thing.

DENNES: So you're suggesting a conspiracy here?

LAMING: Well I'm suggesting superficial analysis potentially until I've seen the way they've done the analysis. There's an enormous amount of detail in our childcare package that responds directly to the needs of children in centres as ascertained by those running the centres. That means, those that need it most will get a 100% subsidy that could not possibly be modelled by NATSEM.

With taxes, we build society

Speech to the Deloitte Tax Symposium

Eight score years ago, about 45 kilometres south-west of where we meet today, people gathered for a conversation about tax. Many of the features of that conversation would be familiar to us here today. Fairness was a key theme, passions were running hot and the debate was political at its core. Not everything was the same though, at the end of my remarks we’ll conduct a civil question session, and have a chat over pastries and coffee. The earlier conversation ended quite differently, with gunfire, bayonets and the death of at least 27 people.

I’m talking of course of the Eureka Rebellion of 1854, the ground zero of Australian tax debate. The source of the anger that led to the Eureka Rebellion was the taxation of miners through a licence, levied regardless of the profitability of a claim. The licence fees were collected by an often corrupt and brutal police force, representing a government that in the view of the miners was failing to provide the infrastructure to support a booming population.

So while I’m sure that Deloitte probably had the boutique spas, fine restaurants and local wines more at the top of mind when they chose Daylesford for this conference, it is apt that we’re meeting here in the heart of the Victorian goldfields for the Deloitte tax symposium.

We’re often tempted into lazy nostalgia for an era of easy reform in Australia that never was—a wonk arcadia where tax policy is made with bipartisan support and electoral glee. It’s good to remind ourselves that tax has always been controversial and that while the dispassionate practitioners in this room might wish it were different, tax is political.

I’d like to speak briefly today about where I think tax reform is up to currently in Australia, my views on ways forward and finally an update on the opposition’s tax policy process. I’m going to keep my remarks relatively free of political commentary, but tax is inherently political. I trust you’ll understand if at times I sound a little less like the economics professor I once was, and a little more like Labor’s Shadow Assistant Treasurer.

Remarks to the 2015 NATSEM Post-Budget Forum

Parliament House, Canberra

It's a real pleasure to be here with some of my favourite economics thinkers – Michelle Grattan, Saul Eslake, Ben Phillips and Arthur Sinodinos - and at an event organised by NATSEM at the University of Canberra. Some of you may know that last year, perhaps due to an unfortunate printing error, the Family Impact Statement was left out of the Budget. That meant that we couldn't observe some of the analysis that had been possible going back to Peter Costello’s era. Fortunately, Australia had NATSEM and they were able to conduct some vital analysis on the distributional impacts of last year's budget which made up for the accidental printing error, and helped spark a national debate around fairness.

I wanted to speak firstly today about the things I like in the Budget. Given that there's no person I like more on the Coalition side than Arthur Sinodinos, it seems churlish to start a conversation about the Budget without talking about the things that I think are good in the package. There is the National Disability Insurance Scheme IT upgrade. There’s investment in the Australian Bureau of Statistics which will be going towards an IT upgrade there as well. So long as that isn't accompanied with cuts to the bureau's surveys, that will be important too. I also like the instant asset write-off. It's a policy that aims to encourage investment, recognising that what you want to do with tax cut that change behaviour is to work on the margin. We had an instant asset write-off under the previous government which was scrapped for by this government. My only concern about the new one is that it's only there for two years. What will happen when it suddenly finishes?

Why should we care about inequality?

The 2015 Economic and Social Policy Public Lecture

University of Wollongong

Dutch economist Jan Pen once suggested a simple way of visualising the extent of inequality in a society. Imagine, he suggested, a parade, in which each person’s resources were represented by their height.

Suppose we were to conduct such a parade in Australia. People of average wealth would be average height. Those with half the average wealth would be half the average height. Those with twice the average wealth would be twice the average height.

Let’s suppose the parade took an hour to pass you. What would you see?

For the first half a minute, people would be literally underground. These are the people with more debts than assets. Perhaps they are homeless, but have credit card debts. Or they are a business owner about to go bankrupt.

Then would come the little people. For the first few minutes, they are no bigger than lego figures. They might have some clothing and a television, but little else. By the ten minute mark, people are the size of a child’s doll. They might own an old car.

Twenty minutes have gone by, but still the marchers are no taller than a newborn baby. Most probably don’t have regular work – they might have odd jobs, or be reliant on the pension. Few would dream about them – or their children – breaking into the central Sydney property market.

It’s now half an hour. The watchers are getting bored. Heights aren’t rising much. Are we really only halfway through the parade?

E&EO TRANSCRIPT

DOORSTOP INTERVIEW

UNIVERSITY OF WOOLONGONG

WEDNESDAY, 20 MAY 2015

SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER ANDREW LEIGH: I'm here with my colleagues Stephen Jones and Sharon Bird, and we've just been touring the iAccelerate building at the University of Wollongong. Learning about their programs to encourage women entrepreneurs; engaging with companies producing 3D printers and pop-up ergonomic desks and potentially game-changing medical technology. It's really impressive to see the range of technologies and the extent to which firms are looking towards the future. It's exactly that future that Bill Shorten was looking to build towards with Labor's announcements in the budget reply about investment in science, technology, engineering and maths, and supporting Australian students to learn coding. I might just throw now to my colleague Sharon Bird to make a couple more quick comments.

MEDIA RELEASE

VISIONLESS ABBOTT VACATES THE FIELD ON SHARING ECONOMY

The Abbott Government is ducking responsibility for leading a serious conversation about the sharing economy.

Today’s ruling by the Australian Tax Office shows the Government is leaving it up to line agencies to drive national policymaking on services like Uber.                

These are not the actions of a future-focused government.

Internationally, some authorities have ruled that sharing economy apps represent a different type of service which requires a distinct regulatory approach. But the Abbott Government has been slow to recognise that new technologies may require the rules to be updated.