Andrew Leigh

ACT JEWISH COMMUNITY GALA DINNER AND CAMPAIGN LAUNCH 

OLD PARLIAMENT HOUSE

CANBERRA

TUESDAY, 30 AUGUST 2016

***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY*** 

Thank you David Reiner, for the honour to address you all tonight. Can I too acknowledge that we’re meeting on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal people, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

I want to acknowledge some of the dignitaries in the room, including but not limited to Yael Cass, Jillian Segal, Alon Meltzer, my parliamentary colleagues Mark Dreyfus, Mike Kelly, Julian Leeser, Michael Danby and ACT Leader, Andrew Barr.

As you’ve just heard, the contribution of Jewish Australians to this nation began with European settlement, with at least eight Jewish convicts transported on the First Fleet. The first Jewish wedding in Australia is thought to have been held in 1832. The first synagogues in Melbourne, Hobart and Adelaide were founded in the 1840s. 

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

TV INTERVIEW

SKY NEWSDAY

TUESDAY, 30 AUGUST 2016

SUBJECTS: Labor’s positive plans for the budget.

PETER VAN ONSELEN: I'm joined now by the Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Dr Andrew Leigh, live from the nation's capital. Thanks for your company.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Pleasure Peter, great to be with you.

VAN ONSELEN: We'll get to some of your portfolio areas in a moment but I just wanted to ask you about the story across the top of the Financial Review – China donor says Australian MPs, quote, "Not delivering". You must have read this piece. It's unbelievable to my way of reckoning. He's the chairman of a property development group and he's given more than $1 million to both major parties over the last four years. And this is his quote from an editorial that he wrote in the Global Times newspaper. It's been translated into English. Quote, "The Australian-Chinese community is inexperienced in using political donations to satisfy political requests." How does that make you feel? That sounds to me like cash...for outcomes.

LEIGH: It was a strange quote indeed, Peter. The gentleman is not somebody who I've met before. But certainly my philosophy with political donations has always been that people should give because they want to contribute to the democratic process, not because they want to buy an outcome for themselves. As you say, doing so is to subvert what democracy is all about – which is politicians executing the will of the people who put them there.

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RADIO INTERVIEW
774 ABC MELBOURNE
MONDAY, 29 AUGUST 2016

SUBJECT/S: Marriage equality; Budget repair.

JON FAINE: Dr Andrew Leigh, good morning to you.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Good morning Jon, how are you?

FAINE: On behalf of the Labor Party, the issue in particular of marriage equality is a vexed one for the parliament. Malcolm Turnbull campaigned with a clear unambiguous promise to put it to a mass vote of the Australian people – a plebiscite. Do you not respect that that was what he was elected to do?

LEIGH: Mr Turnbull was against a plebiscite last year. Before the election he said one would happen this year, and now he's saying it might possibly be happen next year. And who knows whether that promise will actually come to fruition. But I'm guided very much by my former employer Michael Kirby, who said that a plebiscite would be alien to our traditions, unnecessary under the constitution and dangerous in the hostility it would cause to young LGBTI people.

The politics of hate is on the rise. A week before the Brexit vote, UK Labour MP Jo Cox was shot by a man shouting “death to traitors, freedom for Britain”. In France, Marine Le Pen draws parallels between Muslim migrants and the occupation of her country during World War II. In the US, Donald Trump wants to bring back torture, has called women “pigs” and made fun of a reporter with a disability.

In Australia, the share of voters who hate their opponents has risen from under one in six in the late 1990s to over one in four voters today. In the US, the share of people who say they would be unhappy if their child married someone from another political party has risen from 5 per cent to 41 per cent.

You can imagine the scene here in Australia. “Oh, thank goodness, sweetheart — when you said your girlfriend was a lesbian, I thought you said a Liberal.”

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RADIO INTERVIEW

2GB, MONEY NEWS WITH ROSS GREENWOOD

WEDNESDAY, 24 AUGUST 2016

SUBJECT/S: Labor’s genuine solution for budget repair

ROSS GREENWOOD: Let's now go to the Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh, who is very close to the decisions and the policies that the Labor Party will take to the government to try and push them through. Many thanks for your time, Andrew.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Pleasure Ross, great to be with you.

GREENWOOD: Can I just say, some of the superannuation – let's go there first up. Do you think the compromise that you are offering the government in any way shape or form places a question mark over its mandate to govern? After all, it took a set of policies to the Australian people. The Australian people have voted them in – by a very close margin – but have voted them in. Does that mean that the government has simply got to push through its own superannuation policies holus-bolus as they were?

LEIGH: Let's go through two things. Firstly why we have superannuation tax concessions, and secondly what a mandate is. We have superannuation tax breaks – as the government's own financial systems inquiry noted – to reduce reliance on the aged pension. But half of those superannuation tax breaks go to the top 20 per cent who – that report says – are unlikely to be relying on the aged pension.

The government's got a mandate to pursue the changes that it took to the election. But nothing in that says that Labor needs to fold and just pass whatever the government likes. What we're doing is we're putting constructive proposals on the table that we believe are more likely to get through the Coalition party room than the policies they took to the election, but also have the virtue that they're not retrospective. So we can add more money to the budget bottom line without making a retrospective change that's worried so many experts.

The Minefield

Thursday 25 August 2016 11:30AM 

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/theminefield/does-love-have-any-place-in-politics/7774916 

Next week, the 45th Parliament sits for the first time since the federal election. The government holds a paper-thin majority in the House of Representatives; the Liberal Party Room is suffering significant internal discord; and the new Senate is more fractious, demanding and wilfully recalcitrant than any in modern history.

These are the ideal conditions for political discord and outright opportunism.

Australia is hardly unique in this respect. Western politics as a whole seems to be following this trend toward greater political instability, less cooperation; more anger, less empathy. The media’s own fetishisation of the spectacle of conflict is doubtless complicit in this state of affairs.

But the proliferation of social movements and forms of political activism are not exempt from blame either.

On all sides, the prospects for constructive, broad-based collective action are under threat. The question is: if there is to be a change in our fraught and fractious political climate, what will be the agent? From where might the impetus for change come?

For one Australian politician, that change must come from within politics itself.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP
CANBERRA
THURSDAY, 25 AUGUST 2016

SUBJECT/S: Labor’s plan to protect Medicare; Budget; Superannuation; Scott Morrison; NBN; Petrol prices; Labor’s plan for a banking Royal Commission; Asbestos

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER AND SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMPETITION: Good morning everyone, thank you very much for coming out to Macquarie in the heart of the Fenner electorate. My name is Andrew Leigh, the Shadow Assistant Treasurer and member for Fenner and it's a great pleasure to be welcoming Opposition Leader Bill Shorten here to the National Health Co-op. The National Health Co-op began life as the West Belconnen Health Co-op in 2010, it was an initiative of the local community who wanted to do something to raise accessibility to bulk billing. Since then it has expanded to seven sites across the ACT and is now in conversation with three states across Australia. 

The co-op model is a great one for delivering healthcare, because it is focused not on how much money it makes but on how much good it can do in the local community. And in ensuring that people get access to bulk billing doctors by providing access through a membership based model to bulk billing doctors. The National Health Co-op ensures that people get ongoing care, get to see a doctor before problems turn too serious and get access to Allied Health services such as mental health, such as pathology, such as diabetic wrap around care. It's a great model and I would really like to thank Blake and the team for taking the opportunity to show Bill Shorten what the National Health Co-op is achieving here today, and to remind Canberrans and Australians about the value of Medicare for Australia. I will hand over now to Bill Shorten. 

E&EO TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC NEWSRADIO WITH MARIUS BENSON

WEDNESDAY, 24 AUGUST 2016

SUBJECT/S: Labor’s genuine solution for budget repair; Marriage equality plebiscite.

PRESENTER: To look at Labor's budget repair formula, Marius Benson is speaking to the Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh.

MARIUS BENSON: Andrew Leigh, Bill Shorten will be outlining savings of about $8 billion over a four-year period – the forward estimates. Now these are well-known savings. These are the savings you were promising during the election campaign?

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER AND SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMPETITION: These are fair savings Marius, which make sure that we're able to bring the budget back into surplus without hurting the most vulnerable Australians. Savings like the changes to negative gearing that we took to the last election – which experts recognise would not only add to the budget bottom line but would also help the housing situation in Australia that's seeing a generation of young Australians priced out of the housing market. 

AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT HOUSE

CANBERRA

TUESDAY, 23 AUGUST 2016

***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY***

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

I acknowledge Peter van Noorden, Professor Margaret Harding, Bruce Moore and the editorial team.

I was delighted to receive the call-up to speak today. But it only came yesterday, so I have been – as they say – lucubrating over the evening in preparing my remarks today.

This is the Second Edition of Oxford’s Australian National Dictionary. The first one to come along in 28 years – since 1988. It has indeed been a long time between verbs.

I've been asked to say a few words today and I'm happy to do that. 

Apophany. Ultracrepidarian. Stemwinder.