A Musical Interlude
- Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony (Allegro) - his great musical denunciation of the craziness of Stalin's era
- Leoncavallo, Pagliacci, ‘Vesti la guibba’ - I chose the 1902 Caruso recording, which is scratchy, but magnificent nonetheless
- Wagner, Tannhauser, ‘Wie Todesahnung’ - I used to take singing lessons for fun, and this is one I enjoyed singing
- Carl Vine, 5th Symphony, Part II (Tarantella) - a slightly crazed movement from the unique Australian composer
Here's a photo afterwards, with ArtSound general manager Chris Deacon (on the left) and Jim Mooney (on the right).
SchoolKids Bonus this January could be last for ACT families - Media Release - 9 January
MEDIA RELEASE
SCHOOLKIDS BONUS COULD BE THE LAST FOR 12,800 FAMILIES IN THE ACT
If the Abbott Government gets its way, more than a million families will find it much more difficult to pay for school books and uniforms from next year.
This January, 1.3 million Australian families will be receiving the SchoolKids Bonus, a payment of $410 for every primary school child and $820 for every secondary school child.
The payment, developed by Labor when it was in Government, is made at the start of Terms One and Three to help cover the cost of items such as stationery, textbooks, software, laptops, bags, uniforms and shoes.
The SchoolKids Bonus also can help cover the cost of school camps, excursions and extracurricular activities such as music lessons.
However, the Abbott Government has introduced legislation to scrap the SchoolKids Bonus, which will affect 12,812 families in the ACT.
If this legislation passes the Senate, the January SchoolKids Bonus payment will be their last.
Federal Labor representatives in the ACT, Andrew Leigh, Gai Brodtmann and Kate Lundy say that since 2012 the SchoolKids Bonus has delivered much needed relief for low and middle income families struggling to meet the costs of their kids’ education.
Every one of these families will be worse off when the SchoolKids Bonus is scrapped.
The Coalition promised to increase employment and cut living costs. Instead, Canberrans are seeing employment cuts and increases in living costs.
The average family with two kids will be $1,230 worse off every year and $15,000 worse-off over the life of their children’s education.
This is a savage cut from a Government that clearly doesn’t care about Australian families or our kids’ education. The Abbott Government’s priorities are all wrong.
Logging Off
Real world has warm people with offline lives, The Chronicle, 7 January 2014
In an article for the Weekly Standard last year, Matt Labash launched a broadside against social media, arguing that sites like Facebook, Pintrest and Twitter were turning our society into a "Twidiocracy". Labash bemoaned the fact that so many of us incessantly check our mobile phones for updates, rather than engaging with those around us.
As a pretty regular user of social media, I read Labash's column with a red face. If I'm catching a bus or plane, I'm much more likely to be plugged into a device than chatting with the person next to me. My wife Gweneth took a photo that makes me cringe, showing me at our kitchen counter, answering constituent email on the laptop while our boys (aged 1, 4 and 6) played under my feet.
Social media is terrific for staying in touch with friends on the other side of the world, or for linking up people with disparate interests. A year ago, I tweeted that I was looking for a researcher to collaborate on looking at long run trends in CEO pay. Melbourne economic historian Mike Pottenger got in touch, and we'd written an article together before we even met face to face.
But like lottery tickets, online technologies such as email, Facebook and Twitter work off what the psychologists call "variable interval reinforcement schedule". In other words, most of the time you get nothing, but occasionally a nice payoff comes along, in the form of a message from a long-lost friend, or praise for your work. It turns out that humans are particularly vulnerable to this kind of unpredictable reward, and are more likely to become addicted to it. If you've ever checked email more than once a minute, you know what I mean.
And then there's the negativity. Study after study has shown that people are more likely to say unnecessarily harsh things about one another on electronic media. There's something about impersonal technologies that have the potential to bring out our catty side. Read to the end of almost any long comments thread, and you'll find people duking it out.
So how can we capture the manifest benefits of email and social media without becoming slaves to the machine? Surprisingly, Silicon Valley may have some lessons. Some technology firms are now identifying times in each day when employees are not expected to reply to email. For example, 9-11am might be designated as time to think, write or code. I've started (with limited success, I admit) trying something similar in my own office.
Indeed, once you recognise that the technology has an addictive bent and a negative bias, it becomes a smidgin easier not to check in as often, and not to take criticism so seriously. Perhaps taking the kids to the pool might be a better use of time than responding to that twit-crit? Could a phone call to a lonely aunt be more valuable to the world than a Facebook status update?
More radically, I've been trying lately to implement "inbox zero"- the strategy of answering, filing or deleting all email immediately. It's hard at the outset, but does seem to help reduce the time you spend looking at the same message, deciding how best to answer it.
So if you can manage it this summer, check to see if you've got the balance right between the online and offline world. Because there are some terrific books and BBQs, parks and pools just waiting for your attention.
Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser and the Shadow Assistant Treasurer.
Australia Post - 2CC interview, 7 January 2014
E&OE TRANSCRIPTRADIO INTERVIEW
2CC WITH SUMMER BREAKFAST HOST CHRIS MAC
TUESDAY, 7 JANUARY 2014
SUBJECT/S: Australia Post, Medibank Private, Cory Bernardi and abortion, the regulation of Australian charities, Japanese whaling, asylum seekers and Abbott Government broken promises
CHRIS MAC: The Member for Fraser is Andrew Leigh. Andrew, a very good morning. You're talking to one of your constituents.
ANDREW LEIGH: G'day Chris. Good to chat with you.
MAC: Firstly, the ACCC, through Rod Sims, is apparently saying to the Government, if you want to make some money sell the remaining assets we have. We haven't got much left in the can to sell have we?
LEIGH: There's only a certain number of things Chris. While I certainly think you have to have a sensible conversation about these issues, I do wonder about the wisdom of selling off Australia Post. I wonder that there's not more National Party members, for example, in the bush, pointed out that their cost of getting letters around would be an awful lot higher if we let the free market rip for letter delivery.
MAC: I suppose it isn't exactly a GrainCorp issue but for the people who live in country towns it's probably as important as what happened to GrainCorp.
LEIGH: I would have thought so. I mean if you're in a small Australian country town and the postal service is an important link to the rest of the world. Australians cross-subsidise letter delivery. It's no secret that it is cheaper to deliver a letter in the centre of Sydney than it is in the back of Bourke. But we live in a country where we think it ought to cost the same amount of money to send a letter from one place to another and you shouldn't be penalised for living in a regional or rural area.
MAC: Now, while it wasn't said very loudly by the now Government, there was a suggestion they always intended to sell Medibank Private. That looks like that'll certainly be on the agenda for 2014 Andrew Leigh. But in doing that are there any legislative impediments? Do they have to get a law through or can they simply make an administrative decision to sell Medibank Private?
LEIGH: Chris, my understanding is they have to get legislation through Parliament which either means they'll be dealing with The Greens as they did in taking off the debt cap or dealing with Clive Palmer as they intend to do with their intention to abolish the mining tax. But our concern with Medibank Private is just to make sure that that doesn't drive up premiums. One of the roles that Medibank Private has been able to play is in putting a little bit of downward pressure on healthcare premiums. We've just seen the Government allow the biggest increase in premiums in a decade and in that environment they need to provide Australians with some reassurance that selling Medibank Private won't just see private health insurance go up and up and up.
MAC: If it goes up, and I don't think this is just cosmetics Andrew, if they do sell it, I wouldn't like it to still be called Medibank Private because it would give I would think a false indication that it's somehow still got that role. If it's purely out there as private, it's a bit like changing NBF changing it's name to Bupa really.
LEIGH: Well, the question then is whether you'd have to sell it at a discount. Part of the strength of Medibank Private is its brand and if the Government intends to change the name at the time then they're going to get less money for it. My guess is they're not factoring that into what they're doing. But I can see the argument you're making.
MAC: Just in terms of transparency, people say 'well you're Medibank Private'. It's like when they sold the Commonwealth Bank, I remember famously saying there's a lot of religion in the Commonwealth Bank. I tend to think there's a lot of religion in the heritage of Medibank Private. But let's move on. We're chatting to Andrew Leigh, the Member for Fraser this morning. Cory Bernardi, from your point of view Andrew is he the gift that keeps on giving?
LEIGH: Mr Bernardi is someone who is close to the Prime Minister. He was his parliamentary secretary until relatively recently and the views that he seems to be espousing are a long way out of the Australian mainstream. I think Australians pride ourselves in being a tolerant, multicultural country which recognises the fair go and doesn't rip itself to pieces over questions like abortion in the way the United States does. That's a pretty healthy characteristic and Mr Bernardi's comments, I think, would fit better in the extreme wing of U.S. politics than what aspires to be a mainstream Australia political party like the Liberal Party.
MAC: As soon as this story came up and being old enough to remember, I remember the name Bertram Wainer, who was someone trying to bring in virtually the system we have in place now to get rid of backyard abortions. He was a man who was dreadfully vilified in Victoria back in the 1970s. It just frightens me Andrew Leigh, that we have a situation here where these kinds of emotions. Now Luke Bona, our afternoons presenter here on Canberra Live between three and six, took a number of calls. There was one particular point, a lady rang and spoke to Luke and made the point that in terms of the statistics that were being offered in Cory Bernardi's book, apparently they didn't take account of the fact that there was no difference in terms of interpretation when they talk about numbers of abortions each year between those that are terminations and those that are miscarriages, which are apparently referred to, in the call that Luke took from this lady who had worked in the health profession, as being spontaneous abortions. And so, the numbers there may look higher than what they tragically are.
LEIGH: That's right. We don't split those out in those statistics. But I think the view shared by the vast majority of Australians is that abortion should be safe, legal and rare, recognising that if you try and criminalise abortion, effectively what you do is drive it underground and you end up with people engaging in what you describe as those unsafe backyard abortions in which women can end up being badly injured and can end up being infertile as a result. I think it's a pro-family policy to make sure that abortion is available as an option to women and also to make sure that counselling is there, and that kids are using contraception when they first have sex so they don't get into situation of an unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
MAC: Absolutely. Now, something that's a little more administrative but it does have some impacts here. There has been a bit of change, more than just tinkering too, changes in relation to the way we administer charities and how they are looked at particularly from a taxation perspective. What are these changes Andrew Leigh?
LEIGH: The Labor Government brought in place an Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission Chris, and the aim of doing that was to simplify the red tape on charities; to make sure charities didn't have to keep on proving themselves every time they went to government. You had things like a charities passport. And getting rid of the old idea that the definition of a charity depended on laws going back to 1601 and instead bringing in a statutory definition of a charity. I'm a bit concerned as the Labor front-bencher responsible for this that the Coalition seems to be walking away from a set of reforms that were worked out with the charitable sector in order to reduce the red-tape burden on them. I don't know who has Kevin Andrews’ ear but whoever it is seems to be dragging him back to 1601 and saying you don't need to update charities' laws, you don't need a charity regulator, things are all fine as they are. It's not the message we heard when we went out and talked to the bulk of Australian charities.
MAC: Strange one. Time is starting to beat us. I want to get your views very quickly on a few things. Of course revelations of whales being caught and captured by the Japanese in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. And this other story that's emerged this morning of apparently a situation that occurred before Christmas where it's alleged but not confirmed that the Australian Navy has apparently taken control of a boat that was seeking asylum on the Ashmore Islands and given some sort assistance to the boat and turned back to Indonesian waters.
LEIGH: We know very little about what's going on with asylum seekers because of the veil of secrecy that the Government has thrown over this. But certainly I would like to know more about what's going on there. I think it's appropriate if our tax dollars are being used in a naval operation like this, that Australians know what's going on. With the whaling vessel, the clear pledge from the Government before the election was that they would be sending a boat down to monitor the whaling. We've seen that as another broken promise, joining a list of, by my count, at least a dozen broken promises by the Government. I think that people are just beginning to get that sense that maybe the Abbott Government isn't the Government they thought they were going to be before the election.
MAC: The honeymoon looks to be well and truly over. Andrew Leigh, thank you very much for your time this morning.
LEIGH: Good to chat, thank you.
Media Release - Coalition Helps Big Businesses Keep Taxes Secret
ANDREW LEIGH MP
SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER
MEMBER FOR FRASER
MEDIA RELEASECoalition Helps Big Businesses Keep Taxes Secret
Australians should be very concerned about the Abbott Government's plans to allow big business to hide their tax affairs, Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh said today.
In today’s Australian Financial Review, Assistant Treasurer Arthur Sinodinos said: “We don’t want to get into a situation where we’re putting more and more information out there.”
"While in office, Labor put in place measures that required 200 of Australia's largest firms to disclose their total income, taxable income and tax paid," said Dr Leigh.
"We did this to make sure that big firms paid their fair share of tax.
"But as we've seen in other areas, the Coalition wants to keep the sunlight out.
"After hiding the boats and hiding the ministers, they're now hiding the tax returns of big businesses.
"Having recently reversed Labor's $700 million crackdown on offshore profit-shifting by multinationals, the Government is reversing transparency measures on the tax paid by large firms.
By allowing firms to avoid public scrutiny, Australians could miss out on millions of dollars of extra revenue.
"Every extra loophole for multinationals means a bigger tax burden on families," said Dr Leigh
Making Multinationals Pay Their Share
We're Cheating Ourselves if Multinationals Don't Pay Up, Herald Sun, 2 January 2014
New York Governor Mario Cuomo once said that parties campaign in poetry, but govern in prose. In the same spirit, one Australian political party seem to think it can campaign for the middle, but govern for its base.
With the change of government, we've seen Prime Minister Tony Abbott's pre-election poetry turn into prose of a quite different character. Apparently, the secret to solving a "budget emergency" is to lower the tax burden on carbon emitters and remove a profits-based mining tax - measures that were anticipated to raise $17 billion over the next four years.
It's lucky we didn't have a 'budget catastrophe', or the government would have had to solve it by getting rid of income taxes and company taxes too.
In the meantime, Treasurer Joe Hockey has sternly told us that the "Age of Entitlement" must come to an end. So battlers are losing their income support payments, the School Kids bonus and low-income superannuation contribution.
But for billionaires, the age of entitlement will continue, with the Government keeping a tax-break for wealthy retirees, providing a tax cut to mining billionaires and hoping to give them back the private health insurance rebate.
Yet one of the most disturbing decisions of the government has been to keep a $700 million tax break to multinational companies. In government, Labor's economic team - particularly former Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury - took careful measures to ensure that multinationals paid their fair share of tax.
Given that our tax base relies more heavily on company taxes than many other nations, that is an issue that matters a great deal to Australia.
There are several tricks that multinational firms use to shift profits out of Australia and into low-tax jurisdictions. For example, they might arrange for their Bermuda arm to sell their Australian arm a paperclip at a cost of $1 million.
The Australian arm claims that as a $1 million tax deduction and the money is effectively shifted offshore.
Thankfully, that particular loophole is closed, but a similar trick can be played with debt. If the Bermuda subsidiary makes a multi-million dollar loan to the Australian arm, a million dollars a year can be shifted out of Australia in the form of interest payments.
The interest payment is a tax deduction in Australia and the profit is moved to Bermuda, where the company tax rate is considerably lower. Same thimbles, different peas. Now you see it, now you don't.
Labor believes passionately in the value of free enterprise. We support foreign investment. But we also believe in the fundamental Australian value that everyone should pay their fair share of tax.
Mr Hockey's announcement that he will forego $700 million of company tax revenue effectively means that he has to go harder on Australian households. A Treasurer who thinks it's better to take away money from children on their first day of school than ensure multinationals pay tax is one who is out of step with the Australian concept of the fair go.
The issue matters on the international stage too. Next year, the heads of the world's 20 biggest countries will come to Brisbane to talk economics. One of the big issues on the agenda will be making sure tax laws on multinational firms keep up with globalisation and technological change.
To maintain a fair tax system, we need to play a leadership role.
Under Labor, Australia was playing a strong role on making sure multinational firms paid their fair share of tax. Labor believes that all of us have a social obligation to contribute to shared services, like roads and railways, schools and public parks. More loopholes in the tax code eventually means more potholes in our roads.
One reason the issue hasn't received as much airplay as it should is that the tax arrangements for multinational firms are fiendishly complicated.
As an economist, I love the details, but I've spared you the technical terms and statutory provisions here, because they don't matter as much as the point of principle.
Unless we cut services or raise debt, every tax break to one person means a tax hike to someone else.
It's time Mr Hockey stopped getting tough with battlers and started muscling up to the billionaires.
Andrew Leigh is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer.
The Lucky Country, 50 Years On
Hard to Find Equality in the Lucky Country, Australian Financial Review, 20-26 December 2013
If you could take a one-way trip in a time machine back to 1964, would you choose to do so? Before you answer, recall that your income (accounting for purchasing power) would be less than half what it is today, and your life expectancy at least a decade shorter.
If you’re female, you would face greater sexual harassment and more pay discrimination. If you’re non-Anglo, you would be more vulnerable to violence. If you’re a gay man, sexual activity would be illegal. If you’re Indigenous, there would be pools and pubs displaying signs that said ‘No Blacks’.
And yet there are two important metrics on which things have worsened over the past half-century.
The first is social capital, or civic connectedness. In Disconnected, I tracked a plethora of indicators of the strength of our community ties, and estimated that on many measures, Australia in the 1950s and 1960s was at our most connected.
Compared with the 1960s, fewer Australians now report that they are an active member of any community organisation. A similar picture emerges from tracking membership trends of particular organisations, such as Athletics Australia, the Scouts, Guides, Rotary or RSL. Political party membership has declined, and fewer Australians play an organised sport.
In 1964, nearly half the population attended church on a monthly basis (or more frequently). Today, less than one-fifth of adults are regular churchgoers. We are less likely to know our neighbours, and have fewer friends we can trust with a confidence.
The second change is that we have become more unequal. In Battlers and Billionaires, I crunched the numbers on the gap between rich and poor in Australia, and found that the gap had significantly widened since the 1960s and 1970s.
Over the past generation, the top 1 percent share of income has doubled, and the top 0.1 percent share has tripled. We only have comparable earnings data back to the mid-1970s, but that shows earnings growth of 15 percent (after inflation) for the bottom tenth compared with 59 percent for the top tenth.
Writing of the 1960s, economist William Rubinstein noted: ‘most of the wealthy now eschewed conspicuous consumption and ostentatious display of riches and privilege as politically unwise and economically costly’. Social commentator Craig McGregor observed the wealthy ‘feel under some pressure to be accepted by ordinary working Australians rather than the other way round’.
As an economist, I feel slightly guilty about having written two books that praise the 1960s. This is, after all, an era in which our economy was less efficient, our society was more intolerant, and our foreign policy was more insular.
But the data also persuades me that Australia of fifty years ago was more socially connected and more equal than we are now. The challenge today is not to travel back to 1964, but to find innovative ways of ensuring we build fraternity and equality in today’s lucky country.
Andrew Leigh is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer. His books include Disconnected (2010) and Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia (2013).
Labor Forces Government to Back Down on GST Plan - Media Release - Thursday, 19 December 2013
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
Transcript: Coalition Cuts and the NDIS - ABC Radio National
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