Andrew Leigh

SPEECH TO THE NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING CEREMONY

NATIONAL WORKERS MEMORIAL, CANBERRA

I acknowledge that we are meeting on the land of the Ngunnawal people, and pay respect to their elders past and present. On a beautiful, clear Canberra morning like today, you can really tell that they were on to something in making this land their home.

Thank you to the CFMEU for organising today’s ceremony and inviting me to share in today’s commemorations.

It wouldn’t be news to anyone here that the CFMEU has a reputation for toughness. You would also know that this toughness and willingness to take a stand is directed to the best possible end: protecting workers’ rights, their safety at work, and ultimately their lives.

These aren’t things that our community should compromise on, no matter how much some of those in the parliament may want us to. Thank you for always holding the line.     

On this date each year we come together to reflect on all the lives that have been lost at work, and the lives changed forever because of injuries sustained on the job.

We pause to think about the fathers and husbands, the sons and mates, the daughters and wives who went to work and did not come home.

One loss of life at work is too many. One broken limb or blinded eye is too many. Sadly, more than 40 Australians have already been killed in workplace accidents this year alone. Hundreds more have sustained serious injuries.

So many of you here today know someone that has been affected by a workplace tragedy. We mourn your loss and stand beside you in your grief. We also share your anger at deaths and injuries which should never have happened.

All workplace deaths are preventable.

It is of vital importance that government, unions and employers acknowledge this fact and work together to stamp out unsafe practices, minimise risks and send workers home safely. Every worker, every day.

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

ONLINE INTERVIEW

FAIRFAX BREAKING POLITICS

MONDAY, 27 APRIL 2015

SUBJECT/S: Scott McIntyre; pension assets test; marriage equality.

CALLUM DENNESS: Joining me now is Labor member for Fraser in the ACT and Shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh. Good morning.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Good morning, Callum.

DENNESS: Now we saw SBS presenter Scott McIntyre sacked over the weekend for tweets that were labelled by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull as offensive, inappropriate and despicable. Do you think it's fair that someone has lost their jobs for airing an opinion that was controversial?

LEIGH: Ultimately this will come down to the employment contract that the particular journalist has with SBS, but I do think that the tweets were offensive and were wrong.

DENNESS: No irony here that some of the people most outraged by these tweets were some of the same people that were involved in the 18C debate?

LEIGH: I think it is important to remember, on the issue of free speech, that the rubber hits the road when you're talking about opinions with which you disagree or find distasteful. That's separate from the question as to what a particular employment relationship was, but I do think we want to make sure that we've got space in the broad Australian public debate for a wide range of views.

MEDIA RELEASE

HOCKEY’S TAX CONTORTIONS CAN’T HIDE LACK OF PLAN

Joe Hockey is still flailing around looking for a plan to tackle multinational tax avoidance with only weeks to go to the Budget.

When Labor announced our $7.2 billion package to ensure multinationals pay their fair share by targeting debt loading and deductions, the Treasurer dismissed it within hours.

Yet today Mr Hockey seems to have had a change of heart, with reports the budget may include measures to stop companies loading debt into their Australian operations. 

This would be a clear acknowledgement from the Treasurer that Labor has had it right all along.  

Speech to the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute Conference

Australian National University

Thanks for having me here today. It’s great to see the positive influence that the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute (TTPI) is having in its short life. I’m reliably informed by my staff that TTPI Director Miranda Stewart has been at every tax event that they have attended since I started my term as Shadow Assistant Treasurer. I’m not sure whether to feel sorrier for Miranda or for my staff.

It’s great to be in a room full of people who are excited by tax policy as I am. It’s not always an easy topic to get people excited about, and this challenge is by no means unique to me. I read with interest in Crikey last week that the ATO has commissioned BuzzFeed to come up with some funny tax stories. Their efforts so far have included ‘Your Superannuation Explained, But With Dogs’ complete with hilarious dog gifs. I doubt it’s going to win BuzzFeed a Walkley, but I respect the ATO’s willingness to try new things to get people interested in their tax affairs.

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 hope you’ll find it interesting, even if my remarks are not accompanied by any LOLcats.

I’m going to keep my remarks relatively free of political commentary, but tax is inherently political, so I hope you will indulge me if at times I sound a little less like an economics professor and a little more like Labor’s Shadow Assistant Treasurer.

Toughen up tax for the big end of town, Business Spectator, 20 April 

The Australian Parliament is currently deep into an inquiry into corporate tax-dodging. The investigation has been sparked by real concern in the community that some big firms aren’t paying their fair share. That’s not surprising when, in the past few weeks alone, we’ve seen reports about our 900 biggest firms paying an average of only 19c in the dollar in tax, and major multinationals sending billions offshore to Singapore and beyond.      

Some of the tax lawyers and accountants who’ve come before the Senate’s hearings have tried to bamboozle with detail about their Byzantine tax structures. But in fact, one of the main methods companies use to shift profits overseas is as simple as lending money from one place to another.

When we think about lending, we tend to imagine a transaction between a bank and borrower who have no relationship with each another. But this is by no means the only way to borrow money, whether as an individual or a business.

Just as you might have borrowed money from your parents to buy your first car, multinational firms often lend cash from one arm of the company to another.

The argument companies make for this is that they know the affairs of their subsidiaries better than a bank does. This generally means one arm of a company can borrow more money at a better rate from another arm than they could from a bank. 

E&OE TRANSCRIPT

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC NEWSRADIO

MONDAY, 20 APRIL 2015

SUBJECT/S: Budget; Wayne Swan.

STEVE CHASE: Andrew Leigh, good morning.

ANDREW LEIGH, SHADOW ASSISTANT TREASURER: Good morning, Steve.

CHASE: Do you have any sympathy for Mr Hockey's predicament, his deficit problem, given the prevailing circumstances? We've just heard from Deloitte Access Economics that we've got weak wages growth, we've got poor company profits and all this is undermining the Government's budget plans and we could be headed for a recession?

LEIGH: Steve, I think the Deloitte report paints a concerning picture about the Australian economy. They speak about the U.S. doing a little better than expected, China doing a little worse than expected. But they also make very clear that despite Eric Abetz's claims, wages growth is the lowest it's been in a decade. These are challenging circumstances, but of course, Peter Costello faced an Asian financial crisis and Wayne Swan faced a global financial crisis so, Joe Hockey ought to be able to deal with iron ore prices coming back now to where they were in 2008.

CHASE: Well how is Labor going to contribute to meeting that challenge you've outlined there. Are you going to help the Government in this time of crisis?

LEIGH: We certainly will be. We've put on the table a plan to fairly tax multinationals that returns $7 billion to the budget bottom line over 10 years. We've been leading the debate about superannuation tax concessions. We think it's vital that an Opposition is engaged with these sorts of debates rather than just sniping from the sidelines as we saw for the last few years. If the Government wants to take our multinational tax policy I'm happy to sit down and work it through with them and then we'll vote for it in the Parliament. That would certainly help return the budget to surplus a little speedier than Joe Hockey's so-called quality trajectory. 

Why inequality is a feminist issue, Debrief Daily, 19 April

Lilly Ledbetter started work as a supervisor at Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant in Alabama in 1979. She worked there for the next two decades. Towards the end of her time at Goodyear, she began to suspect that she was earning less than her male colleagues. An anonymous note in her mailbox confirmed it. Despite being praised by her bosses, they had given her smaller raises than the men who worked around her.

Over the course of her time at Goodyear, pay discrimination cost Ledbetter more than $200,000 in salary. Worse, because the statute of limitations had passed, she couldn’t recover it. The story led President Barack Obama to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, which guarantees that such a situation cannot recur in the US.

Pay discrimination is often categorised as a ‘women’s issue’, but it goes further than that. Injustice at work undermines the sense of fairness that is fundamental to a healthy workplace. By paying Ledbetter less, Goodyear hurt her financially. But it also failed to live by the principle of equal pay for equal work. Because the Ledbetter family had fewer resources, they all suffered from Lilly’s mistreatment.

Many Australians were left feeling like Lilly Ledbetter a few weeks ago when figures came out that showed the gender pay gap is now at a 20-year high. Among full-time workers, the average male weekly wage is $1559, while the average female wage is $1276. In other words, blokes get an 18.2 percent wage premium every week of the working year.

That premium isn’t simply about the presence of dangly bits. To understand what’s going on, it’s vital to recognise that pay equity for women is interlinked with pay equity across the workforce. The remorseless rise of inequality is the main culprit for the rising gender pay gap.

MEDIA RELEASE

HOCKEY'S CLAYTONS TAX SOLUTION

Today's announcement of a UK-Australia working group on multinational tax is classic Joe Hockey: all talk and no action.

From opposition, Labor has released a carefully-costed and measured package to tackle multinational profit shifting. Our plan would add $7.2 billion to the budget bottom line over the coming decade.

With all the resources of government at his disposal, the best Joe Hockey can do is come up with a plan to have a plan.

Reckless beyond words? A data-driven look at Australian young people today 

Speech to the National Youth Conference

Canberra

Thank you to Bob Gregory for the generous introduction, and to Jordan Kerr and the conference organisers for inviting me to be part of the National Youth Conference 2015. I acknowledge that we are meeting today on the land of the Ngunnawal people, and acknowledge their elders past and present. I also acknowledge the young Ngunnawal people who make such a contribution to Canberra’s community life and ensure that this area’s Indigenous history continues to be part of our common story.

In 1950, life expectancy for an Australian bloke like me was about 67. At 42, that means back then I’d have been considered well into the later innings of my life. One of the great things about life expectancy increasing to 82 today is that I’m now probably only halfway through my life’s journey. Unfortunately, I still don’t think that lets me squeak into the category of ‘young person’ though, so thank you for making an exception and having me along today anyway.

A little while ago I came across a column in one of our major metro papers where the writer talked about his horror at the behaviour of young Australians out and about on a Saturday night. He described seeing police and other revellers ‘routinely disrespected, sworn at, made fun of, shoved, taunted and generally treated like garbage by swarms of drunken youths.'

In a report about the emergence of new social problems, I was also dismayed to read: ‘bikie gangs and overseas criminal syndicates [are] taking advantage of the highly addictive aspect of ice to actively hook thousands of young Victorians.’

Both of these stories brought to mind the former-Treasurer Peter Costello (that noted expert of youth culture). Some years ago he gave a speech stating: ‘We do not have to look far to see evidence of moral decay all around us. We can see it and hear it in entertainment like rap music, in songs that glorify violence or suicide and the exploitation of others.’    

All of this made me start to really worry about the drunken, drug addicted, depraved young people around today. So as an economist, I did what economists do: I turned to the data.

I started looking at all the indicators I could find on how young people today compare with their predecessors. We’re very fortunate in this country that the Australian Bureau of Statistics collects time series data on things like school attainment rates, drug and alcohol use, teen pregnancy and crime. So all the evidence we need of young people’s ‘moral decay’ should be right there in hard numbers.

Except it isn’t.

MEDIA RELEASE

$41 MILLION HIT TO BELCONNEN FROM IMMIGRATION MOVE

The huge economic cost of moving the Department of Immigration out of Belconnen has been revealed today.

Shifting the department would drain $41 million a year from local shops and cafes, seriously undermining the viability of these businesses. 

Modelling from Urbis handed to the Canberra Times shows federal public servants spend about $45 each per workday in the businesses surrounding their workplaces.

With over 4,000 staff currently based at the department’s complex in Belconnen, these workers pour millions into the local economy each year – whether buying coffee, picking up their groceries or getting a quick haircut.