Andrew Leigh

On ABC RN Drive yesterday, I discussed asylum seeker policy and removing tax loopholes with the very erudite Waleed Aly and Arthur Sinodinos. Here's a podcast.

I spoke yesterday with Janine Perrett about Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia.http://www.youtube.com/v/6ELtQH_4VZo?hl=en_US&version=3

I spoke this morning on ABC 666 about asylum-seeker policy, and the new Regional Settlement Arrangement. Here's a podcast.

TRANSCRIPT
ABC 666 WITH ROSS SOLLY

Andrew Leigh
Member for Fraser

TUESDAY 23^rd JULY 2013

Topics:                        Asylum Seekers, Foreign Aid

Note:                           Due to time constraints, Gary Humphries’ contributions have not been transcribed.

Ross Solly:                  Gary Humphries will be joining us very soon, but Andrew Leigh, the member for Fraser is here with me in the 666 Breakfast studio. Andrew Leigh, good morning to you.

Andrew Leigh: Good morning Ross.

Ross Solly:                   Just on that photograph and the film footage, are you comfortable with it being used the way it is?

Andrew Leigh: Look, this is a desperately hard area of policy, Ross. The purpose that the Immigration Department has used the photograph for, is to make sure that people don’t make a risky boat journey and that we don’t see more drownings at sea. So it’s part of a policy that I believe is aimed at being as compassionate as we can.

Ross Solly:                   Does it look compassionate though, that picture?

Andrew Leigh: This is a picture which is aimed to serve a purpose, serve a compassionate purpose, which is to stop people getting on boats. Let me tell you in general why I believe that this is ultimately the most compassionate policy, although I understand it is extremely difficult for many of us. First of all…

Ross Solly:                   Can I ask you straight up, do you agree with where your party’s gone on this? Are you comfortable with it?

Andrew Leigh: I’m not comfortable with any response in this area Ross, I think it is… I’ve reached the point where my view is that there is going to be no policy with which I am going to feel perfectly comfortable. But that in the circumstances, this is probably the most compassionate response.

Ross Solly:                   OK, tell me why.

Andrew Leigh:           First of all, I think it has the potential to reduce drownings at sea. Now those drownings at sea were tens a year, now hundreds a year. They could soon go to thousands a year. We’ve seen a little one-year-old baby drowning recently. We’ve seen blokes in their 20s and 30s, with their whole lives ahead of them, drowning on the way to Australia. And this policy, I think, will reduce those drownings. Secondly, I think it’s more compassionate because we will be drawing refugees from UNHCR camps, rather than drawing people that can afford to pay $10,000 or more, to pay a people smuggler. We’re among the top three countries in the world in UNHCR resettlement, but that process will effectively grind to a halt if the number of people arriving by boat goes from the current annualized figure of 20-30,000 a year to maybe 50,000 a year. And thirdly, I think it’s compassionate because we’ve said under this policy that if we’re able to stop boat arrivals, then we’ll increase the number of humanitarian places to 27,000, so we’ll be able to help more people over all. But, I share the discomfort that I’m sure many of your listeners do. This is an extremely difficult area of policy, and my hope is that we are able to stop drownings at sea as a result of this policy.

[…]

Ross Solly:                   Well I think, Andrew Leigh, as someone [inaudible] says via Twitter this morning, the key point is that if the boats stop coming, which [inaudible] believes is likely, few asylum seekers will ever need to go to Papua New Guinea, and we’ll get more from the UNHCR.

Andrew Leigh: That’s exactly right, Ross. Gary can have the tough on refugees argument. I don’t want it. What I want out of a refugee policy is to stop drownings at sea and to create the potential for us to take more asylum seekers. And I think that’s, frankly, very difficult in an environment in which more and more boats are arriving. I think it’s hard to raise the refugee intake when you see support for, political support for, asylum seekers declining in Australia. The way in which you turn that around, is you don’t have people arriving by boat. Instead, we take the neediest people from the UNHCR camps and, let’s be honest Ross, if we…

Ross Solly:                           So you think that would change the Australian peoples’ attitudes to asylum seekers if in fact, they weren’t coming by boats, but were taking the needy ones from the refugee camps?

Andrew Leigh: Absolutely, and I would give the example of the Vietnam War refugees as the best example of this. That had pretty strong support across the Australian community, in part because we did refugee resettlement not based on who could get a boat to the shores of Australia, but by working with the UNHCR in places like Hong Kong. There are camps in Africa, in South-East Asia which have 100,000 or more people. And we need to work with the UNHCR to take more people out of those camps. Not just the people who can afford the $10,000 or more to pay a people smuggler. Now, there’s also a bit of this too, which is about dealing with organised crime. So people smugglers aren’t simply operating trafficking businesses, they’re also looping that in with a range of other organised crime networks in South-East Asia. So that’s a side benefit, if you can reduce the number of people coming by boat, you reduce the potential for that money to fly into organised crime. But fundamentally Ross, I want to stop people drowning at sea, and I want to take more asylum seekers.

[…]

Ross Solly:                   Have either of you been to Papua New Guinea? I’m assuming you’ve been for… You’ve not been Gary Humphries? And [inaudible]

Andrew Leigh:           I’ve visited as a child. My uncle worked there for all of his career, but I haven’t been there as a parliamentarian. It’s certainly a developing country with a range of challenges. I mean, that’s why we’re working particularly on the issue of health care and law and order, big priorities for Papua New Guinea.

Ross Solly:                   So I understand one of the things though, Andrew Leigh, is that we are according to the Papua New Guinean Prime Minister, he is now going to have control over the foreign aid budget that comes his way.

Andrew Leigh:           We’ll work co-operatively with Papua New Guinea, as we do with every other country to which we give foreign aid. Papua New Guinea has identified these priorities, law and order, health care and education. We’ll work with them to identify the projects that they believe are most important. I think we take a special responsibility for PNG, being a country for which we had effective colonial responsibility in the past. We’ve given a range of foreign aid support. But I do want to sort of also say in response to some of the comments that Gary Humphries has made suggesting that this is simply back to the Howard government, there are clear party differences in refugees. We’re aspiring to move the humanitarian intake to 27,000. The Coalition would take it back to about 13,000. We also believe that this is a policy area which has evolved, and that simply going back to the policies of the Howard government wouldn’t work for the current era. You have to keep trying to update policies.

[…]

Ross Solly:                   I’ve actually been, I’ve been there in more recent times, and the poverty is terrible. The health system is terrible, the infrastructure is terrible, the crime rate’s terrible. And, I don’t know, Andrew Leigh that this… I mean, I’m sure that’s part of the reason why we’re saying we’re going to send people there ‘cause they’re not going to come here, and this is going to be a tough life.

Andrew Leigh: Well Ross, to answer the question that both you and Gary have raised, I can assure you that aid projects, aid to PNG will continue to go through the AusAID  merit process that aid to other countries goes through.

Ross Solly:                   But will we have any control over how it’s spent?

Andrew Leigh: Absolutely, we will give aid to PNG as we do with every other country to which we give aid, co-operating with that government, talking with them about their priorities and reviewing each independent aid project on its merits. That’s how the Australian aid system works, and I think that’s what’s made it an effective aid system. Ross, I’m pretty proud of the fact that we’re a country that is in the top three for UNHCR refugee resettlement. We’re now a top ten foreign aid giver around the world. These two things have happened under a Labor government. We’ve substantially increased foreign aid as a share of national income, now at a quarter of a century high. And we’ve also increased the number of refugees we take. Both these things, I think, would go backwards under the Coalition, which is why I do want to say that there’s clear differences.

[…]

Ross Solly:                   I was going to ask a question about family reunions etc., but Don has called in with the same question. You might just need your headphones there Andrew and Gary. Hello Don.

Caller:                                   Yes, good morning. How are you?

Ross Solly:                           Good thank you. Your question?

Caller:                                   I just want to know, in amongst all this, what do you think about the fact that the Department is saying it’s between 9 and 20 years before some family reunions can take place? Surely in having given a protection visa to people, we wouldn’t expect them to be without their families for that period of time?

Ross Solly:                           Yeah I did see the Minister making these sorts of comments last night. Andrew Leigh? Thank you Don.

Andrew Leigh: Well certainly, people who have received a humanitarian visa to Australia have the right to then bring family members to Australia, as is true of people in other…

Ross Solly:                   But didn’t Tony Burke say last night that that wouldn’t be happening?

Andrew Leigh: My understanding was that the Minister was talking about people who went to PNG rather than people who came to Australia, but if there’s a new development that the Minister has announced in the last 24 hours, I’ll obviously defer to him.

[…]

Ross Solly:                   This is in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning. “Refugees and those in the community on bridging visas in Australia would have no right to bring family members who end up in PNG to join them.” Tony Burke said, “we’re not going to give someone an incentive that they get a higher level of family reunion because they got on a boat.”

Andrew Leigh: Oh, well that’s certainly consistent with Australian policy Ross, that you wouldn’t advantage your claim by coming by boat to Australia. But the fact remains, the people who’ve received humanitarian visas in Australia then have the opportunity to bring family members down the track. That doesn’t happen immediately, as your caller noted.

[…]

Ross Solly:                   Thanks chaps for coming in. There’s obviously a lot more discussion to have about this, but thank you very much for coming in. Andrew Leigh, Gary Humphries.

ENDS

A few reviews of Battlers & Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia:

• Jessica Irvine, News Ltd papers


• Ross Gittins, Fairfax papers


• Gillian Terzis, Australian Book Review


• Rama Gaind, PS News


• Ross Fitzgerald, The Age

My op-ed in the Australian today discusses the rise, fall, and rise of Australian inequality, why it sits oddly with our social norms, and what we might do about it - including through a revitalised Eureka legend.

Why both sides should celebrate Eureka, The Australian, 18 July 2013

One way of making the case for egalitarianism is to compare two sporting codes– English Premier League football and the Australian Football League. Of the last twenty EPL championships, Manchester United has won twelve. In the same period, no AFL team has won more than three premierships. There are structural reasons for this: the AFL shares television revenue, caps the salary bill, and runs a draft that gives lower ranked teams first pick of promising players. More redistribution makes AFL a more equal game – and a more interesting one – than EPL.

In Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia, I argue that egalitarianism has always been central to Australian national identity. Ours is a country that doesn’t like tipping, that prefers the word ‘mate’ to ‘sir’, and where we often sit in the front seat of taxis. If there’s another country that’s had central bank governors called ‘Nugget’ and ‘Nobby’, I’d like to know of it.

From egalitarian beginnings in the late-1700s, Australian inequality rose significantly during the 1800s. In that century, 4 percent of the population worked as servants, and the social fabric bore more resemblance to Dickens’ London than modern Australia. Inequality continued to rise into the early-1900s, peaking around World War I.

Then came the great compression. From the 1920s to the 1970s, incomes rose faster at the bottom than the top, and wealth came to be more equally distributed. Moguls were scarce – as one social commentator noted of the 1960s, the wealthy ‘feel under some pressure to be accepted by ordinary working Australians rather than the other way round’. By the end of the 1970s, Australia was one of the most equal countries in the world.

Over the past generation, this has slowly unravelled. Since the mid-1970s, real earnings for the bottom tenth have grown 15 percent, while earnings for the top tenth have grown 59 percent. In recent decades, the top 1 percent income share has doubled, and the wealth share of the top 0.001 percent has more than tripled. Australia is not as unequal as the United States or many countries in Latin America, but our current level of inequality places us in the top third of the OECD.

How might we seek to redress inequality? To begin with, it’s vital to maintain economic growth, because recessions tend to hit the poor hardest. Next, we need to do more to reduce educational inequality – the gap that sees a child from an affluent family performing three to four years beyond a child from a disadvantaged background. Equality of opportunity doesn’t mean making some competitors run with lead shoes, but it might mean buying a pair of runners for someone who can’t afford them.

It’s also worth recognising the role that unions play in reducing inequality, both within sectors and across them (as with recent pay equity cases). Because unions devote disproportionate attention to lower-paid workers, they act as a powerful bulwark against inequality. Allowing unions the freedom to organise is important in ensuring that inequality does not continue to rise.

We need to preserve our means-tested social safety net, which targets scarce public money to the poorest. Applying an assets test to the pension in 1984, or a means-test to the private health insurance rebate in 2012, was politically difficult. But such decisions are vital to ensuring that our welfare system is effective at reducing poverty.

We also need better evaluation of social policies, ideally through randomised trials. Right now, randomised trials are compulsory for new pharmaceuticals, but almost non-existent for new social policies. In both areas, better evaluation is likely to lead to better results.

Finally, we should preserve the egalitarian spirit that is so central to Australian identity. A belief in equality has been a golden thread through Australia’s history, even at times when the gap between rich and poor has widened. It is vital that egalitarianism stay at the core of our country’s ethos.

National identity is shaped by stories. Some are symbolic nuggets. Peter FitzSimons recounts the tale of a conversation with Bob Hawke, in which an insistent waitress twice interrupted the then prime minister in midsentence to take his coffee order. Only in Australia, FitzSimons thought to himself.

Our big national episodes matter too. I believe that the 1854 Eureka Rebellion – a collective uprising against oppressive taxation – should be reclaimed by both sides of politics as our driving legend. It recognises that hard-working entrepreneurs are vital to our nation’s success. And it tells of the willingness of protestors to join with their mates in a cause greater than themselves: a fairer Australia.

My main reason for writing Battlers and Billionaires is to raise awareness of our egalitarian spirit, and the significant increase in economic inequality over recent decades. Some readers will disagree with me that excessive inequality damages the social fabric. So long as we have a proper debate about the right level of inequality, I’m quite comfortable with this. What I fear is the prospect that we will sleepwalk into a more unequal Australia without realising what is being lost.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser. His new book is Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia (Black Inc, $19.95).

TRANSCRIPT

2CC WITH MARK PARTON

Andrew Leigh

Member for Fraser



WEDNESDAY 17^TH JULY 2013

TOPICS:                                Austerity, changes to fringe benefits tax, live exports

Mark Parton:                     Andrew Leigh is a thinker and he’s got a piece in the Canberra Times this morning about austerity measures, and he says that when the Great Depression hit the United States, US treasury secretary Andrew Mellon famously advocated austerity.  His formula was simple – liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate – it’ll purge the rottenness out of the system. The theory behind austerity is elegant; Proponents argue that government crowds out business and the tax payers will equate spending cuts today with tax cuts tomorrow. There’ll be some short term pain as prices and wages fall, but from cuts will come growth and on the face of it, you can understand why they bought it as a concept back in the 1920s and 30s. But in its simplest form, it just doesn’t really work. Andrew Leigh joins us right now, of course, the federal member for Fraser here in the ACT. G’day Andrew

Andrew Leigh: G’day Mark

Mark Parton:                     You are obviously correct in what you say about the way that they dealt with the Depression in the 20s and 30s because it just died in the bum, it didn’t work at all did it? It extended it for such a long period of time.

Andrew Leigh:                  Yeah, all the way up until World War II in fact, Mark. I mean World War II is the only thing that eventually gets the developed world out of the Great Depression. The monetary policy makers in the era just fall apart.

Mark Parton:                     And you’ve basically suggested that the Conservative government in Britain at the moment is essentially heading down the same path.

Andrew Leigh:                  They are Mark. They’re terribly worried about debt, which is no bad thing in itself, but the consequence is that they’re cutting back so far that they’re hitting into growth. So they’re cutting back on hospital services, they’re cutting back on education services, they’re shutting down libraries. You’ve got about 10,000 more people in the UK homeless now than before. The result is that Britain’s got its slowest recovery than from any other crisis going back. Even slower, in fact, than Britain’s rate of recovery in the Great Depression itself.

Mark Parton:                     Andrew, I think that there’s truth in what you say, in that obviously austerity measures can harm. But I think that the great challenge here is finding the line that’s somewhere in the middle between reckless spending and cutting things back. There’s got to be a line in the centre somewhere doesn’t there?

Andrew Leigh:                  That’s right Mark so, you know, we made savings this week, for example, on tightening rules around fringe benefits allowances for cars.  We believe that that’s a responsible saving and I would [inaudible]…

Mark Parton:                     Do you seriously think it’s a responsible saving Andrew? Because the mail that I’ve got this morning is that Australia’s largest leasing companies have stopped deliveries of new cars, as of now, until at least next week, until they can assess the impact of the Rudd government’s overhaul of company car tax rules.

Andrew Leigh:                  Well Mark, we’ve known for a while that the fringe benefits tax arrangements were problematic from an environmental standpoint, That they were encouraging people to drive too far because they had these thresholds. What we’re saying now is that you can have your car under the log book method and you’ll get the appropriate tax rebates according to how far you drive it, but you won’t simply get a bigger tax rebate for picking out a bigger car.

Mark Parton:                     Which again, all sounds sensible but isn’t there the chance that you could do the same to the car industry, exactly the same as, for argument’s sake, what you’ve done to the live cattle industry?

Andrew Leigh:                  Well, the live cattle industry has a much better future for actually getting its supply chains right Mark, so I’d dispute you on that one. I think it was a real risk for that whole industry if we’d gone on as we were before.

Mark Parton:                     Just, I mean this Smart Salary have issued a bulletin to dealers. It went out late yesterday, ordering them to halt deliveries until further notice. This email distributed says, “due to the uncertainty, and until we have further clarification of details from the Department of Treasury, all settlements are to be suspended as of close of business today, Tuesday 16th of July.”

Andrew Leigh:                  Mark, I’m sure people want to make sure that they’re buying a car under the right arrangements and if people end up waiting a week to make sure that they’re still making the right decision on a sale that sounds pretty sensible to me. But I don’t think people ought to be worried about moving to a log book method. Certainly many firms are already using log books to assess business use. So that’s, I think, a reasonable savings measure. You know what I’m trying to do in the piece in the Canberra Times today is to contrast that with cut backs that see patients on oxygen getting fewer visits from district nurses. These sorts of across the board cuts to really vital services which seem to have driven Britain just about back into recession.

Mark Parton:                     Andrew, always good to get you on the radio. Thanks for coming along. Andrew Leigh, the federal member for Fraser.

My article in today's Canberra Times looks at the perils of austerity.

Copying UK's austerity cuts sets us on a road to ruin, Canberra Times, 17 July 2013

When the Great Depression hit the United States, US Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon famously advocated austerity. His formula was simple: ‘Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate…It will purge the rottenness out of the system’.

The theory behind austerity is elegant: proponents argue that government crowds out businesses, and that taxpayers will equate spending cuts today with tax cuts tomorrow. There will be some short-term pain as prices and wages fall, but from cuts will come growth. Austerity sounds great in simplistic theory. The only catch is: it doesn’t work.

Yet today, a conservative government in the UK (in partnership with the Liberal Democrats) are trying austerity. The UK government has cut spending on pension benefits and housing. Teachers, police, doctors, nurses and community workers have had their pay frozen.  Public libraries are closing, and more cuts have been foreshadowed.  Oxford’s David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu estimate that 10,000 families in the UK have become homeless as a result of the cuts.

UK Labour's financial affairs spokeswoman, Angela Eagle, has argued austerity has ‘hit the poorest hardest’. Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the UK Patients’ Association, reports that patients on oxygen due to breathing problems have seen visits from district nurses reduced, while other patients have been denied operations and painkillers due to the cost, with a nurses’ union warning that the UK  ‘is sleepwalking into a crisis’. Unemployment was 5 percent before the crisis, and is now almost 8 percent.

The double tragedy of austerity in the UK, as with every occasion it is put in place is that it has hurt the neediest, and failed to jumpstart the economy. Britain’s recovery from the Global Financial Crisis has been the slowest recovery from any recession in that country since records began: slower than the recovery from the Great Depression and slower than any other G7 country apart from Italy.

That’s because slow growth has effectively negated reductions in debt. As the International Monetary Fund’s Luc Eyraud and Anke Weber have argued, ‘fiscal tightening could raise the debt ratio in the short term, as fiscal gains are partly wiped out by the decline in output’.  The situation is akin to a plumber who sells his tools to help pay off the mortgage.

This point has been picked up by thoughtful observers. The UK Budgetary Review Office has warned that cutting will slow economic growth. IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard warns that the UK would be ‘playing with fire’ if it did not do more to stimulate its economy. Princeton’s Paul Krugman likens austerity to a medieval doctor draining a patient’s blood, who, noticing the patient getting sicker, takes more blood.

The contrast with Australia is stark. We avoided recession and saved hundreds of thousands of jobs because the Australian government actively created jobs and benefitted the community through nation building projects such as a once-in-a –lifetime school building program. Australian wages are rising, and inflation remains lower than in the UK. Australia’s debt to GDP ratio is well below Britain’s. As Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz likes to quip, Australia’s only contribution to the global slump was the acronym ‘GFC’. As former Prime Minister John Howard remarked, ‘When the current prime minister and the Treasurer and others tell you that the Australian economy is doing better than most – they are right’.

Why does the difference between Australia and the UK matter? Because if the Opposition win government later this year, Britain’s past may be Australia’s future.

In recent months, Tony Abbott has acknowledged ‘The Coalition obviously is looking for significant expenditure reductions.’, and admits that these will be ‘painful decisions’. Queenslanders know what he’s talking about. The savage program of cuts by the LNP government in the midst of an overblown fear campaign about public debt also led to increased unemployment in that state.

Britain’s experience warns us that you cannot cut a nation to prosperity at the expense of the young, the elderly, the disabled and the infirm. If you care about reducing the debt to GDP ratio – as I do – then you need to worry not only about paying down debt, but also about increasing GDP. On economic policy, this election sees Australia at a fork in the road. Coalition austerity would be a rocky path indeed.

Dr Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and his website is www.andrewleigh.com.

On Sky AM Agenda, I spoke with host Kieran Gilbert and Liberal Senator Scott Ryan about why an emissions trading scheme is the most efficient way of dealing with dangerous climate change, and how the Rudd Government is working with neighbours such as Indonesia and PNG to find a regional solution to the challenge of asylum seeker flows.

One of the risks of hiring great staff is that other employers will offer them even better opportunities, and I'm afraid to report that my media adviser, Courtney Sloane, is the 6th staffer of mine who has been snaffled up by a minister's office (in Courtney's case, Human Services Minister Jan McLucas). At this rate, future reunions of Leigh alumni will empty the ministerial wing of Parliament House.

So as a result, I'm looking for a new media adviser. In the past, I've advertised in newspapers and on seek.com.au, but the best applications have invariably been the ones who came across the ad on my blog or twitter feed. So this time, I'm simply going to rely on word of mouth. If you know of someone suitable, please let them know.

What does the job involve? In a high-level sense, helping me do a better job of publicly communicating on issues of public policy. I have a pretty broad range of ways through which I engage on policy issues - from books to speeches to interviews to op-eds to tweets. My media adviser helps draft, coordinate, and project those ideas. This involves lots of typing transcripts, sending out media releases, and chatting with journalists. The hours tend to exceed 40 hours a week, and can be unpredictable - for which there's an overtime allowance.

The salary range is $77,155 to $92,772, which includes an overtime/on call allowance.

If you're interested, please send a CV with a covering email to andrew.leigh.mp<asperand>aph.gov.au. Applications close Friday 19 July.

Oh, and if you're interested in my views on engaging with the media in the current environment, have a read of my speech The Naked Truth? Media and Politics in the Digital Age.

TRANSCRIPT – 2CC WITH MARK PARTON
Andrew Leigh MP
Member for Fraser
10 July 2013

TOPICS:                      Battlers and Billionaires, election date, polls

Mark Parton:           We had Andrew Leigh, the federal member for Fraser on the program recently and this is after the whole leadership change with federal Labor. It’s worked out really badly for Andrew that his new book’s been released at the time that all this stuff’s been going down. It’s the book called Battlers and Billionaires. He writes really well does Andrew and the book is basically about you know egalitarianism in Australia and whether or not things are as equal as they should be.  Now look, I disagree with a number of things that Andrew puts forward in the book, but gee it’s a good read. I haven’t read it all I’ve just read some extracts from it. I’ve got Andrew on the line right now.

Morning Andrew.



Andrew Leigh: Good morning Mark.

Mark Parton:           Among the things that I’ve read are the extract that appeared in the daily telegraph which quoted well what went on immediately following the Bali night club bombings and how the Australians just show this amazing spirit in times of drama like that.



Andrew Leigh: It’s a great story. So the story is that in the ‘Australian ward’ in Bali, doctors are going bed to bed asking the patients whether they need painkillers, and constantly the response comes back ‘I’m alright, it’s the person in the next bed who’s doing worse.’ And this reminds the historian John Hirst who’s writing about it of Clive Bean in WWI. He goes back to the old Clive Bean diaries and he finds exactly the same thing from Aussie soldiers in WWI. They’re all saying ‘No no, I’m alright, look after the bloke in the next bed. He’s worse off than me.’ So there’s a sense that there’s this kind of looking after your fellow Aussie spirit that’s been there for a hundred years.

Mark Parton:           And we get that, but I just reckon when you try and scope that out into every aspect of community it doesn’t work. That everyone can’t be equal because so many examples I mean Venezuela for arguments sake shows that it doesn’t work. You know that mad bloke who’s now passed on took over and decided he was going to share the wealth evenly with everybody. The place doesn’t even have toilet paper anymore.



Andrew Leigh: You’re completely right Mark. I mean perfect equality is as awful as perfect inequality. We don’t want to have the same amount of money, we don’t want one person to have all the money. So the right answer is somewhere in between. And what I do in Battlers and Billionaires is talk a little bit about the costs and benefits of inequality and whether maybe we’re starting to get to an Australia where inequality is getting out of touch with the sort of egalitarian spirit that we see in those hospitals after the Bali bombings, or that we see in see in a lot of our kind of much more egalitarian sporting codes.

Mark Parton:           See it’s interesting when you bring up sport because one of the examples that you’ve given is the Melbourne Cup v. the Kentucky derby in America that the Melbourne cup is a more egalitarian race because it’s a handicap. Now I’ve got to tell you, as a racing purist, obviously I get into the Melbourne cup because it’s a race that stops the nation.  But give me the cox plate any day. Give me the cox plate any day, this wait for age race where it’s basically the best horses in Australia taking on each other with nothing to mar the result, the best horse wins.



Andrew Leigh: So horses for courses Mark, but certainly I think there is some lesson that we can take from the fact that our favourite horse race is a handicap and American’s favourite horserace isn’t.  Or from the fact that the Brits’ favourite sporting code, English Premier League, is an amazingly unequal sport in which Manchester United has won twelve out of the last twenty seasons because the best teams get to keep all of the TV revenue. Whereas one of our favourite sports, AFL, no team has won more than three out of the last twenty seasons because you have revenue sharing, salary caps, player drafts. That makes AFL more equal, and they do that in order to make AFL a more interesting game than EPL.

Mark Parton:           Alright, when you get together with other Labor MPs on July 22, what election date will you be voting for Andrew?



Andrew Leigh: That’s a beautiful question Mark. I think the election date is going to be one of those things as in previous years be known by about ten people before it is finally announced and I can confidently tell you I won’t be one of those ten people and that would have been true last time around. These things are kept fairly close to the chest as Prime Minister Howard did before or Prime Minister Keating did before him.

Mark Parton:           But if you had a say in it, what would you be going with? Would you be going early rather than late?



Andrew Leigh: I’m certainly relaxed, I think we’ve got a good story to tell and I certainly never tire of talking about the investments that Labor has made through Canberra and anyone who doubts that just needs to go to their local primary school and ask them about the quality of their buildings five years ago compared to now. But you know if the Prime Minister wants to go early or if he wants to go later I think that’s fine. The only advantage of going late would be we might actually get some policies out of the Opposition.  They’re being a little coy on the policy front you got to say.

Mark Parton:            Alright it’s interesting that we’ve got the polling out at the moment which shows that it’s basically neck and neck at this stage of the game. But if you go to the betting agencies around the place, they’ve still got the coalition as a very, very clear favour and I think the latest markets I’ve seen are about a dollar twenty-five for a Coalition victory.



Andrew Leigh: We’re definitely the underdog Mark and I think that reflects the simple reality that Mr Abbott has done a good political job of attacking the government over recent years.

Mark Parton:           There has been a shift actually; Coalition has blown out to a dollar thirty-five on Centre Bet so it’s moved out ten cents since that polling came out yesterday. There’s movement at the station Andrew.



Andrew Leigh: There is indeed Mark and you know if the Coalition wants to peg it back I think all they need to do is to reveal to the Australian people that actually the policy sitting in their top drawer is good policy rather than bad policy. Because I think Australians are asking now: ‘If it was so good for me, why would it be sitting in Tony Abbott’s top drawer rather than being out on the evening news?’

Mark Parton:           And Kevin’s got to work out what the greatest moral challenge of our time is this particular year.



Andrew Leigh:        I think Mr Rudd will be campaigning strongly on carbon pricing as he should be, Mark.

Mark Parton:           Andrew thanks for your time this morning.



Andrew Leigh:        Thankyou Mark.

Mark Parton: Battlers and billionaires if you want to check out Andrews’s book.