Andrew Leigh

On 29 July, I spoke with host Lyndal Curtis and Liberal MP Craig Kelly about the fact that only Federal Labor has cut real spending (something that never happened under John Howard), why preventing asylum seekers coming by boat (and increasing the intake to 20,000) is the most compassionate response, and same-sex marriage.

JULIE COLLINS MP
Minister for Housing and Homelessness

ANDREW LEIGH MP
Member for Fraser

SHANE RATTENBURY
ACT Minister for Housing

MEDIA RELEASE
A $17 million boost to help tackle homelessness in Canberra

The Federal Labor Government and the ACT Government will invest almost $17 million of joint capital and recurrent funding to provide long-term, stable accommodation and support services to Canberrans who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.

Federal Minister for Housing and Homelessness Julie Collins and ACT Minister for Housing Shane Rattenbury announced the funding today during a visit to Our Place, a youth accommodation service in Canberra.

“I’m pleased that the ACT Government has signed up to the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness for 2013-14 and is also receiving capital project funding through our $43 million Development Fund,” Ms Collins said.

“This joint funding injection will support seven existing homelessness services and build a new housing facility in Gungahlin for some of Canberra’s most vulnerable people.”

Mr Rattenbury said the funding would help provide affordable housing and critical pathways out of homelessness for Canberrans in need.

“Once completed in December 2014, the Gungahlin Common Ground facility will provide homes for 40 individuals and couples.

“The Common Ground model helps to break the cycle of homelessness by combining a safe, sustainable home, with the support services people need to get back on their feet in the long term.

“Support will be targeted to people’s needs to help them address some of the underlying issues that can cause homelessness, such as mental illness, substance abuse, family breakdown and unemployment.”

Federal Member for Fraser Andrew Leigh said he was very pleased the complex had got the green light.

"There are no more passionate campaigners for social justice than those who've pushed for Common Ground Canberra, and it's an honour to have worked with them over the past few years to finally make this happen," Mr Leigh said.

“Close to shops, public transport and community facilities, the new complex will house a mix of people who will receive support to ensure they can keep their homes and get their lives in order.”

Ms Collins said the Federal Labor Government remained steadfast in its commitment to halve the rate of homelessness and provide supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who seek it by 2020.

“Through the transitional $320 million National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness, we are working with the states and territories, businesses and community organisations to jointly reduce homelessness,” Ms Collins said.

“This will ensure critical services continue, as we work toward a longer-term response to homelessness.”

Since coming to office in 2007, the Federal Labor Government has invested a record $31 billion to help make housing more affordable and assist people to move out of homelessness.

29 JULY 2013

On 29 July, I spoke with host Kieran Gilbert and Liberal Senator Mitch Fifield to discuss the government's responsible economic management, the Opposition's refusal to submit policies for costing, and the whether opinion polls have any value.

TOPICS: Budget challenges, Coalition costings, election date

Note:                                     Due to time constraints, contributions from Mitch Fifield have not been transcribed.

Kieran Gilbert:                   This is AM Agenda, thanks very much for your company. With me now, Liberal frontbencher Senator Mitch Fifield and Labor MP, Andrew Leigh. Good morning to you both. Andrew, I want to start with you, with this pre-election economic statement. The cabinet meets today; Mr Bowen has reiterated the government’s commitment to return to surplus in 2016-17. If you are to do that, given the various reports about revenue write-downs, further revenue write-downs, even since the May budget, you really do have that balancing act between making cuts which could hurt growth and staying on that trajectory for a credible path to return to surplus.

Andrew Leigh: It’s a challenging time for the economy Kieran, you’re absolutely right about that, and we’re seeing the transition from that huge investment period in the mining boom which involved so many jobs in the construction phase, and now to a production phase where the amount of stuff we dig out of the ground and ship overseas will probably even go up, but the amount of jobs decreases because you’ve got a lot of the construction done. But with the dollar having come down a bit, that’s I think given manufacturers a bit of breathing space, and we’ll be looking to craft a set of policies that allow for that transition.

Kieran Gilbert:                   But in terms of making cuts so close to an election, that’s the difficult political balancing act here isn’t it?

Andrew Leigh: We’ll make responsible savings as we have in the past Kieran. I think you would have seen in the past things like means testing the private health insurance rebate, phasing out the old dependent spouse tax offset which paid people not to work…

Kieran Gilbert:                   The fringe benefits tax changes…

Andrew Leigh: I was just about to say the fringe benefit tax changes.

Kieran Gilbert:                   Which where there was quite a backlash is the point isn’t there?

Andrew Leigh: But I mean these are never easy decisions Kieran. I’ve just picked three that were opposed by the Coalition, but ultimately the reason that you make these savings is because we have to make sure that the tax system is serving people as well as it can, and a broadly based tax system makes sure we all pay our way. I just don’t think the FBT loophole was sustainable.

[…]

Kieran Gilbert:                   Andrew Leigh, Joe Hockey told me on this program on Friday that the Coalition will provide fully costed policies. He has said that they’ve been in consultation with the budget, parliamentary budget office, state governments where necessary. They’ve had full consultation on their costings. He did raise some concerns about the government’s pre-election statement and the subsequent pre-election fiscal outlook from Treasury. That’s fair enough isn’t it, given that he has said, regardless, he will have fully costed, transparent policies out there well in time for the election?

Andrew Leigh: Kieran, I’ll believe it when I see it. I think this is absolutely vital that we have a discussion about our contested set of policies. You will see Labor’s in the budgets and in the budget updates, and you’ll see us making hard decisions. To put some facts in response to what Mitch said, we have managed to cut real government spending, something the Howard government never did. But you’ve also seen from the Coalition now, a backing away from an earlier promise to put out their policies when the Pre-Election Fiscal Outlook was released. That’s worrying because at the last election, we saw the Coalition just do costings based on a team of accountants who were later fined for professional misconduct. So, given the $11 billion hole in the Coalition’s costings last time, given that they themselves have said they’re $70 billion back, we know they have to put in place some pretty stringent cuts just to pay for their, for example, tax cuts to big miners and big polluters. So we need from the Coalition now, more than ever, a commitment to transparency, we need them to come clear with policies. We still don’t have a health policy or an education policy from the Coalition, and we need them to do a little bit less bashing of senior public servants and a little bit more creative policy making. Because frankly, policy is generally made best in the open light of public gaze, rather than in back rooms, and then thrown out at two minutes to the election.

[…]

Kieran Gilbert:                   Andrew Leigh, I know that, and our viewers who watch this program regularly, would know that you don’t engage on the opinion polls. You never have throughout the years that you and I have discussed, you know, have been on this program, but you look at the polling in the last couple of days and Labor’s primary vote at 40. When does it become a predictable quantity in your view? Or do they not have any predictable worth at all?

Andrew Leigh: Kieran, you’d be completely right to slap me around the face with your iPad if the moment the polls started turning for Labor, I started saying you can believe them when I’d been saying the opposite previously.

Kieran Gilbert:                   No violence. There’s no violence on AM Agenda.

Andrew Leigh: Well that’s nice to hear. That’s good, but you know, I don’t rate the polls because I think they distract us from the sort of policy issues that Mitch and I care about a great deal. I do think if the Coalition’s keen on an early election, one way of advancing their cause would be to bring on their policies. If you want an early election, then bring out your health policy, bring out your education policy and bring your cuts out of witness protection.

Kieran Gilbert:                   Well I think both of you won’t have to wait too much longer on both those fronts, the election date or the policies. Andrew Leigh and Senator Fifield, thanks so much as always. Good to see you.

Andrew Leigh: Thanks Kieran, thanks Mitch.

On 24 July 2013, Andrew Barr MLA and I opened one of the largest affordable housing developments in the ACT, supported by the National Rental Affordability Scheme.

On behalf of Health Minister Tanya Plibersek, I launched the inaugural State of Preventive Health report.

Launching the State of Preventive Health Report 2013
Parliament House
26 July 2013

Thank you very much Louise [Sylvan]. Can I, of course, acknowledge we’re meeting today on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal people, and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I want to acknowledge Louise, Ita [Buttrose], David [Butt] who is here representing Jane Halton, as of course I am representing Tanya Plibersek. So, where this might in a parallel universe have been the Jane and Tanya show, it’s instead, I’m afraid, the David and Andrew stand-ins. But, what you get when you ask a former economics professor to launch a report is, I’m afraid, an irresistible opportunity to talk about the economics of preventive health. Because this is – from an economics perspective – truly a fascinating area.

Fundamentally, the way in which I see preventive health is as a time inconsistency problem. You think of ourselves now, and ourselves in the future, and the challenge with preventive health is getting ourselves now to do the right thing for ourselves in the future. I’d wager that there’s barely an Australian around who thinks that they wouldn’t be better off in the future if they didn’t speed in their car; who thinks they wouldn’t be better off in the future if they ate a little better; if they exercised a little more, and if they didn’t smoke. We all know that in the long run those things are going to be better, but in the short run for so many of us the cream bun prevails over the salad roll, the great TV show prevails over going to the gym, and for about one-fifth of Australians, the cigarette prevails over giving it up. And so this fundamental time inconsistency problem is the one that preventive health seeks to address.

Now politicians, temperamentally, have to be optimists. So I want to talk today about two successes and one failure in the preventive health area. Let me start with the successes. Tobacco has been a great success of public health. As you well know, cigarette smoking only really gets going in the late 19^th century. It’s the Spanish and then the French who work out that tobacco will be consumed more readily if it’s wrapped in paper. (And you ask why French women don’t get fat; maybe the high smoking rates in that country have something to do with it.) So hardly anyone’s smoking at the start of the 20^th century, but by the end of World War II you’ve got about half the population in developed countries smoking. And then in recent years, we’ve seen that come down rapidly. There’s been a number of drivers of that, the biggest has been price. Tobacco taxes have, to a large extent, helped to bring down cigarette consumption.

But we’ve also changed people’s knowledge about the link between cigarette smoking and cancer. One of my favourite economic studies looking at this area asks the question “why do more Europeans smoke than Americans?”. The answer is that Americans are more likely to believe that smoking will lead you to an early grave. That’s true even if you survey non-smokers in those two regions of the world. So public health campaigns have made an enormous difference. And then recently in Australia, we’ve gone further. Not just the public health campaigns, not just the taxes, but also putting in place advertising bans and now our world first plain packaging laws – which former health minister Nicola Roxon had the privilege of taking to New York to speak to a global health convention about. So tobacco has been a success.

Another great success has been road safety. Road deaths as a share of the population steadily rose as the automobile became ubiquitous in Australia in the post-war decades. But they peaked in the late 1970s and been trending down since then. Regulation has played a huge part. You’ll occasionally hear people talk about getting rid of red tape and getting rid of regulation, and we should do that where regulations are unnecessary.  But we should also never forget that the regulation that mandated that all cars should have seatbelts and that people should wear them or face a fine means that thousands of Australians are alive today who wouldn’t have been were it not for that regulation. The installation of airbags in cars has also seen many Australian lives saved, and the regulation that saw us put in place random breath testing in the early 1980s, decades ahead of many other countries, continued to save lives. Road safety is a great preventive health story.

But there had to be a cloud to the silver linings, and that for me is obesity. As you know, obesity has steadily been rising for the better part of the last half-century. Up until about 1970, the health economists tell us, that rise was caused by a shift towards more sedentary jobs. The shift from agriculture and manufacturing towards service jobs, desk-bound jobs, increased overweight and obesity up until about the year of my birth. But for the last 40 years, the rise in obesity is largely a technology story. We’ve seen the rise of the microwave, which makes it easier to prepare hot meals at home. The technology of vending machines has been important in allowing Australians and people across the developed world to have access to cheap snack food. And we’ve seen big advances in packaging technology . Thirty years ago, if you wanted a scrumptious jam cake you had to buy the ingredients and make it yourself; now you can wander down to Coles or Woollies and pick one up for less than $5. Those advances have seen the price of food fall, but they’ve also seen an increase in overweight and obesity. Two thirds of us - now overweight and obese, a quarter of Australian children. So therein lies the challenge, that we’re seeing steadily rising rates of obesity and here we’re fighting big technological shifts.

Preventive health is, I believe, an area where we need not only soft hearts, but also hard heads. It is certainly true that relative to many other countries, Australia has underspent on preventive healthcare. But that doesn’t by itself tell us that we ought to spend more. A famous study, of which I’m sure you’re aware, in 2008 by Joshua Cohen and co-authors in the New England Journal of Medicine pushed back against US presidential candidates who had noted US underspending on preventive health. They catalogued a range of preventive health interventions and found that many of them didn’t pass cost-benefit test. And you’ll see here, right in this report, work by Alan Shiell reviewing a range of public health interventions and finding that only about 40 out of the 120 passed a rigorous cost-benefit test. So we need that rigour in working out which preventive health interventions can work, which are going to be most effective. In the area of obesity, randomised control trials tell us that surprisingly, one of the best dieting tips turns out to be small plates. That simple heuristic that tells us to fill up our plate means that if you can cut your plate size from 12 inches to 9 inches, you’ll actually end up eating a whole lot less. Not eating in front of a TV works too, but doesn’t have as big a bang for the buck in randomised trials. So we need that rigour, and it’s that rigour that is in this fabulous, readable report.

I’d also like to point out the importance of combining a preventive health agenda with a health equity agenda. Michael Moore said to me just before I stood up, “you are going to say a little bit about health equity from your new book Battlers and Billionaires aren’t you?” I wouldn’t have spruiked my own book, but since Michael’s asked me to, it seems churlish not to do so. The two statistics that scare me most about health equity are the fact that if you’re in the top fifth of the income distribution, you live on average six years longer than someone in the bottom fifth of the income distribution. Six more Christmases, six more years to spend with your family, six more years to spend enjoying great movies. And the other is that if you compare the top and the bottom of the income distribution, you’ve got a difference of seven teeth. The rich have seven more teeth than the poor, an income difference that shows with every smile. And there are some preventive health measures which are unambiguously targeted at closing the health equity gap, smoking leading among them. But not every preventive health measure will help to close the health equity gap, and one of the things I love about this report, is it talks about the health equity issues alongside preventive health issues.

This is also a great report because it talks about the international context. We see statistics from around the globe, and I understand that this is feeding in to the global action plan adopted by the World Health Assembly in May of this year. There’s going to be more of this in future reports, and I think it’s absolutely vital to plug in to the international context.

There’s also a discussion of the partnerships, because we know that preventive health even more so than other areas of health intervention needs to have partnerships. Whether that’s education, business, industry, researchers, celebrities – and there I’ve only named the categories into which Ita falls. This is a vitally important area and it needs to engage other professions. My wife Gweneth is a landscape architect who recently put on an exhibition at the Gallery of Australian Design, looking at landscape architecture and public health. Simple questions like “if you have a neighbourhood which has footpaths, does that better encourage people to get out and take a walk after work?” There’s so many other professions whose work feeds in to a preventive health agenda. This is, in some sense, the most broadly ranging area of the health system, and I commend the authors and the work of ANPHA in bringing together so many different strands of a vital health agenda.

It is my pleasure to officially launch the State of Preventive Health 2013 Report, and I look forward very much to reading subsequent editions.

• Read the report


• Listen to a podcast of my speech

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).