Andrew Leigh

On 7 June 2013, I held a town hall meeting at Ainslie Football Club to answer questions from residents, and hear about the issues they care about.http://www.youtube.com/v/eKcAmgUbGd8?hl=en_US&version=3

My Chronicle column this week looked at the benefits for all Canberra school students from signing up to the national schools agreement.

Funding Allows ACT Schools to Flourish, The Chronicle, 4 June 2013

When surgeons are talking about the path to understanding a new procedure, they use a simple maxim: “see one, do one, teach one”. It sums up the fact that you haven’t really understood a topic deeply until you’re able to teach it to someone else.

Whether it’s bricklaying or algebra, teaching is hard. We remember things best when we’ve done them ourselves , rather the simply being told the answer. And yet until we’ve done a task right, we often don’t know what it feels like. If you’ve ever tried to teach a child to ride a bike, you’ll know the delicate balance between risk and safety.

Our schools today teach some extraordinary stuff. A student who has mastered the Australian Curriculum knows more about maths, chemistry and geography than anyone alive just a few centuries ago.

Canberra’s students are the best-performing in Australia, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better. I regularly have the pleasure of visiting local schools to see the work they’re doing, and how they’ve been using new resources to improve learning outcomes.

The historic Building the Education Revolution program means that Florey Primary School has new science labs where children can follow in the footsteps of the great Howard Florey, discoverer of penicillin. At Amaroo School, teachers can slide back the dividing walls between classrooms and teach in teams. At the Forde campus of Burgmann Anglican School, the new multipurpose hall has sharply raked seating so all children can see the stage.

We’ve also been helping teachers. At Giralang Primary, I’ve met with the literacy and numeracy coach who is working to make great teachers even better.  These coaches are funded by the government’s national partnerships, and they help make sure that best-practice teaching techniques are deployed in all classrooms.

Last week, we saw an historic school funding announcement that will ensure ACT schools have a strong funding base into the future. As the Gonski Review’s 2011 report on school funding revealed, our current school funding model is broken.  The new school funding agreement will deliver an additional $190 million to ACT schools.  Loadings will provide more resources to children from regional areas, disadvantaged backgrounds, and children with disabilities.

The greatest value of the National Education Reform Agreement is that it puts school funding on a growth trajectory. At present, federal schools funding is indexed to average schools spending across the nation. So when state governments cut education spending, federal spending on Canberra schools automatically drops.

Now, ACT schools will be funded according to a Schooling Resource Standard. No school will lose a dollar of per-child funding. The Gillard Government has committed to grow its school education spending by 4.7 per cent per year from 2014. In return, ACT has agreed to grow its own school budget by 3 per cent per year from 2015 onwards.

Thanks to a partnership between the ACT and federal governments, Canberra’s schools have the funding base they need to prosper into the future.

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

TRANSCRIPT – DOORS
Andrew Leigh MP
Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister
Member for Fraser
6 June 2013

TOPICS:                                100 days to the election, policy vs flim-flam, security assessments, State of Origin.



Andrew Leigh: It’s 100 days to the next election and for Australia that’s a fork in the road: a choice between a Government which has continued to invest to make strategic savings and so we’re able to build a DisabilityCare system, better schools, and invest in aged care, and an Opposition which are going to deliver savage cuts. They have to deliver those savage cuts because of the big tax cuts they’ve promised to big miners and big polluters. And if you want to see what the future for Australia would be if we went down that fork in the road, you just need to look to Queensland where the Newman Government is making savage cuts following their Commission of Cuts – the same model Tony Abbott’s promised, or to the UK where a Conservative Government has delivered savage austerity that’s driven that economy back into recession. So that’s going to be the fork in the road that Australia will face and I’m going to be out every day from now until the election speaking with my constituents and other Australians about that choice. Happy to take questions.

Journalist:                           With a hundred days to go is it helpful that some of your fellow MPs [inaudible]

Andrew Leigh: I’m focused on talking about policy. That’s why I got into this place. I’m far more interested in the ideas, the values, the choices that we face, and on encouraging my Coalition colleagues to be clear with the Australian people about the cuts that they’ll make.

Journalist:                           Isn’t the fact that they’ve packed up their offices a sign that they’re not interested in policy and have given up?

Andrew Leigh: On any given day there’s going to be flotsam and jetsam, and there’s going to be matters of substance. I’m out here today to talk to you about matters of substance. I’m happy to take questions on those all day, all night, and in to tomorrow if you like.

Journalist:                           But these are elected members with constituents and they’ve decided that it’s in their best interests, and they say in the interests of taxpayers, not to come back after the election and pack up their offices because they don’t think they’re likely to be back.

Andrew Leigh: We’ve obviously go a tough hundred days ahead of us. I don’t think anyone would argue with that. But for people like me the choice is between focussing on gossip and flim flam, which have filled too much of the airwaves this week, or on the sort of things that matter to my constituents, like the important reforms passed in the parliament on schools reforms, even like the Australian volunteers going abroad that I spoke to last night. Happy to talk to you about the book on inequality I’ve got coming out next month. All of these things are matters of substance and I think bear a little more reporting than gossip and other stuff that’s floating around this week.

Journalist:                           It’s not gossip; we’ve confirmed it.

Andrew Leigh: There’s serious questions and there’s flim flam. And yesterday, I sat in a Beyond Blue event watching an AFL footballer tell a powerful story about his battle with depression and his near brush with suicide. Part way through that a hoard of camera folk rushed across the room to chase a parliamentarian. If that’s your priorities then I think you’ve got it backwards. I think Australians are far more concerned about the issue of suicide than about the gossip that might be floating around inside this building.

Journalist:                           Should there be a shake-up of the Immigration Department following what we’ve heard over the past week or so about the Egyptian national [inaudible]?

Andrew Leigh: You’ve just heard the Attorney General make the point as the Prime Minister has in the parliament; that the individual in question was always in detention and that, I think, is the key issue here. The Opposition are keen to play politics, a little ham-fistedly; they can’t even work out the gender of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. But it’s important to focus on the issue here, that that individual was in detention throughout the period.

Journalist:                           Should there be a parliamentary inquiry? Should that be something that the parliament should consider?

Andrew Leigh: Well here’s the absurdity of the situation. The independent inspector has the legal authority to carry out the inquiry, and the Opposition say no. The parliamentary committee doesn’t have the authority to carry out the inquiry, and the Opposition say yes. Again, they’ve got it backwards because they’re diving in to play politics with national security rather than trying to ensure that the right inspector carries out the process.

Journalist:                           Any thoughts on the State of Origin last night?

Andrew Leigh: I was farewelling the international volunteers otherwise I would have loved to. The best I can do is turn up with a blue tie today and maybe suggest that we can just make this season a one game season. Thanks folks.

Speech at the Farewell of Australian Volunteers for International Development

Old Parliament House

5 June 2013

Thanks very much, Margaret [McKinnon]. It’s a real pleasure to be here tonight farewelling Australian volunteers for, I think, the fourth occasion on which I’ve had to pleasure to be here.

Like Auntie Jeanette Phillips, can I acknowledge that we’re meeting on the traditional land of the Ngunnawal people and pay my respects to their elders, past and present.

I want to acknowledge the Ambassador from Mongolia, Ambassador Bold Ravdan, and to wish particular luck to the six volunteers who are going to be going off to Mongolia.

I want to recognise other members of the diplomatic corps here tonight, and the AVID partner Agencies: Austraining International, the Australian Red Cross, and Australian Volunteering International.

This year there will be 1,800 Australian volunteers going off to work in developing countries. You’re the latest batch of more than 15,000 Australians who have gone to volunteer in developing countries since the AVID program began.

And I want to speak tonight about the man who initiated the Australian Volunteering Program, Herb Feith.

Herb was a family friend of ours. I lived as a little kid in Kuching, Jakarta and Banda Aceh. I remember Herb then, coming to stay with us.

But that was near the end of his life. He was wonderfully eccentric, a campaigner and an academic. And I want to take you right back to the beginning. Because Herb’s life story is an extraordinary story in itself, but it also, I think, says a little about modern Australia.

Herb was born in Vienna in Austria in 1930. His family was Jewish and one of his earliest memories was of his mother holding him up to the windows to watch the synagogues burn.

This was Kristallnacht, and the Nazis were wreaking havoc across Austria and Germany.

Herb’s mother wanted her little seven year old boy to remember this moment, to have this moment seared forever on his memory.

The family got out. They came to Australia and they settled in Melbourne. And in Melbourne, Herb went to high school and settled down to the life of a regular Melbourne lad.

But he wanted to give something back. He wanted to help those who were less fortunate than him.

And so he began collecting for the cause that he thought in the late 1940s was the most important. Guess what cause he chose? He collected for poverty relief for German people, left in poverty after World War II.

This is Herb Feith, the Jewish boy whose family had fled the Holocaust, who began riding the streets of Melbourne, going door to door asking people to contribute to help make sure that people in Germany didn’t starve.

And he continued this work for a number of years, riding his bike from door to door, raising money and sending it to Germany.

And then he got to know a girl at Melbourne University by the name of Betty. Betty was a Methodist, once leading Herb’s mother to say, “Herb, what did I do wrong? How did I not raise you as a good Jewish boy?” And Herb and Betty fell in love and they got interested in our local region.

Now Herb was very much the generation that took the view that Australia’s role in Asia required two things.

Firstly it required that we change our domestic policies. So he and others marched in the streets to get rid of the White Australia Policy; a set of de facto immigration laws which had meant that Australia wasn’t a colour-blind country when it came to who we admitted.

But then Herb did a second thing which was that he decided that Australia was at its best when we played a powerful role in the region.

So he went to Indonesia in the 1950s and worked on an Indonesian public servant salary, working to help this country, which had just won its independence from the Dutch, develop as best it could.

He commuted on bicycle, he ate simply, he did what he could to help in Indonesia. And when he came back to Australia, he had a notion that it might make sense to build a volunteering program.

So he and a few other colleagues went about brainstorming this idea and they went from place to place holding public meetings and giving talks about how a volunteering program might work.

One such talk was reputedly given in Canberra where then Prime Minister Robert Menzies was in the audience. Menzies is reputed to have muttered to Solicitor General Kenneth Bailey ‘How much will it cost?’. Someone made up a figure on the spot and Menzies said, “it sounds like a good idea. I’ll support it.”

And so the Australian Volunteering Program was born.

Herb continued to go back to Indonesia as an academic in Monash, studying Indonesia and remaining engaged with the region.

And near the end of his life, in 1999, he travelled to East Timor as an election observer.

You’ll remember this independence vote, the one in which the Indonesian militia hadn’t thought for a moment that the East Timorese might vote for independence.

But they realised on polling day that that was what the East Timorese were going to do and sections of the militia set about wreaking havoc on Dili; killing, setting houses on fire.

And Herb did what he could to prevent further bloodshed. And there’s a story of Herb famously standing in front of a house defending an East Timorese woman from the militia using only his shock of grey hair and his perfect Indonesian.

And for me, that image, that life, which begins with the awful holocaust of the twentieth century and ends with devastation in East Timor that could have been much worse were it not for people like Herb sums up so much of what Australia does when we’re at our best.

So they’re the footsteps in which you’ll be following.

I’ve made Herb sound like he was a terribly worthy man, and he was. He said things like, “volunteering is symbolic of human equality”.

But Herb was also someone with a delightful sense of humour.

I remember as an eight year old boy, Herb who was a vegetarian looking across at me and saying, “Andrew, are you going to eat those chicken bones?” I said, “no, I wasn’t planning on it.” He said, “Oh good!” and picked one up and began crunching away.

He would ride his bicycle everywhere. He would wear his batik shirts and he would always be one for trying new experiences, to delving into the unknown.

You’ll do much of that in your own travels. You will meet new people, you’ll enjoy new experiences. You may well fall in love with someone in the country that you’ll be visiting.

All of these are great experiences to be had.

And in the end, there are three big benefits that will come from it.

First of all, the countries that you’ll visit will be better for it. They will learn from your skills and your experience, and your ideas and your energy.

Secondly, Australia will be the better for it. We will benefit when you come back to Australia and you bring back those experiences to your workplaces. Some of you I know from experiences will end up at AusAID. But to other agencies, other jobs, other occupations.

But third, you will benefit yourself because life isn’t just about consequences, the things you do. It’s also about character, the person you are. This experience will shape you character.

You will, as novelist Frederick Buechner put it, find a place “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”. And in so doing you will become a richer person for your experience overseas.

And when you come back, I hope you’ll stay in contact with one another. That you’ll continue to maintain those friendships with people you’ve met overseas.

I held a gathering in my electorate office recently with a group of newly returned volunteers where one of them, Lisa Brown, told us about her experience with an NGO in Phnom Penh that works with children living in the garbage dumps. Lisa said, “there is no smell in Australia that could possibly bother me any longer”.

And so use that network of alumni and enjoy those friendships.

But most of all, push yourself, stretch yourself, go into experiences, go to places which you know are a little testing.

Herb was of a generation where Australia was mostly white and so he referred to the experience of volunteering overseas as one of experiencing “whitelessness”.

It’s a little archaic for a much more multicultural Australia but it catches some of the sense of what it means to be in a place where you are the one who is a little different.

I felt that myself as a school child in Banda Aceh in Indonesia and I hope you too, get to get some sense of that slightly unsettling feeling. It’s good; it will build your character.

So thank you for having me here tonight and best of luck on your journeys. I look very much to hearing some of your stories upon your return.

On Sky Showdown, I spoke about the strong Australian economy, the risk Tony Abbott poses, and the Coalition's decision to vote against marine parks, including one established by the Howard Government.

I spoke in parliament tonight about the death of Mr Yunupingu.

Mr Yunupingu, 4 June 2013

It is my pleasure to follow the eloquent words of the member for Fremantle. In 2008, 17 years after he first sang of 'hearing about it on the radio and seeing it on the television', Mr Yunupingu reflected on the Hawke government's promise for a treaty for Indigenous Australians. 'I am still waiting for that treaty to come along for my grandsons,' he said. 'Even if it is not there in the days that I am living, it might come in the days that I am not living.'

Mr Yunupingu's optimism rings with particular poignancy in light of his passing this weekend. At only 56, his days on this earth were too few. Pushing Indigenous Australian issues to the forefront of the national psyche in a fashion that blended the political with pop culture was a momentous achievement. His influence extended internationally. He drew global attention to the ongoing mistreatment and inequality within Australia, while always encouraging a positive and inclusive attitude. Few of us could forget Yothu Yindi's performance at the 2000 Sydney Olympics closing ceremony, bracketing, as it did, the role that Cathy Freeman played in the opening ceremony and with her victory in the 400 metres. During a period in Australian history where the government was reluctant to say sorry, thousands of voices sang along to Treaty, showing the world that non-Indigenous Australians wanted a better future with our Indigenous brothers and sisters.

Mr Yunupingu's story is one of extraordinary passion, with the importance of identity and of hope for the future. As a member of the Gumatj clan, his ancestral totem was the saltwater crocodile and his family name, Yunupingu, translates to the 'rock that will stand will against anything'.

In his youth he was known simply by a short, anglicised first name, but he chose to shrug off this anglicisation and in his adulthood adopted his Yolngu first name. This act was an embrace of cultural tradition and served as a gentle reminder that no-one should have to adjust their identity for the convenience of others, least of all for the convenience of non-Indigenous Australians, whose tongues struggle with the unfamiliarity of this country's oldest language—as I confess mine does.

Mr Yunupingu began teaching at the Yirrkala school in his early 20s, and in 1987 he became the first Indigenous Australian from Arnhem Land to gain a university degree with his Bachelor of Education. He then broke another barrier by becoming the first Indigenous Australian appointed as a school principal. The curriculum he developed blended both Western and Aboriginal traditions, and this approach was also one he embraced in his music in the band he was fronting in his personal time. Yothu Yindi translates from Yolngu as 'child and mother', and theirs was a musical project that fused traditional Indigenous music with modern rock and pop.

In 1991 Mr Yunupingu stopped teaching to pursue his musical endeavours with the band. Along with the band's other members, Stuart Kellaway, Cal Williams, Witiyana Marika, Milkayngu Mununggurr and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, the song Treaty was released in 1991. It spent 22 weeks at No. 1 on the Australian singles chart, and gained global recognition in 1992. Yothu Yindi toured the US with the Hon. member for Kingsford Smith's band, Midnight Oil, famously performing at the launch of the United Nations International Year of the World's Indigenous People.

Those who knew him personally say that Mr Yunupingu often spoke of his 'both ways' philosophy, and the need for Aboriginal Australians and non-Aboriginal Australians to speak to one another, not just about one another. This notion of balance and harmony was described by his close friend and fellow musician Paul Kelly, who described Yothu Yindi:

'They are not so much a band as a physical philosophy. All great art contains contradictions. And their art has always rested on holding opposites together. The modern and the tribal, the parent and the child, balanda and yolngu, freshwater and saltwater, seriousness and celebration.'

Mr Yunupingu was named Australian of the Year in 1992 for his contribution to building bridges of understanding between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. Political activism was something of a tradition with the family. His brother, Galarrwuy, had won the award in 1978. Mr Yunupingu was also committed to an extensive array of philanthropic work. He established the Yothu Yindi Foundation as a means to develop Yolngu cultural life, and he built the Yirrnga Music Development Centre, a recording studio for Indigenous artists.

The uniting power of Mr Yunupingu can best be summarised by again drawing on Paul Kelly's words. He paid tribute to Mr Yunupingu by saying:

'You showed me your country, brought me into your family, called me brother. You called the whole country brother.'

Australia has lost a powerful uniting voice. As an educator, a songwriter, a musician and a tireless campaigner, the contribution that Mr Yunupingu made to bridging the cultural and communicatory divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians cannot be overstated.

I spoke today on the Matter of Public Importance debate, moved by Malcolm Turnbull.

Matter of Public Importance - National Broadband Network, 4 June 2013

I appreciate the member for Wentworth providing us with a chance to set the record straight on what has been a disgraceful fear campaign by the coalition.

As with any major national project there are important conversations that policymakers need to have about what we want to achieve and how best to set about achieving it. So I want to speak first about why Australia needs the National Broadband Network—a fibre-to-the-home network—and then discuss the issues of asbestos that the honourable member has raised and how the government is responding to those.

The simple fact is that in a 21st century developed country, access to the internet is a form of basic infrastructure. It is to our generation as the water and electricity networks were to generations before. The member for Wentworth knows this; he has great knowledge of the information technology industry—certainly unlike his leader, who has confessed 'I'm no tech-head'.

The member for Wentworth might cast his mind back to 1923, when construction began on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Back then, Sydney was home to fewer than 40,000 cars—not enough to cause a single traffic jam. But when construction on that bridge began the policymakers of the era built a bridge capable of carrying six lanes of traffic flanked by an extra two lanes for trains. It might have seemed a bold move but, as the member for Wentworth well knows, and as his constituents would well know, the Sydney Harbour Bridge is now an indispensable artery of the city's transport system. Over 160,000 cars cross the bridge daily, four times the entire number of cars that existed in the city of Sydney when construction of the bridge first began.

The point here is that the Sydney Harbour Bridge was not designed for the Sydney of the 1920s; it was designed for, and it continues to serve, a Sydney of the future. And it is that same spirit with which Labor first proposed a national broadband network. We do not know precisely how our technological use will change in the future. But one way of thinking about this is to think about how our own IT usage has changed just in the past 10 years, and then imagine it changing just as dramatically again.

That is why we need the National Broadband Network. Under the NBN, every home and every business will have access to superfast internet via optic fibre, fixed wireless and satellite technologies. For 93 per cent of homes and businesses this will be a national fibre network. The point here is that unlike copper, which transmits electrical current, fibre uses pulses of light to transmit information. Over recent years, engineers have steadily been achieving more rapid fibre transmission speeds: up from 100 megabits a second a few years ago to 1,000 megabits a second today. That is the difference between being able to download a CD full of information every five seconds rather than every 50 seconds. And the boffins do not think that they have found the limit on fibre just yet. Some tests suggest that it could be up to 1,000 times faster again. Unlike copper, fibre-to-the-premises is an information superhighway without a speed limit.

People in my own electorate of Fraser are already seeing the benefits the NBN has to offer. Gungahlin Library is part of the Gungahlin Digital Hub, where residents are able to learn more about how to access the NBN. They are running free training sessions, covering a range of computer basics, every day online activities, online safety and security and connection options. I would encourage those opposite, whether they call themselves tech heads, or especially if they do not, to visit the Gungahlin Library to learn about how the NBN is delivering.

I have welcomed the release of detailed maps by NBN Co. which show where the construction of the National Broadband Network will start. The maps show that NBN fibre has been rolling out across Civic, Acton and parts of Braddon, as well as in Gungahlin. It is worth making the point that for all its conniptions about Labor's National Broadband Network, the coalition has now adopted a policy which has a multibillion dollar price tag and which has the same accounting treatment as Labor's NBN, but which ultimately will deliver far slower speeds than the NBN. So the need for the National Broadband Network is clear.

I want to turn now, though, to the issue that the member for Wentworth has raised over managing asbestos risk during the rollout. As has been made clear during question time, the health and safety of Australian workers and Australian communities is our number one priority. As the opposition would be well aware, Telstra has accepted full responsibility for the issue. The government is expecting Telstra and its contractors to follow Australia's strict laws on the handling and removal of asbestos in preparing its pits and ducts for the rollout of the NBN. Those pits and ducts are owned by Telstra and used by NBN Co.

We have announced that the first National Asbestos Exposure Register will be created and maintained by the new National Asbestos Safety and Eradication Authority. This continues the strong tradition in the Australian Labor movement, leading the national charge on identifying and eradicating the scourge of asbestos and asbestos-related disease.

It was the labour movement that got asbestos banned: blue in 1967, brown in the mid-1980s, white in 2003. That happened thanks to pressure from the labour movement. There cannot be any shortcuts in asbestos safety. We understand that and we have acted.

There have been a number of incidents in recent times through the remediation of Telstra's pits and ducts, and that includes in Penrith. There has been at least one as a result of work being done by contractors to NBN Co. When you are working in the telecommunications industry and doing this type of work, you will deal with asbestos. That is well known. But the most important issue, and the one the government has continued to focus on, is to ensure that the strict laws in place for the handling and removal of asbestos are followed at all times. It does not matter if you are Telstra, if you are NBN Co., if you are a builder doing renovations: asbestos has to be dealt with in a safe and appropriate way.

The coalition cannot pretend that this issue would not arise under their policy. If you are advancing fibre-to-the-node technology, as the opposition does—and they have accepted that it is a slower technology that will deliver slower broadband speeds—it will involve working in areas with asbestos risk. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that perhaps we are intending to leave the copper in the ground forever, that Australia will forever have a copper network. Copper to the home is not something that anyone believes Australia will have in a century's time.

NBN Co. is continuing to assess the situation but it does not expect it to impede the overall rollout. The construction process already takes into account a period of several months in each area for Telstra to remediate its infrastructure. The remediation of Telstra's infrastructure is carried out by Telstra and it is paid for by Telstra. Telstra has known for 30 years about the presence of asbestos in its pits, and this is a process which will be managed by Telstra.

Since 2007, Labor has done more than any previous government to combat the problem of asbestos. We have established the National Asbestos Agency, the National Asbestos Plan and the National Asbestos Exposure Register. Under the Gillard government we established the asbestos management review in 2010. Before that there was no coordinated or consistent approach to managing asbestos beyond workplaces. That is why earlier this year we also introduced legislation to parliament to establish the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency. In the 2013-14 budget we provided that agency with $10½ million in funding over the next four years to help protect Australians from asbestos related diseases. The agency will pave a new way for a national approach to asbestos eradication. It will handle asbestos awareness and education. It will administer a national strategic plan.

Conversely, what can we say about the record of the coalition on asbestos management? I am sure some of the speakers who will follow me will say something about the Leader of the Opposition's track record in this regard. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition was a lawyer who fought to deny compensation to thousands of victims of CSR's asbestos mine in Wittenoom. Back in 2004 it was Labor who shamed the coalition into returning donations given to them by James Hardie. In 2007, as health minister, the Leader of the Opposition refused to list on the PBS a drug known as Alimta, which would ease the suffering of asbestosis patients.

Mr Turnbull: Mr Deputy Speaker, on a point of order: the remarks that the honourable member has made about the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the Opposition are not relevant to this MPI. He is just having a free kick.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Murphy): The member for Wentworth will resume his seat. The parliamentary secretary will speak to the motion.

Dr LEIGH: Thank you, Deputy Speaker. I understand why those opposite are concerned about the track record of the two major parties when it comes to asbestos. As Fairfax media has reported, in 2001 Telstra wanted to create an independent body to fast-track compensation payments to employees exposed to asbestos and sought approval from the then department of workplace relations. The then minister for workplace relations was the now opposition leader, so the fact is that the opposition leader knew as far back as 2001 that Telstra was aware of asbestos in its infrastructure and sat on his hands. It is time for the opposition leader to explain what he knew, what correspondence he had with Telstra about asbestos in 2001 when he was workplace relations minister and why he chose to ignore it.

In 2005 a question on notice was asked of then Minister McGauran, representing the then communications minister, Senator Coonan, about Telstra's use of asbestos. The minister provided an answer in February 2006—not exactly a speedy answer, but an answer nonetheless—that explained Telstra's use of asbestos in pits, ducts and exchanges and the possibility of exposure. So those opposite cannot argue that the Howard government was ignorant of this issue. The Howard government was in fact well aware of the issues with asbestos and Telstra's infrastructure. Those opposite have a track record of this standing up for James Hardie, while those on this side of the House have a track record of standing up for those who have been affected by asbestos, of standing up for workers, of standing up for people like Bernie Banton.

We know the National Broadband Network is a necessity. We are working to mitigate the risks that are generated by building the NBN, but only someone who argues that they will never open a single pit again can promise that this asbestos will not be disturbed. The coalition's policy is a policy which builds fibre to suburban nodes. It is the kind of 'get your water at the village well' approach. If you want to build fibre from the node to the home you will have to pay for it yourself, at $5,000 a pop. That is not only inequitable but it will mean that for many Australian households their connections are 25 megabits a second at best. That is around one-40th the speed that the NBN can provide. I am sure slow upload and download speeds trouble the member for Wentworth, but they do not trouble the Leader of the Opposition. He has made the brash statement that he is 'confident 25 megs is enough for the average household'. I have talked about what that kind of thinking in the 1920s would have meant for the Sydney Harbour Bridge: the Leader of the Opposition would have built a single-lane bridge because that was enough for the then 40,000 cars in Sydney.

But we do not have to use infrastructure analogies; we can use IT analogies. When I bought my first computer in 1984 it had 3½ kilobytes of memory. I do not think that we send emails that small these days. But in fact in that period the then computer editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Gareth Powell, wrote that he thought no program would ever need more than 16 kilobytes. Statements like that are a warning to anyone who forgets that the things we can do with technology far outpace our imagination. The sorts of statements by the Leader of the Opposition suggesting that 25 megabits a second is enough ought to embarrass the member for Wentworth, and I know they trouble many prominent Australians. Dr Karl Kruszelnicki recently told me that he regularly talks to school classes using Skype. With the Australian classes the copper connection is unreliable and has to be reset a couple of times an hour. But if he talks to Korean or Japanese students, he can expect an uninterrupted high-resolution videoconference. That is what the National Broadband Network will deliver to Australians.

[caption id="attachment_4320" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Chris Manchester, Wendy Tuckerman, Michael Pilbrow, Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Rowena Abbey, Geoff Kettle & John Shaw"][/caption]

I spoke in parliament yesterday about the need to make the Barton Highway safer, ahead of a meeting the PM had with mayors and Labor candidate for Hume Michael Pilbrow.

Barton Highway, 3 June 2013

Last week there was a head-on crash on the Barton Highway, between Yass and Murrumbateman. The drivers of both cars were hospitalised with critical injuries, and the single-carriageway highway was closed in both directions for several hours.

Thankfully, this incident did not claim any lives; unlike a similar head-on collision in February this year in which one of the motorists, an ACT resident, was tragically killed.

The Barton Highway is a part of the national highway system and a key link between Canberra and the national grid, and it is unacceptable that it remains so dangerous. The risks are only going to increase as traffic volumes build, because the Yass valley area is one of the fastest growing regions in New South Wales. For example, Murrumbateman has grown from having a population of around 350 in 1984 to some 3,000 today.

Thanks to pressure from my predecessor, Bob McMullan; Labor's 2007 candidate for Hume, David Grant; and locals, including Murrumbateman resident John Gelling, Labor devoted $36 million to roadworks to address a notorious danger spot, the Gounyan curves. This 4.5 kilometre section of improvements removed seven bends. It was my pleasure to officially open the improved section in November 2011.

Many locals still believe the Barton Highway should be duplicated. The Commonwealth would be prepared to consider a proposal for this, but at present New South Wales has not even listed it as a priority, which is disappointing, given that the National Party's member for Burrinjuck serves in Barry O'Farrell's cabinet—yet she is unable to get the road onto the New South Wales state government short-list for urgent action.

A strong campaigner for duplication of the Barton highway is Labor candidate for Hume, Michael Pilbrow. Like many people in Hume, Michael regularly travels the Barton Highway to attend meetings in Canberra. He sometimes travels the road with his children and he knows the risk it brings.

There is no more passionate champion of duplicating the Barton than Michael Pilbrow. Tomorrow, he will be meeting with Prime Minister Gillard along with Rowena Abbey, the Mayor of Yass; Geoff Ketle, the Mayor of Goulburn; Wendy Tuckerman, the Mayor of Booroowa; Chris Manchester, the Mayor of Harden; and John Shaw the Mayor of Upper Lachlan. The meeting will further push for the Barton Highway duplication, and a petition calling for duplication, initiated by the Mayor of Yass, will be presented to the Prime Minister.

Every day over 6,000 people commute from the Hume electorate to the ACT. As a Canberran, I applaud Michael Pilbrow's activism. He is a candidate who lives in the electorate, who is raising his family there and who is working hard to address local issues such as the Barton Highway duplication. He is a candidate who would serve the people of Hume well in this parliament. I wish him and the local mayors the best in their efforts for improving the safety of the Barton Highway, and I wish Michael Pilbrow my personal best in fighting this election.

My op-ed in today's AFR looks at the prospects for jumpstarting Japan's ailing economy.

Three Arrows on Their Way, Australian Financial Review, 4 June 2013

In the mid-1930s, John Maynard Keynes coined the phrase ‘animal spirits’ to sum up the impact of a country’s mood on its economic environment. When nations get stuck in a funk, it’s hard to escape. Conversely, when growth gets going, exuberance builds on exuberance (sometimes to the point of creating a bubble). Either way, the sentiments of consumers and businesses can build on one another.

For Japan, the post-war decades are a story of astonishing transformation, as the country transformed itself from a developing to a developed country. By the 1980s, airport bookshelves were filled with tomes about the virtues of the Japanese economic model, with titles like Trading Places: How we are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It and Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by the Year 2000.

But the past twenty years have been a story of malaise. Hard as it is to believe, the Japanese economy – in nominal terms – is almost exactly the same size as it was twenty years ago. The deflation trap has proved devilishly hard to escape, and net government debt is now more than 140 percent of GDP, the highest in the OECD (Australia’s debt share is one of the lowest).

Yet all this may be about to change, thanks to a policy dubbed ‘Abenomics’ after the country’s new Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe. In a series of recent meetings with senior economic policymakers, I was struck by the positive impact that these policies appear to be having on the national mood.

Prime Minister Abe has identified three strategies to promote growth, which he refers to as his ’three arrows’. The reference is to a Japanese legend in which a father shows his three sons that a single arrow can be snapped easily, but three together cannot be broken.

The first arrow is monetary policy. In an effort to break out of deflation, the new central bank governor Haruhiko Kuroda has committed to a 2 per cent inflation target, to be achieved via a massive bond-buying program. The second arrow is fiscal policy, focused particularly on reconstruction efforts after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

While monetary and fiscal policy can jump-start an economy, productivity growth is what keeps the engine humming along. So Japan’s third arrow – structural reform – is the one that matters most for enduring economic growth. While previous Japanese governments have typically shied away from major trade liberalisation, Prime Minister Abe has stated that a hallmark of his administration will be pursuit of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trading zone in the Asia Pacific. In Australia’s case, a study by the Productivity Commission’s Dean Parham estimated that half of our productivity growth in the 1990s was due to our trade liberalisation. Japan could reap a similar reward.

Other reforms that people spoke about with me included encouraging more start-up firms, expanding the availability of child care in order to boost female labour force participation, and improving the efficiency of the service sector.

For Australia, the payoff from a growing Japanese economy is considerable. As the government’s Australia in the Asian Century White Paper noted, Japan is our second-largest trading partner and our third-largest source of foreign direct investment. We provide them with minerals, agriculture and energy; they provide us with manufactured products and foreign investment. The Australian and Japanese economies are remarkably complementary. At senior levels, there is a keen awareness that Prime Minister Gillard was the first foreign leader to visit Japan after the 2011 earthquake. Following the Labor Government’s Asian Century White Paper, all Australian high school children will soon have the opportunity to learn Japanese.

Japan’s nascent recovery could still go awry, as the recent downtick in the Nikkei has reminded us. The consumption tax has been legislated to rise from 5 percent to 10 percent by 2015. Demographics remain a serious concern, with the population due to shrink from the current 128 million to 95 million by 2050.

And yet for now, it is pleasantly surprising to see the general enthusiasm with which Abenomics has been embraced. Keynes’ animal spirits are alive and well in Tokyo, and for now, the three arrows seem to be flying towards their mark.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister. He recently represented the Australian Government at the Nikkei International Conference on "The Future of Asia" in Tokyo. His website is www.andrewleigh.com.

I spoke in parliament today about Coalition costings, and the importance of parliament expressing its confidence in Treasury officials.

Confidence in Treasury, 3 June 2013

Too often the crucial work of our nation's public servants goes unnoticed and goes unthanked. As the member for Fraser I am pleased to say that many of these hardworking public servants are my constituents. I myself have been seconded to Treasury and have seen firsthand the hard work of those public servants. We on this side of the House believe in a frank and fearless Public Service in the great Westminster tradition. Those opposite would prefer to have a flaccid and fearful Public Service. That is their ideal of public service.

It is clear why those opposite have spent three years waging a smear campaign against Treasury. It is because they have an ever-widening costings black hole. They are therefore desperate to avoid scrutiny of their costings, and they see the boffins and the bean counters as an obstacle to that. At the 2010 election, the member for North Sydney concocted bogus allegations of Treasury politicisation to avoid submitting coalition policies to Treasury and Finance. Instead, the opposition had their policies costed by a private accounting firm, who overlooked that they had an $11 billion black hole. That private accounting firm was subsequently fined by the Institute of Chartered Accountants for breaching professional standards. Despite that, the member for Goldstein has in this chamber claimed that those faux costings were 'as good as you can get anywhere in the country, including in Treasury'.

On 19 September, I was witness in this chamber to a savage attack by the member for Goldstein against the institution of Treasury and against then Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, who, as honourable members know, was appointed by Treasurer Costello to that position.

The member for Goldstein claimed the $11 billion black hole was:

‘… something fabricated with the use of Treasury officials to give government a political advantage.’

The member for Mackellar—who in 1992 shot to prominence after attacking public servant Trevor Boucher—joined in, saying:

‘… this Parliamentary Budget Office is something that is simply linked to the coattails of Treasury.’

She went on:

‘I made the point that Treasury and the head of Treasury had been rewarded for things that they had done to assist the government … it is politicised and that is why we cannot trust them.’

The member for Mackellar has even said of former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry:

‘He served the government very well in the latter stages of his appointment, particularly when it came to assessing the budget savings that were put forward by the opposition prior to the last election.’

This is like a rich kid who gets a maths question wrong and, instead of accepting the right answer, goes to the principal asking for the teacher to be sacked.

The opposition in the last election were badly out in their costings, and their pretext now is that budget forecasts cannot be relied on. The member for North Sydney has said:

‘The numbers are just not believable. It is fundamentally a dishonest budget.  … I don't believe they are Treasury numbers. They are Wayne Swan's numbers.’

Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson has directly rejected these allegations. He said on 21 May:

‘I can say on behalf of David Tune, the secretary of the Department of Finance and myself—and get this right—were PEFO to have been released on the 14th of May, it would have contained the numbers that were in the budget.’

PEFO is produced independently by Treasury and Finance in caretaker period without political oversight. Dr Parkinson has told us in crystal clear terms that the numbers in the budget represent the best professional estimates of Treasury and Finance. They have not been tampered with by the Deputy Prime Minister as those opposite would have you believe. They are the best estimates of honest and hardworking public servants.

The member for North Sydney continued his extraordinary slur, saying:

‘I would have expected Martin Parkinson to say nothing different yesterday because he is, quite appropriately, a servant of the government.’

This is continuing in the same vein as the members for Goldstein and Mackellar. He should withdraw that claim. Attacking Treasury is not only unfounded; it is also weak. In public debate, public servants do not have the opportunity to defend themselves as we in this place do. It is wrong to treat them like a political football.

On the other side of politics, Senator Sinodinos, my opposition counterpoint as Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, has worked hard in the Department of Treasury and knows as I do the important work that they do.