Andrew Leigh

I spoke today on a bill to give the ACT Assembly the power to set its own size.

Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Amendment Bill, 12 March 2013

It is a pleasure to rise to speak on the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Amendment Bill 2013 today, the 100th birthday of Canberra. This morning we had a re-enactment out the front of Parliament House of the ceremony of the laying of the foundation stone. I have here the program for that ceremony, which was held on 12 March 1913. Today's ceremony aimed to shadow that historic ceremony of 1913, when sheep greatly outnumbered the residents of Canberra. The ceremony this morning acknowledged the rich history of Canberra—not only the political heritage but also the social tapestry of the city. I was very pleased today to hear the member for Stirling speak so warmly of the city that I have the honour to represent in the federal parliament.

Walter Burley Griffin said that he was designing a city for a nation of ‘bold democrats’. To borrow a phrase from Seamus Heaney, I have always thought of Canberra as being the kind of place where hope and history rhyme. In the centenary celebrations, Canberra has been given an opportunity to celebrate but also to remember much of our history. Historian David Headon has produced a series of centenary booklets and centenary director Robyn Archer has made sure that history has been interwoven into the celebrations.

We have also taken the opportunity to invest in the city of Canberra. The Australian government has contributed $20 million to the development of a visitors centre, a children's play space, ceremonial gardens, an events pavilion and an events terrace at the National Arboretum. In building the National Arboretum, we really are reaching out to the generations to come, because arboretums often involve planting saplings that will only become great trees once we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

There is also an opportunity for communities to come together. One of my regrets about today is that I am missing out on the street parties that are being held throughout my electorate. The parties in Lyneham and Hackett in particular are ones that I would have looked forward to attending. They are in fact going on at this very moment. They are bringing together communities to have a bit of fun and enjoy their history.

One of my contributions to the celebrations has been through the celebrity suburb name competition, which involves thinking about who or what your suburb might have been named after if you had particularly wicked ancestors. For example, Cook might have been named after Master Chef, Dunlop after tyres, Latham after Mark Latham, Reid after Chopper Reid, Russell after Russell Crowe and of course Scullin after the Oarsome Foursome.

This is an extraordinary city to live in and to represent. Ours is the bush capital, where you can look up and see hills from inside a shopping centre. There are plenty of cockatoos and magpies and, yes, even galahs. When the scoping party visited Canberra in August 1906, a newspaper reported wrote: 'A deep breath of the air is like a draft of champagne.'

Federal parliamentarian King O'Malley turned Canberra's chilly climes to his advantage by saying: ‘I want us to have a climate where men can hope. We cannot have hope in hot countries.’ A sentiment, I am sure, thought of by many a pub-goer to King O'Malley's Irish Pub in Civic on a cold winter's night.

Canberra is Australia's sporting capital. We have the Australian Institute of Sport and a plethora of great sporting teams—the Comets, the Brumbies, the Raiders, the Capitals, Cavalry, Strikers, Knights, Lakers and GWS. But we also play more sport than people in other parts of Australia. Four out of 10 Canberrans play an organised sport compared with three out of 10 for the rest of Australia.

Canberra is Australia's ideas capital. Wi-fi was invented at CSIRO. Our most recent Nobel laureate is Brian Schmidt, the ANU researcher who won a Nobel Prize for his research on the expanding universe. We also have ideas generated by the public servants, such as HECS, Medicare, universal superannuation and plain packaging. We have social entrepreneurs in Canberra who are inspirational for the rest of the country.

We are also the country's history capital. We are not the oldest city in Australia but we are the only capital city in Australia named after the traditional owners rather than one of the white interlopers. All around us the nation's history is the local geography for Canberra—suburbs from Deakin to Curtin, Scullin to Chifley. In fact, the only one you feel sorry for is Prime Minister Gorton, the only Prime Minister to make Canberra his home after retirement but who missed having a suburb named after himself because the planners wanted to avoid confusion with 'Gordon'.

We are also Australia's social capital. Walter Burley Griffin wanted ours to be a community with 'great democratic civic ideals', and I think he would be pleased to know that Canberrans are more likely to volunteer than people in other parts of Australia and more likely to donate money to a charity. They are more likely to trust others and to join community organisations. Part of that is not just the fact that Canberrans are, on average, a touch better educated and a touch more affluent than the rest of Australia, because even when you compare like with like you see that Canberrans are more civically engaged than people of similar demographics. I think it is something to do with the urban design—the fact that in Canberra you do not have to burn a litre of petrol to buy a litre of milk; that you can live in the suburbs but walk to local shops. That means, for example, that a Sydneysider with a full-time job spends 13 days a year commuting—13 24-hour days just sitting in the car. A Canberran with a full-time job spends eight days a year commuting. That is an extra five days a year to spend with friends and family, playing an organised sport or getting involved with family and the community.

That is not to say that we should not work to improve Canberra. I do commend the member for Stirling for his bipartisan support for this bill. This bill is a recognition of the work that is being done by ACT Chief Minister Katy Gallagher appointing an expert reference group to review the size of the ACT Legislative Assembly. That expert reference group comprised ACT Electoral Commissioner Philip Green, who is the chair; Anne Cahill Lambert; Meredith Edwards; John Hindmarsh; and Louise Taylor. This expert review will look at the number of electorates and the number of members per electorate.

I have put a submission into that inquiry because I believe that it is important first and foremost that the assembly be able to set its size, as state parliaments can already do. The ACT assembly, now into its third decade, has proved itself the decision-making equal of any other parliament in Australia and I believe ought to be able to set its own size.

The workload of ACT parliamentarians is significant indeed. A standard rule for the size of an assembly body, if you look across parliaments around the world, is an assembly size of about the cube root of the population it represents. So, for example, if you take Australia's population—23 million—the cube root of 23 million is 284, not far off the 226 members of the Australian parliament. If you take New South Wales, for example, the population is seven million. The cube root of seven million is 191 and the New South Wales parliament has 135 representatives—in the ballpark of what the cube root rule would lead you to expect.

But if you apply that to the ACT's population—375,000—you get an assembly size of 72, four times larger than the current assembly. Put another way, you can ask the question: 'If you had an assembly of 17 people, what population size should it represent?' The answer is about 5,000 people, about the population of Palmerston, one of the suburbs in my electorate.

That may sound ridiculous, but if you look to Norfolk Island, for example, it has a nine-member assembly serving 2,000 people; Wreck Bay in my own electorate, with a population of 200, has a community council of nine people. So the ACT assembly is almost uniquely small for the workload that it deals with. Its current 17 MLAs are particularly hard working. I would particularly acknowledge the numerous mobile offices run by Chris Bourke, Mary Porter, Mick Gentleman and Joy Burch; the doorknocking work of Yvette Berry; and the hectic public speaking schedules of Katy Gallagher, Simon Corbell and Andrew Barr.

It is tough to be an MLA in the ACT for two reasons. The first is that the number of people they must represent is large. The second is the number of issues are vast, because there is no local council here, unlike, say, the Northern Territory or Tasmania. The work of the assembly ranges from everything from schools to garbage collection. The result of having a 17-member assembly is that government members who are in the ministry can hold between four and six ministries. These are exceptionally high workloads and they are replicated among the shadow ministers.

It is also worth pointing out that not only does the assembly represent a very large number of people for its size but that it is also true of federal electorates. My own electorate of Fraser now has 131,698 people on the electoral roll. That is either the largest or the second largest of any of the 150 members in the House of Representatives. At the last federal election the average number of electors per electorate was 94,000. But at current rates of population growth it does not look as though the ACT will receive a third seat in the House of Representatives. That then expands the workload on the ACT's House of Representatives members. We deal with a considerable number of local queries and I believe that the representation of the ACT population would be improved were we to have a larger assembly.

The assembly size is for the assembly, but my own view is that increasingly the assembly to 25 MLAs—five electorates each returning five members—is the minimum that ought to be considered. That would be is still well below the ratio of members per population that other states and territories have. In fact, it would only provide a level of representation comparable to 1989, when the Territory first attained self-government. I do think that the Territory, were it to go to only 25 members, should do so in conjunction with a commitment to steadily increase the assembly size as the population of the ACT grows. I think that would be appropriate, given the extremely large workload of the assembly.

So while I commend my assembly colleagues on the hard work, I do hope that there will be bipartisan support for this. I was very pleased to hear the member for Stirling speaking of the federal coalition's bipartisan support. But I am aware that there are always temptation to play politics with this. I can see the temptation that the ACT Liberals may face, where they decide that they can run some sort of cheap, populist line of saying that they are going to vote against extra politicians. While it might be in their immediate political interest, it would not be in the long-term interests of the ACT, and I do urge them to place those long-term interests first.

In closing, I make mention of a great Canberran, CEO of the ACT and Region Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Chris Peters. Chris passed away on 27 February this year. He had a ready smile, a generosity of spirit and a willingness to engage in public debates on matters large and small in the ACT. His commitment to building this great city, I think, will live on beyond him. He is known as a great advocate for business in Canberra, and having great advocates for business—as I know the member for Canberra is and as am I—is so important to ensuring that this diverse city does well in its second century.

I commend the bill to the House.

I spoke in parliament today about higher education reform (thanking Michael McCormack at the outset for filibustering long enough to let me get out of the chair and over to speak!).

Higher Education Support Amendment (Further Streamlining and Other Measures) Bill, 12 March 2013

At the outset, I acknowledge the comments of the member for Riverina, who has demonstrated his passion for his constituents with his ability to speak for an appropriate length about an issue of importance to him and to the chamber.

I was pleased when I was an academic at the ANU to work alongside Bruce Chapman, one of the architects of HECS, who put in place a truly world-leading piece of policy. It is easy to forget now that HECS, now known as HELP, has become so much part of our social fabric. The notion of income-contingent loans was one in which Australia was stepping out as a world first. Milton Freeman mentioned the notion of income-contingent loans in the 1960s but it was Professor Chapman who really picked it up, put flesh on its bones and suggested it as a way of ensuring two big things.

The first was, because a student receives a private benefit as well as the public benefit from a university education, they should contribute a little bit back into the public purse. University education boosts earnings significantly, and HECS, now HELP, recognises that private benefit. But, secondly, it was the recognition that we needed to expand the sector. We needed to ensure that university education was not something just for elites but was attainable for all Australians. The only way of getting those additional resources into the sector was to ask students to give a little bit back.

So now, when we look at policies in which Australia is leading the world I think we should also look to the HELP policy—a policy which has proven its worth and is now being adopted by a suite of other countries around the world. The UK, Germany, Israel, Thailand and Chile are all adopting or considering adopting the HELP policy. I suspect that will be the case down the track with policies such as plain packaging of tobacco and putting a price on carbon pollution—we are moving with other countries in the world to put in place policies that future generations will thank us for. What we are doing with this policy is ensuring that the thresholds are indexed at appropriate levels. When HECS was originally introduced, repayment did not start until you reached average weekly earnings. That was based on the simple notion that you should not have to pay back your HECS debt until your university education had begun to pay off in earnings for you. When the Howard government came to office, that model was changed and the repayment thresholds were brought down substantially. I am pleased that now the HECS repayment threshold have been restored so that they are around average weekly earnings.

This bill is a part of a major university investment by this government. Since Labor has come to office there have been more than 150,000 extra Australians studying at university and total funding for the sector has been increased substantially. At the Australian National University, just to pick one of the many excellent universities in my electorate, there has been an increase in enrolments from 6,350 students to 7,086 students, significant investment in education and significant investment in improving access to youth allowance and the quality of student learning and living areas through our investment in housing. That matters, because high-quality university accommodation improves the learning experience.

Recently, we had the ANU alumni awards recognising extraordinary alumni. I acknowledge Alumni of the Year joint recipients Anne Gallagher and Martin Parkinson; Vice-Chancellor's Special Commendations Adam Ford, Danny Bishop and Chris Duffield; International Alumnus of the Year Cheong Choong Kong; Young Alumnus of the Year joint recipients Sebastian Robertson and Jennifer Robinson; Student of the Year joint recipients Katrina Marson and Ray Lovett; and Student of the Year finalists Aditya Chopra, Julie Melrose and Georgia Majoribanks.

In closing, I also note some important reforms being put in place by the government in teacher education courses. This government recognises that it is important to improve the academic aptitude of new teachers. When I was at the Australian National University I did work with Chris Ryan looking at the academic aptitude of new teachers and those entering tertiary education, and what we found was deeply disturbing. From 1983 through to 2003 the share of teachers who were in the top fifth of their class for literacy and numeracy had halved. Over the same period, the share of teachers who were in the bottom half of their class had doubled.

So we had seen a fall in the academic aptitude of new teachers from the 70th percentile to the 62nd percentile, and we had seen a fall in the academic aptitude of those entering teacher education courses from the 74th percentile to the 61st percentile. It is a development that had also been seen over that period in the United States and it is a development that concerns this government. Literacy and numeracy does not guarantee you are going to be a great teacher but, all else equal, we want those who are at the whiteboard to have strong literacy and numeracy skills themselves. So, as the minister has announced, we will be putting in place literacy and numeracy testing, a more targeted admission process for teaching courses and more assistance to help all teachers over every stage of their career, recognising that there is no more important job in Australia than teaching students, particularly disadvantaged students. With those remarks, I commend the bill to the house.

On Sky AM Agenda, I spoke with host Kieran Gilbert and Liberal Senator Mitch Fifield about the Western Australian election, Labor's strong record of reforms, and Canberra's Centenary.

MEDIA STATEMENT
Andrew Leigh MP
Labor Spokesperson on Coalition Costings
Member for Fraser
12 March 2013

The Australian people have a right to see the Coalition’s costed policies, said Labor Spokesperson on Coalition Costings Andrew Leigh.

In a doorstop interview this morning, Opposition frontbencher Scott Morrison said “we’re obsessed with putting our plans and policies to the Australian people to ensure that if we are elected later this year we are ready to hit the ground running”.

“If the Coalition’s policies are as good for Australia as they claim, they shouldn't be hidden in Andrew Robb’s desk drawer”, said Dr Leigh.

“The fact is, the Opposition are obsessed with keeping their policies secret. That’s because they know that filling their $70 billion costings gap will require radical cuts – equivalent to stopping Medicare for four years or cutting the pension for two years.

“The Opposition aren’t even sharing their policies with each other. That’s why the Opposition Leader has had three positions on WestConnex in a single week; why Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey disagree on how much they will cut household assistance; and why Mr Hockey and Mr Robb cannot agree on their revenue gap.

“Providing costed policies to the Australian people is a fundamental issue of openness and honesty. If the Coalition cannot level with Australians about their cuts, why should Australians trust them to govern in the national interest?”

ENDS

On the ABC Capital Hill program, I spoke with host Lyndal Curtis and Liberal MP Russell Broadbent about the opportunity for the new Victorian Liberal Government to reverse its savage cuts, and about the importance of treating asylum-seekers with dignity in our public debates.

On ABC 666 yesterday, host Genevieve Jacobs asked me to remove the politician's hat temporarily, and speak about my research with Pamela Katic on wealth inequality in Australia. Here's a podcast.

Rachel Baxendale in the Australian and Katie Walsh in the AFR have neat write-ups today of my research with Pamela Katic on wealth inequality. Here's the abstract:

Combining data from surveys, inheritance tax records, and rich lists, we estimate top wealth shares for Australia from World War I until the present day. We find that the top 1 percent share declined by two-thirds from 1915 until the late-1960s, and rose from the late-1970s to 2010. The recent increase is sharpest at the top of the distribution, with the top 0.001 percent wealth share tripling from 1984 to 2012. The trend in top wealth shares is similar to that in Australian top income shares (though the drop in the first half of the twentieth century is larger for wealth than income shares). Since the early twentieth century, top wealth shares in Australia have been lower than in the UK and US.

Update, 6 March: Here's the audio from a doorstop interview I did on the topic this morning.

MEDIA STATEMENT
Andrew Leigh MP
Labor Spokesperson on Coalition Costings
Member for Fraser

5 March 2013

Hockey Exposed Over Cuts

Joe Hockey has been exposed on the Coalition’s plans to lower the tax-free threshold after an embarrassing press conference this morning.

At the press conference, Joe Hockey shamelessly attempted to justify his commitment to scrap low and middle income tax cuts.

Yet, mysteriously, the transcript distributed to the parliamentary press gallery had this exchange omitted from the text.

“Mr Hockey and Mr Abbott are at odds over the Coalition’s policy to scrap income tax cuts for over 7 million hard working Australians”, said Labor Spokesperson on Coalition Costings Andrew Leigh.

“Lifting the tax free threshold delivered tax cuts to all taxpayers with incomes of up to $80,000, with most receiving at least $300 a year, and many part time workers receiving up to $600.

“It’s bad enough that the Coalition are hiding their policies. Now they’re trying to hide their own words.”

THE ‘EDITED’ TRANSCRIPT

JOE HOCKEY: We have said, repeatedly, it is one of the initiatives that we cannot afford because it is based on the proceeds of the mining tax and the mining tax has been a complete failure. Now the Government is borrowing money to pay those things. It is unsustainable. You can’t hand out money that is being borrowed from the next generation. It is not what people want.

[The following two lines were omitted from Mr Hockey’s distributed transcript]

JOURNALIST: The tax free thresholds changes (inaudible)

JOE HOCKEY:  $3 dollars. That is what you said? [Turning to Lib candidate for Parramatta] $ 3 dollars!

JOURNALIST:[inaudible] It is part of the compensation package for the carbon tax. You have said you [inaudible].

JOE HOCKEY: You will see our final tax proposal after we see the books ten days into the election campaign.

On Sky Lunchtime Agenda, I spoke with host David Lipson and Liberal Senator Scott Ryan about the importance of treating asylum-seekers with dignity and compassion, and the value of making sure we have more and better-trained workers in the aged care sector.http://www.youtube.com/v/SuePSI9bkqQ?version=3&hl=en_GB

MEDIA STATEMENT
Andrew Leigh MP
Labor Spokesperson on Coalition Costings
Member for Fraser

3 March 2013

Abbott’s Costings Soar With the Eagles

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has made another unfunded promise, pledging up to $70 million for the redevelopment of Brookvale Oval, home of his beloved Manly Sea-Eagles.

Mr Abbott made the pledge at a function for Manly’s season launch at Brookvale Oval on Friday night.

“Mr Abbott needs to explain where the money to redevelop Brookvale Oval would come from”, said Labor Spokesperson on Opposition Costings Andrew Leigh.

“When Warringah Council estimated the cost of adding 7,000-10,000 undercover seats to Brookvale Oval, they put the cost at $70 million.”

“Would Mr Abbott take money from Western suburbs teams? Would it come from other sporting codes? Or would he raise taxes on all Australians to pay for it?

“Mr Abbott said last Tuesday that everything the government does should be subject to cost-benefit analysis.* Has he done such an analysis on Brookvale Oval? Or is this just another case of fiscal rectitude in public, and pork-barrelling in private?

“Mr Abbott’s willingness to play favourites with taxpayers’ money contrasts with his refusal to level with the Australian people about where his $70 billion of cuts will come from.

“The Coalition owe it to the Australian people to take all their policies to the Parliamentary Budget Office immediately.”

ENDS

* “Now, it’s more important than ever that everything the Commonwealth does that involves new spending which is subjected to rigorous cost benefit analysis and I guess that’s what I’d like to see. I’d like to see careful, objective, disinterested cost benefit analysis of this proposal and that would make it much easier for the Coalition to come to a hard and fast position.”
TONY ABBOTT, ABC NORTH QLD – 26 FEBRUARY 2013