Andrew Leigh

I appeared on Lateline on 5 October 2012, speaking about the increasingly scratchy tone of debate in Australian politics; the way that Labor policies such as paid parental leave, equal pay and superannuation have helped women; the strength of the Australian economy; and Labor's decision to replace a badly-targeted dental policy with a better one. A transcript is here.http://www.youtube.com/v/BL1NS8OvKKs?version=3&hl=en_GB

I was delighted today to join Senator Kate Lundy at the laying of a distribution fibre cable in Palmerston -- bringing the National Broadband Network to the heart of Gungahlin.



Our joint media release is below.

JOINT MEDIA RELEASE

Senator Kate Lundy
Senator for the ACT

Andrew Leigh MP
Federal Member for Fraser

4 October 2012

NBN rollout picks up speed in Gungahlin

Senator for the ACT Kate Lundy and Member for Fraser Andrew Leigh MP today welcomed construction activity connecting Gungahlin residents to the National Broadband Network (NBN).

Construction crew will rollout the first NBN fibre optic cable today to link homes and business in Gungahlin to the NBN.

Senator Lundy said the NBN will deliver fast, affordable, and reliable broadband to over 15 000 Canberra homes and businesses, including 2 700 in Gungahlin.

“The roll out of fibre in Gungahlin means homes and businesses are one step closer to connecting to the NBN and accessing services and other benefits,” Senator Lundy said.

“The NBN will not only provide a massive boost to internet speeds, it will provide a huge boost to our local community.”

Senator Lundy said with the fibre hauling commencing today, NBN Co forecast that construction activity should be complete in the central business district of Gungahlin as well as nearby suburbs by the end of the year allowing homes and businesses to connect shortly afterwards.

The Gillard Government has provided over $1 million to Gungahlin Library through the ACT Government to ensure local individuals and businesses can access training opportunities and connect with local services using the NBN in publicly available facilities.

"I'm particularly excited about the opportunities the NBN opens up in education," said Dr Leigh.

"With super fast broadband, students will be able to video link with schools overseas and share classroom experiences to learn other languages in real time. Guest lecturers can present to a university class through a feed from another country and take questions from students. Rather than today's slightly grainy and patchy quality of services such as Skype, the NBN will mean the quality is similar to watching a DVD.

"There are also enormous economic benefits in increased productivity. Businesses will be able to upload and download enormous files quickly. It means the person running the small production company can email a draft version of an ad, rather than posting a DVD or waiting until a meeting to screen it.

"I call on the Liberals to abandon their tin-can-and-string policy, and support Canberrans getting super-fast broadband."

My La Trobe University chat with moderator Robert Manne and Greens MP Adam Bandt ('The Future of the left in Australia: Labor and the Greens; friends or enemies?') is now available as a podcast via ABC Radio National Big Ideas and a vodcast via Slow TV.

On Sky AM Agenda, I spoke with host David Lipson and Liberal MP Kelly O'Dwyer. We discussed budget measures (including Labor's focus on efficiencies over the Coalition's job cuts), the resurgence of closed-economy thinking in the Coalition, and Labor's important achievements over the past five years.

In today's AFR, I have a column on why inequality matters.

Take the test, which society do you prefer? Australian Financial Review, 26 September 2012

To see whether you care about inequality, take this simple test. Suppose you had an equal chance of being born into any of the five wealth quintiles in Australia. Would you prefer to be born into a society where the share of wealth held by each of the quintiles was 1%, 6%, 12%, 20% and 62%? Or a society where the shares were 15%, 17%, 20% 24% and 24%?

Actually, I’m cheating, because I already know the answer. The first set of numbers is the actual distribution of wealth in Australia: 1% for the poor and 62% for the rich. But when surveyed about their ideal distribution of wealth, respondents almost universally want a more egalitarian distribution. Indeed, the figures I’ve shown are the wealth distribution preferences of the most affluent, who thought that the poor should have 15% of wealth, and the rich 24%.

So while I enjoyed Christopher Joye’s thoughtful column on inequality (AFR, 25/9), his view that we need a wider gap between rich and poor is definitely a boutique one. Asked to choose between the level of inequality in Australia and the United States, the vast majority of survey respondents opt for the Australian level.

As Treasurer Wayne Swan might put it, being Born in the USA seems appealing for those who get to drive a Pink Cadillac, but things look different for those in the Badlands and Backstreets. There is much to admire in the way that the US fosters great entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Marissa Mayer and Sergey Brin; but we must remember that the US is also the country that jails two-thirds of black high school dropouts, and where life expectancy for low-educated white women has fallen by five years over the past two decades. Inequality may not cause these bad outcomes, but the fact is the US is a dreadful place to be destitute.

Christopher Joye asks why we have progressive income taxes when we don’t handicap sportspeople. A glib answer is that Australian sport is replete with handicapping, from the different weight saddlebags in the Melbourne Cup to the salary caps that characterise most of our sporting contests. As many English soccer fans can tell you, too much inequality makes for a dull sport.

In the case of progressive income taxes, we ask the rich to pay a higher share of their incomes in taxes because they have more discretionary income than the poor. Put another way, the richer you are, the more capacity you have to fund our schools, army, hospitals, and pensions. And while it is true that higher-income people like Joye and me are lighter users of the income support system, we tend to be heavier users of other public services, including universities, roads and airports.

The flipside of progressive taxes is that government cash payments should be means-tested. I’m agnostic about whether $250,000 classifies you as ‘rich’, but I’m pretty sure that it means you don’t need to be on welfare.  And yet when our government has imposed means-tests on household payments and tax breaks, we heard an outcry from the Opposition (a reminder that they’re the heirs to those who opposed asset-testing the pension in the mid-1980s).

Australia is fortunate to have less inequality than many other nations, and to have seen a small drop in inequality over recent years. But the gap between rich and poor has grown markedly since 1980, with the top 1 percent doubling its share, and the top 0.1 percent tripling its share. And yes, inequality boosts growth, but it trickles down slowly.

Surveys prove that Australians care about inequality, and a plethora of economic experiments have shown that people are willing to pay to narrow the gaps between the rich and the rest. I can understand why Joye disapproves of envy, but as an economist, I’m surprised he would dismiss it as ‘irrational’. What brings us happiness isn’t just our own incomes, but also the wellbeing of others. Some people might find envy distasteful, but it’s no more irrational than altruism.

As ACTU researcher Matt Cowgill has pointed out, we should be sceptical of those who argue that it’s possible to worry about poverty but ignore inequality. What we define as a reasonable standard of living is invariably based on the wellbeing of the typical household. Someone who says they don’t care about inequality isn’t just saying that we shouldn’t worry about those at the front of the pack – they’re also saying that we needn’t worry how far the most disadvantaged have fallen behind.

Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser, and a former professor of economics at the Australian National University. He is currently writing a book about inequality.

I've had some queries over the last day about why I didn't vote on gay marriage yesterday afternoon.

I was absent from Parliament because my wife gave birth to our third son yesterday afternoon. To avoid any confusion on this issue, I put out the below statement this morning. Gweneth and I, as well as Zachary's two elder brothers, are all very excited about the new addition to our family.

MEDIA STATEMENT

Andrew Leigh MP

Member for Fraser



20 September 2012



LEAVE FROM PARLIAMENT

Andrew and Gweneth Leigh's third son, Zachary Keith Leigh, was born on the afternoon of 19 September.

Andrew is on parental leave from Parliament on 19-20 September.

Pairing arrangements did not apply to the conscience vote on same-sex marriage. Andrew has spoken in support of same-sex marriage on multiple occasions, and would have voted in favour of yesterday's motion.

I spoke in parliament tonight about the proposed Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission.

Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission Bill, 17 September 2012

It is my pleasure to speak on the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission Bill 2012. Strengthening Australian community life is a great passion of mine but it is an area which, in recent decades, we have sadly seen go backwards. I am going to do a little auto-citation, for which I apologise. In a book called Disconnected that I wrote a couple of years ago, I said that pretty much whichever way you cut it Australians are less involved in formal organisations than they were a generation ago. If you ask individuals whether they are active members of an organisation, you find that in 1967 33 per cent said yes but by 2004 just 18 per cent said yes.

If you look at the Directory of Australia Associations, the so-called bible for Australian associations, you find that the raw number of Australian associations has not kept pace with the Australian population. From the 1970s to 2010, the number of associations in that directory fell from 7,000 to 4,300. Put another way, there were about seven associations per 10,000 adults in the late 1970s and less than three associations for every 10,000 adults by 2010. That means that the associations we have are older than they once were. In the late 1970s, the typical association was about 22 years old; now, the typical association is about 39 years old.

We are not growing new associations the way Australia traditionally has—the way we did in the 1950s and 1960s, when we saw the birth of the Endeavour Foundation, Community Aid Abroad, Brisbane's Blue Nursing Service, World Vision Australia, UNICEF Australia, the Scout Association of Australia, Choice and International Pen Friends, to name just a few.

If you ask the associations themselves, they tell you they are shedding members. The RSL, Scouts, Guides, Rotary, Lions, the Mothers' Union—if you put together what these organisations are reporting back, it is possible to track an index of organisational membership. Compared with 1950, membership was down by 14 per cent in 1980 and was down a full 67 per cent by 2009. So it is vital that we as policymakers do what we can to increase the strength of Australia's organisations.

As a member of parliament, I take great pleasure in being involved in the associations in my local community. Just looking back through my diary for the last fortnight, I have been involved with Micah Challenge; People Power; the Canberra Times Fun Run, which raised money for a range of different charities; the University of the Third Age; and Care Australia.

Australia's associations need a system of regulation which is as good as we can provide for them. The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission is aiming to be a one-stop shop for Australia's charities. The notion of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission is that charities and not-for-profits will provide their information once to a single organisation. That organisation which will then pass that information on to other Commonwealth agencies, including the tax office. Once we get buy-in from states and territories, it will also be passing that information on to state and territory government agencies as well.

This is what past reviews into the sector have called for. As the inquiry into the bill by the House Standing Committee on Economics noted, there have been five major reviews into regulation and taxation of the sector since 2000—the inquiry into the definition of charities and related organisations in 2001, the inquiry by the Senate Standing Committee on Economics in 2008, the Henry review in 2009, a Productivity Commission review in 2010 and a Senate Economics Legislation Committee inquiry, also in 2010. All those reports recommended a single national regulator for the sector. It is a straightforward approach and one which would bring Australia into line with other jurisdictions. As the report points out, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand have this same sort of single regulator. Moving towards a single regulator is good for the growth of the charitable sector. If we want to, we can squib this reform, as previous parliaments going back to 2001 have—that was when the first inquiry recommended such a one-stop shop for charities. But, if we do that, we would be doing Australia's charities a disservice and we would be continuing the red-tape burden which falls upon them.

As was pointed out by witnesses to the inquiry, the not-for-profit sector already has a regulator—by default. It is called the Australian Taxation Office. The Australian Taxation Office is not particularly pleased about this and many charities are not particularly pleased by it either. It has strained the relationship between charities and the Australian Taxation Office. But let's not pretend, as the member for Menzies has attempted to do, that there is no additional red tape being imposed upon Australia's charities. We heard a great deal of evidence from charities about the burden of having to provide the same information to multiple government agencies and about grant requirements which are subtly different and so require charities to employ people to provide information to government agencies—when they could otherwise be increasing their expenditure on front-line services.

So this notion of the charitable passport is enormously appealing and will allow us to continue to grow the sector. As the report notes:

‘The current regulatory framework for the sector is fragmented, inconsistent, and uncoordinated across a range of government agencies.’

The report went on to note that it is vital we cut the level of red tape within the sector. The Treasury submission to the inquiry said:

‘For some entities the reductions [in red tape] will happen immediately, particularly those entities that are regulated at the Commonwealth level.’

The Treasury submission went on to say that those entities will see a reduction in their red-tape and compliance costs.

Reducing multiple reporting is absolutely critical. The Community Council of Australia said:

‘I do not think people quite realise how often charities have to demonstrate their bona fides, and the capacity to do that, by having the equivalent of a charities passport, has incredible appeal’

In summarising the situation I referred to earlier—the Australian Taxation Office becoming the default regulator for the sector—ACOSS said:

‘… it was never intended (nor has it wanted) to be the sector’s regulator; and the relationship between the sector and the ATO is less than positive as a result.’

If we are able to provide a more streamlined reporting arrangement for Australia's charities, that will provide great benefit to these charities.

Some have asked why the states and territories have not signed on already, but I think this is putting the cart before the horse.

It is vital that we build the ACNC and then allow states and territories to look at exactly what they will be signing up to. I fully expect that states and territories will do just that. It is strongly in their interests not to be collecting data that is already held by an ACNC. It is in their interests to be able to simply encourage charities to use a charitable passport. That ought to free up public servants in states and territories to focus on service delivery, not on requiring not-for-profits to provide information they have already provided to other agencies.

I commend the member for Parramatta for her excellent chairing of the committee. The report made a number of recommendations. It suggested, for example, that in the case of private ancillary funds, a tax-effective mechanism for individuals to pursue philanthropy which requires at least five per cent of the wealth of the PAF to be distributed annually and that the government investigate ways to strengthen protection in the bills for private donors who wish to keep their philanthropy anonymous. Recognising the desire for anonymity is an important feature in the bill. The committee also referred to the director's liability regime. The report said:

‘The committee is concerned that either the directors' liability regime is unduly onerous, as suggested by a significant portion of expert evidence presented to the committee, or that, as presented in the Bill, it is not sufficiently comprehensible for people to understand its intent or purported mode of operation. … Placing an unnecessary burden of liability could be seen as … a disincentive, which is opposed to the purpose and objects of the Bill. The committee therefore recommends that Treasury read draft this section of the legislation with a view to clarifying its intent and operation.’

The committee went on to note that the penalty amounts in the bill were roughly comparable with state and territory provisions but there was uncertainty among some witnesses as to the amount of discretion that would be available to the commissioner. The committee recommended accordingly that the explanatory memorandum to the bills clarify that the commissioner has the discretion not to impose an administrative penalty.

The committee scrutinised the bills thoroughly but the majority of the committee came strongly to the view that this is an important bill, that this bill will cut through red tape for the charitable and not-for-profit sector, a bill which will reduce frustrating and unnecessary duplication. I could see in the eyes of many of the witnesses the sheer sense of frustration at having to write the same details on the same forms. We have all had it from time to time when dealing with an agency that requires us to provide back to it information which it knows already. But how much more frustrating must it be for many of these charities and not-for-profit to have to remit information to a second government agency which it knows is already held by the first government agency.

I am surprised that the coalition are not supporting this bill. I know there is a strong tradition in the conservative parties of supporting the charitable sector and of reducing regulation. I am disappointed that the member for Menzies has chosen to run something of a scare campaign on this bill and has chosen to suggest that the government is increasing regulation; whereas, in fact, we are in fact simply doing what so many inquiries, going back to an inquiry under the coalition in 2001, have recommended—that is, to take the approach that Britain, Canada and New Zealand have taken, to cut through the duplication by allowing the equivalent of a charities passport. The member for Menzies has been selectively quoting from the sector and has not recognised in many cases that organisations he has quoted strongly support the bill. For example, ACOSS, the Community Council for Australia, the National Roundtable of Nonprofit Organisations, Philanthropy Australia, the Smith Family, the RSPCA and Chartered Secretaries Australia are all supporters of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission. I commend the bill to the House.

I spoke in parliament today about Mitochondrial disease, and the potential of advance market commitments to encourage research on new vaccines.

Mitochondrial Disease, 17 September 2012

I join the member for Flinders in strongly supporting the member for Cook staying in bed; I think there is bipartisan consensus on that point! More seriously, I commend the member for Cook for bringing this motion before the House. Too often, discussions about health care operate at the very high level—the millions of dollars that are spent, the institutions, the hospitals, the doctors, the researchers—and sometimes there is value in a particular motion that focuses on a single disease, highlights the plight of sufferers and allows us in this place to focus briefly on their stories and what we can do to alleviate their suffering.

I must confess that, of all the diseases that scare me, a fatigue related disease is perhaps my greatest fear. In common with many in this place, I quite enjoy doing too many things, so the description of mitochondrial disease as feeling like you are hitting the wall strikes me very much. That is why Stay in Bed Day, on Sunday, 23 September, is an appropriate way to recognise sufferers of mitochondrial disease.

Mitochondrial disease was discovered fairly recently and research on it is ongoing. There is a great deal we do not know about it, but we do know that its symptoms are various and severe. They can include deafness, eye disorder, dementia, muscle weakness, heart disease and kidney disease, to name but a few. I note in passing that one of the syndromes of mitochondrial disease is called Leigh Syndrome, which reminds me that researchers who ask for their own names to be given to a disease are brave people indeed.

The ongoing research into mitochondrial disease is of a piece with the increasing research on what has come to be known as personalised medicine. It is research which recognises that treatment for certain genetic disorders—mitochondrial disease can be caused by mutations to mitochondrial DNA—may require personalised approaches, treatments that are tailored to an individual's genetic structure. That is bringing health researchers and genetic researchers together—and some of that high-level gene research is taking place at the Australian National University. The John Curtin School of Medical Research is one of the great powerhouses of medical research in Australia, and I believe it is through research bodies such as the Curtin school that we are going to make great breakthroughs on mitochondrial and other diseases.

However, at present, as the Australian Mitochondrial Disease Foundation website notes, 'there is no cure, treatment is limited and diagnosis is difficult, costly and often missed'. That is because the mitochondrial mutations are due to the lack of an error-checking capacity of nuclear DNA. Consequently, mitochondrial disease is potentially tied in with disorders such as Alzheimer's, autism and cardiovascular disease—hence, any breakthroughs on mitochondrial disease may well affect our understanding of many other conditions.

I believe that there are two things that are at the core of dealing with mitochondrial disease. The first is ongoing research, what I think of as the push factors, for getting to a solution for mitochondrial disease, whether that is a vaccine or some other form of treatment. But there has also been increasing interest among economists on improving the pull factors—the attractiveness of finding treatments for diseases for which we do not yet have treatments.

The GAVI Alliance, formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, is currently experimenting with advance market commitments. Advance market commitments are commitments by countries to purchase certain amounts of vaccines. They have been used with great success with pneumococcal vaccine. They have been discussed for use with potential vaccines for malaria and HIV. As policymakers, we need to bring all of the innovation to dealing with a problem of this kind that scientific and medical researchers bring to thinking about the disease itself. There may be a role for advance market commitments in the future as a way of encouraging researchers to find the prize.

One of the benefits of advance market commitments is that they are available to anyone who comes up with a solution, whether that is an established research team or a group of mavericks who are working in a lesser-known institution or even outside an institution. An advance market commitment rewards ingenuity, and we need as much human ingenuity as can be brought to bear on diseases like mitochondrial disease and other diseases for which vaccines do not exist, such as malaria and HIV. I commend that policy tool to the House as a valuable way of addressing diseases about which we do not yet know enough.

I commend the member for Cook for his hard work on finding a solution to mitochondrial disease and am grateful to him for his continued advocacy on this issue.

I did a doorstop interview this morning covering a range of current events leading into another Parliamentary sitting week. Among other things, I pointed out that the weekend violence does not represent the mainstream of peaceful Muslims in Australia, and argued that horserace polls are the fairy floss of modern politics - they're rotting the teeth of the body politic.

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Yesterday, Anthony Albanese, Katy Gallagher and I announced that Fulton Hogan won the contract to build the Majura Parkway. It's the largest road investment in the Australian Capital Territory and I am delighted the Gillard Government invested $144 million to match the ACT Government contribution in recognition of the necessity of the Parkway for families and businesses. It's something I'd been pushing for since before I entered Parliament.

You can even view three digital flyovers of the road on the Territory and Municipal Services YouTube channel.

The media release is below.

Anthony Albanese
Federal Minister for Infrastructure and Transport

Katy Gallagher
Chief Minister
Minister for Territory and Municipal Services

Andrew Leigh MP
Member for Fraser


FULTON HOGAN AWARDED CONSTRUCTION CONTRACT FOR $288 MILLION MAJURA PARKWAY

With the awarding today of the construction contract to Fulton Hogan, work on the $288 million Majura Parkway project will soon commence. Tenders for the construction of Majura Parkway were called on 26 May 2012 and closed 31 July 2012.

“I’m pleased to announce Fulton Hogan as the successful company to undertake the construction of the Majura Parkway,” Federal Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Anthony Albanese, said today. “This signifies the next step in this critical road infrastructure project which will deliver 11.5 kilometres of dual carriageway connecting the Federal Highway through to the Monaro Highway.

“Interest in the tender process for construction was well received by the industry with seven national infrastructure companies making submissions to undertake the work.

Fulton Hogan is a major civil and resources contractor that operates throughout Australasia. In Australia, the company has been involved in successfully building significant road infrastructure projects including the Princess Highway Upgrade, New South Wales ($242 million); and the Calder Freeway, Victoria ($156 million).

“The site supervision contract for the project has also been awarded to Professional Engineering Services who will oversee the construction project.

“Both the Australian and ACT Government regard safety as a critical element in the effective delivery of this project. As part of the prequalification requirements to undertake this work, tenderers were required to be accredited by the Australian Government Building and Construction OHS Accreditation Scheme to ensure robust management systems are in place to ensure the highest levels of safety during the works.

“Tenders were also evaluated on their previous safety record and their ability to demonstrate how safety would be managed during the implementation of these works.”

ACT Chief Minister and Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Katy Gallagher, also welcomed the news of the successful tender for the construction of the Parkway.

“Due to start in late-2012 and completed by 2016, this multimillion dollar project is the single largest road infrastructure investment in the ACT,” the Chief Minister said. “The project is jointly funded by the Gillard and Gallagher Labor Governments, both contributing $144 million each.

“Preparation for the construction of Majura Parkway has already commenced with sections of pine plantation in the Majura Valley region being cleared to make way for the road’s alignment.

“This project is great news for the ACT economy, for local jobs and businesses.

“The completed Majura Parkway will also play a significant role in improving the main national and regional freight route and the ACT will also benefit from additional capacity on its road network.”

A simulated flyover video allowing Canberrans and other interested stakeholders to get a sneak peak of what the completed Parkway will look like is publicly available on the project web site.

The flyover video showcases the Majura Parkway design northbound toward the Federal Highway and southbound towards the Monaro Highway, highlighting key features of the road. A separate video also provides a view of the Molonglo River Bridge – a 200 metre long elevated bridge over Morsehead Drive and the Molonglo River.

Member for Fraser Andrew Leigh said the Parkway will take pressure off the streets in the Inner North, and provide a faster way for northside residents to connect to the Monaro Highway.

“The Parkway will reduce the amount of time Canberrans spend sitting in their cars, making us a more productive city and freeing up time for us to spend with family and friends,” Mr Leigh said.

For more information about the Majura Parkway project visit www.majuraparkway.act.gov.au