Andrew Leigh

I spoke today about Indigenous jobs in the public service.

Indigenous Public Service Jobs, 22 August 2012

As a member representing an electorate with a large number of public servants, I rise to speak about the employment of Indigenous Australians in the Australian Public Service. The government has set a target to increase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment in the APS from 2.2 per cent in 2010 to 2.7 per cent by 2015. We are working through COAG to make sure similar goals are met in the states and territories. Disturbingly, the State of the Service Report 2010-11 noted a decrease in Indigenous employees from 3,383 to 3,236 in that financial year—a four per cent drop. That was the first fall in the number of Indigenous public servants since 2008.

I commend the Attorney-General's Department, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the Department of Health and Ageing, the Bureau of Meteorology and Screen Australia for their specific commitments to the COAG target of 2.7 per cent for Indigenous employment. The Department of Human Services also commits to a target for attracting and retaining employees who identify as a member of a diverse group.

This issue received some attention at the recent ACT Labor Party conference, where delegates called on the government to provide details on progress towards the COAG targets, to ensure greater opportunities for training and development and to ensure career pathways are provided for new and existing Indigenous employees. It is also vital that pay issues be addressed and that opportunities be provided in mainstream agencies and in nonmetropolitan and remote areas.

I have written to all ministers seeking their advice on how we might together work to meet the 2015 target. I would like to thank the Community and Public Sector Union and particularly Elizabeth Hay for their work in supporting Indigenous employment in the Australian Public Service. The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cabinet gives Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members, delegates and activists a strong voice in the CPSU. NATSIC is about making sure that Indigenous people have a real say in the union's agenda. In the ACT, I particularly acknowledge the work of Duncan Smith, who is a tireless advocate for the needs of Indigenous Australians. We need more Duncan Smiths in the ACT.

Indigenous Australians have made an extraordinary contribution Australia, and I hope that they will form an even larger proportion of the public service in coming years.

I spoke in parliament today about Homeless Connect Day.

Homeless Connect Day, 9 August 2012

On 9 August it was my pleasure to attend Homeless Connect Day at Pilgrim House on Northbourne Avenue. Homeless Connect Day is a one-day event for homeless people, or those at risk of homelessness, to access services, support and essentials. On the day there was a range of services available to people who were homeless or at risk of homelessness: free food, clothing, haircuts, massage, personal care packs, health advice and even entertainment. I was grateful to see the folks from Canberra FM there as well, drawing public attention to one of the real challenges that Australia faces.

In Australia it is estimated that over 100,000 people are homeless on any given night. In Canberra alone that is estimated to be around 1,300 people. Homeless Connect allowed those people who were homeless to recognise that they were not alone in their plight. The theme of Homeless Persons Week is 'Homing in on the real issues of homelessness', and I pay tribute to those who were there—social workers, community sector workers, people providing entertainment and health care services—assisting on one of Australia's challenges. I pay tribute to Minister Macklin who is here in the chamber for her hard work along with the team in reducing the rate of homelessness in Australia.

It was disappointing yet unsurprising to see the Liberals talking about job cuts in Canberra again today. My Federal Labor colleagues and I put out the below media statement about this.

MEDIA STATEMENT
22 August 2012

Gai Brodtmann MP
Federal Member for Canberra

Andrew Leigh MP
Federal Member for Fraser

Senator Kate Lundy
Senator for the Australian Capital Territory

PUBLIC SECTOR JOBS


In an article in today’s Australian Financial Review, Shadow Finance Minister Andrew Robb revealed Coalition plans to “outsource” key programs to state bureaucracies.

The Coalition announced 12,000 local job cuts at the last election. Since then, we’ve seen that number rise to 20,000 job cuts.

This is nothing new for the Coalition. Before the 1996 election, the Coalition said they would cut 2500 jobs. After winning office, more than 30,000 public servants lost their jobs.

The Opposition’s new policy, revealed in the AFR, will see the Commonwealth vacating the field in important areas such as health and education.

Commonwealth public servants provide important advice on big issues affecting our whole nation. Outsourcing this advice will see an increase in confusion for businesses and families with different systems in different states.

Slashing public service jobs in Canberra will affect the entire Canberra economy. In 1996-97, the impact of the Howard Government’s job cuts was to:

• Slash $25,000 from the price of the average Canberra home (in an era when house prices were much lower than they are today);
• Increase the ACT unemployment rate by 1 percentage point; and
• Increase personal bankruptcies in the ACT by around 100 bankruptcies per year.

Unlike the Liberals, we believe that a strong public service is essential to support the community and deliver critical government programs.

Sometimes you get to do something in parliament that puts a lump in your throat. Seeing the smile on the face of 91 year-old Thelma Norman after parliament debated my motion about her late son was one of those moments. The other speakers were Melissa Parke, John Alexander, Graham Perrett, Dan Tehan, Rob Oakeshott and Steve Irons. All spoke poignantly about different aspects of Peter Norman's extraordinary life (click on their names to read their speeches). Here's mine.

Peter Norman, 20 August 2012

Iconic images emerge from every Olympic Games.

‘Golden girl’ Betty Cuthbert taking home three gold medals in Melbourne.

Kieren Perkins’ stunning performance from lane 8 in Atlanta.

Cathy Freeman carrying Australian and Aboriginal flags after winning the 400m in Sydney.

But perhaps the most powerful image of the modern Olympics is this one.

Life magazine and Le Monde have declared it one of the most influential images of the 20^th century.

An image of three brave athletes at the 1968 Mexico City Games making a statement on racial equality.

One of them was Australia’s Peter Norman.

It is Peter Norman’s role in that moment and taking a stand against racial injustice that I want to talk about tonight.

At the 1968 Mexico City Games, Peter Norman ran a time of 20.06 seconds in the men’s 200m final.

Winning the silver medal and in the process setting the Australian record that still stands today.

As recently as the 2000 Olympics, Norman’s time would have won him the gold medal.

But in 1968, it was when the Star Spangled Banner began to play after the medals presentation that Peter Norman became a part of history.

The two Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos stand, heads bowed with one arm raised.

A black glove on the right hand of Smith, Carlos his left.

Their posture and shoelessness symbolising black poverty and racial inequality in the United States.

Sending a powerful message to the world for racial equality.

Prior to the presentation Smith and Carlos told Norman of their plans.

‘I’ll stand with you”, he told them.

Carlos recalled he expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes.

But he didn’t.

“I only saw love”, Carlos said.

On the way to the dais Norman borrowed an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge from white US Rower, Paul Hoffman.

After Carlos forgot his gloves, Norman came up with the idea that the two Americans should share the one pair of gloves.

A protest like this, on a global stage, had never been done before.

At the time, it was electrifying.

Racist slurs were hurled at Smith and Carlos. IOC President Avery Brundage – a man who’d had no difficulty with the Nazi salute being used in the 1936 Olympics – insisted the two be expelled.

In that moment Norman advanced international awareness for racial equality.

He was proud to stand with Smith and Carlos and the three remained lifelong friends.

At his funeral in 2006, Smith and Carlos gave eulogies and were pallbearers.

As for Norman himself, he competed at the 1970 Commonwealth Games, but was not sent to the 1972 Olympics.

Some have said that this was because of his action in 1968. Others say that financial pressures prevented the AOC from sending a full complement of athletes.

What is clear is that in 1972, Norman consistently ran qualifying times for the 100 and 200 metres, but was not sent.

It is also clear that he never complained about his treatment.

Yet he never stopped thinking of himself as a runner. His trainer Ray Weinberg said: ‘he always called me coach’.

32 years later it took an invitation from the United States Olympic team for him to be a part of the 2000 Sydney Games.

The United States Olympic team.

The apparent treatment of Peter Norman is symbolic of the attitude of the late-1960s and early-1970s. The view that sport and politics should not mix.

In the early-1970s, a group of brave protestors took a stand against apartheid in South Africa, interrupting games played by white-only sporting teams.

One of them was my friend, Meredith Burgman, who was sentenced to 2 months in jail for interrupting a rugby game.

History has vindicated those anti-apartheid protestors.

And history has vindicated Peter Norman.

I am grateful that his 91 year-old mother Thelma, his sister Elaine Ambler and her husband Michael can be here today.

***

Every Olympic Games produces moments of heroism, humanity and humility.

Its motto is Citius, Altius, Fortius – “Swifter, Higher, Stronger"

In 1968, Peter Norman exemplified this.

Swifter because of his record that still stands.

Higher because he stood tall that day.

Stronger because of the guts it took to take a stand.

In the simple act of wearing that badge, Peter Norman showed the world he stood for racial equality.

He showed us that the action of one person can make a difference.

It’s a message that echoes down to us today.

Whether refusing to tolerate a racist joke or befriending a new migrant, each of us can – and all of us should – be a Peter Norman in our own lives.

On ABC News Breakfast, I spoke about the motion I'm moving tonight apologising to the late Olympian Peter Norman. The video is below.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/yJPvOWafSJo

I spoke in parliament yesterday about the 'Big Bang Ballers' program, working with disadvantaged youth in Australia and overseas.

Big Bang Ballers, 16 August 2012

Last Saturday night it was my pleasure to attend the Gunners versus Bandits game at the ACT Basketball Centre, part of the South East Australian Basketball League competition. I was invited there as a guest of Tony Jackson, the CEO of Basketball ACT, because it was a special evening with all proceeds going to the Big Bang Ballers campaign to use basketball to fight youth poverty and social disadvantage around the world. In Afghanistan the Big Bang Ballers are currently providing basketball courts to young Afghani girls who until recently could not even consider sport, let alone play it.

I was speaking there at the game with Mark White, the coach of the Gunners, and he talked about the concept of shorter basketball players needing to ‘play above their height’. To me it is a great metaphor for the way in which all of us should be trying to play a little above our height. I pay tribute to Pierre Johannessen, the CEO of the Big Bang Ballers, for all that he has done not just in developing countries but also in Australia. Natalie Porter, the former Olympian, was assisting a group of young Canberrans in Night Hoops. Night Hoops is aimed at at-risk Canberrans, some of them recent migrants from Sudan, providing them with an opportunity to learn valuable basketball skills and leadership skills and to get a good meal at the same time.

Keiran Gilbert hosted Josh Frydenberg and me on the Sky AM Agenda program this morning. We discussed the Gillard Government's approach to asylum seekers and preventing further tragic drownings.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/BqzzGAxV1x4

I spoke in parliament yesterday about the late Robert Hughes. Others had refelcted on his life more broadly, so I focused particularly on his contribution to art criticism. (Delayed by another event, I nearly didn't make it into the chamber on time, since I was running with American Visions in one hand.)

Robert Hughes, 15 August 2012

Robert Hughes's life is a difficult one to sum up: 74 years, 15 books, multiple TV series, three wives. The member for Wentworth yesterday in the chamber spoke on Robert Hughes's passing with wonderful eloquence, as he so often does. I suggested to him afterwards we should create a post of parliamentary eulogist and make it his in permanence.

So many aspects of Robert Hughes's life could attract mention today: The Fatal Shore, inspired by EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, or his tome on Barcelona, which was an extraordinary piece of work. But I want to focus today on his role as an art critic—I think the leading art critic of a generation—because it was in that capacity that he so much inspired me. It has been noted that Robert Hughes became an art critic by accident. In 1958 he was working as a cartoonist in Sydney for the fortnightly magazine the Observer, then edited by Donald Horne. He recounted that Horne had sacked the magazine's art critic and snapped at Hughes, 'You're the cartoonist—you ought to know something about art.' And so a career began.

Robert Hughes was himself an artist, not of the ranks of those whose work he analysed but enough to know something of the craft. In an interview with Peter Craven, Craven described Robert Hughes's own creative work in the following words:

'He's pleased that he knows enough about making things to appreciate greatness when he sees it, and to understand the sheer difficulty of creating something that looks simple.'

He left Australia in the 1960s. His friend the writer Alan Moorehead counselled: 'If you stay here another 10 years, Australia will still be a very interesting place, but you will have become a bore, a village explainer.' So off he headed, first to Europe and then to the United States.

His tongue could be sharp. American Visions, I think possibly his greatest work, contains some examples of where he could take on those who displeased him. In writing of the work of Barnett Newman, he said the following:

'At one point Newman said, with a straight face, 'I thought our quarrel was with Michelangelo.''

Hughes's deadpan reply:

'It was not a quarrel anyone could win with a stripe.'

Speaking of Julian Schnabel, one of his great nemeses, Hughes described him as:

‘a roundly self-admiring painter who once compared himself to Duccio, Giotto and van Gogh. Not very close, and no cigar. Schnabel was a perfect painter for a culture of replays.’

But for those whose work he loved he wrote in glowing terms. Writing of Lucian Freud, he said:

'Every inch of the surface has to be won, must be argued through, bears the traces of curiosity and inquisition — above all, takes nothing for granted and demands active engagement from the viewer as its right.'

Of Goya he wrote his genius lay in his 'vast breadth of curiosity about the human animal and the depth of his appalled sympathy for it'. Of Caravaggio he wrote:

'Caravaggio was one of the hinges of Art History. There was Art before him, and Art after him, but they were not the same.'

Sebastian Smee, the Pulitzer Prize winning expatriate Australian who is now the art critic for the Boston Globe and perhaps one of those who will pick up Hughes's mantle, wrote:

'Robert Hughes, more than any other critic, played an enormous role in converting people to take pleasure in it and to be discerning about it, rather than to feel that sense of suspicion.'

Sebastian Smee pointed out that Hughes helped to create a sense of enjoyment of modern art, to make many of us feel that we could approach it and like it and, most importantly, not like it.

As the National Gallery of Australia director, Ron Radford, said:

'I had known Robert Hughes since the mid-70s and will miss his eloquent, thought-provoking writing and commentary on Australian art in a national and international context.'

He touched so many Australians through his writing. His great work, particularly on the fine arts, will live on for decades and perhaps centuries to come.

I was astounded today when the opposition voted against my motion recognising the strong Australian economy and requesting we put facts before fear in economic debates.

My media release on it is as follows:

Dr Andrew Leigh MP
Member for Fraser

MEDIA RELEASE

16 August 2012

Tony Abbott opposed to using facts in economic debates

The House of Representatives today passed a Private Member’s Motion moved by Member for Fraser, Dr Andrew Leigh. The Private Member’s Motion recognised the strength of the Australian economy and called upon all Members to approach economic debates with facts rather than fear.

Tony Abbott and the opposition voted against the motion.

“It appears that Tony Abbott and the opposition are either opposed to the facts of the strong Australian economy, or alternatively they’re opposed to using facts in economic debates,” said Dr Leigh.

“As an economist I’m astounded by the level of economic ignorance displayed by Tony Abbott and the opposition. Deliberately misleading the Australian public and our international trading partners by refusing to use facts in a debate is reckless and dangerous.”

ENDS

Text of Private Member’s Motion:

A Strong Australian Economy

I move: That this House:
(1) notes that:
(a) by historical standards, unemployment, inflation and interest rates are at very low levels;
(b) for the first time in Australian history, Australia has a AAA rating from all three major credit rating agencies;
(c) Australia’s debt levels, despite the hit to revenues from the global financial crisis, are around one tenth the level of major advanced economies;
(d) OECD Economic Outlook 91 confirms that the Australian economy will significantly outperform OECD economies as a whole over this year and next; and
(e) the IMF has said of Australia: ‘we welcome the authorities’ commitment to return to a budget surplus by 2012-13 to rebuild fiscal buffers, putting Commonwealth government finances in a stronger position’; and
(2) calls upon all Members to approach economic debates with facts rather than fear, and to put the national interest first when discussing the strong Australian economy.