The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
Responsible Business in a World in Transition
Australian Treasury,
Canberra
Thursday, 11 June 2026
I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, on whose lands we meet today, and all First Nations people present.
Thank you, Michael, for your leadership as Chair of the Board overseeing the Australian National Contact Point. The AusNCP is Australia’s National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises: the Treasury-based body that promotes responsible business conduct and helps handle complaints when concerns are raised about multinational enterprises.
My thanks also to Shiv Martin, who will guide the panel discussion shortly, and to my fellow panellists. Each of you brings serious expertise to the question of responsible business conduct, which is another way of saying that if I say anything foolish in the next ten minutes, it will have a very short shelf life.
Thank you also to the members of the Governance and Advisory Board, who provide crucial oversight and impartial advice drawing on their expertise, organisations and networks across the community, to the AusNCP team in Treasury, and to everyone who has helped mark this 50th anniversary of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.
Anniversaries are funny things. At 50, a person might buy reading glasses and start developing suspiciously strong opinions about lumbar support. But for an international instrument, 50 is something different. It means endurance. It means adaptation. It means having survived governments, recessions, technological upheavals, and at least a few acronyms that have tested the patience of innocent bystanders.
The OECD Guidelines began in 1976. It was the year Apple was founded, the year ABBA was conquering the charts, and the year the first Concorde passenger flights took off. Multinational enterprises already had reach, but the world economy was still a slower, heavier machine. Supply chains were shorter. Capital moved with less speed. Information travelled less freely. A corporate decision in one country could still echo across borders, but the echo took longer to arrive.
Since then, the world has been rewired. Goods, capital, data and ideas now cross borders with astonishing speed. A garment can be designed in one country, stitched in a second, financed in a third, and delivered to a consumer who will leave a one-star review before the parcel is cold. A technology platform can reach millions of users before regulators have found the right folder. A mining project, a bank loan, a procurement decision, or a software tool can affect communities far from the boardroom in which the decision was made.
Australia has been an adherent to the Guidelines from the beginning. We support trade and investment. We benefit from firms that can scale, innovate, hire and operate across borders. But open markets work best when they rest on trust. Trust is built when firms compete fairly and take responsibility for their impacts.
The original Guidelines covered areas such as disclosure, competition, taxation and employment. Today, they include expectations on human rights, the environment, bribery and consumer interests, along with due diligence and the mitigation of adverse impacts.
One of the most important shifts came in 2000, when National Contact Points took on a non‑judicial complaints function. Before then, governments promoted the Guidelines. After that, they also helped provide a channel through which concerns could be raised, examined and, where possible, resolved. That was a substantial change. It recognised that responsible business conduct cannot live only in speeches, policy papers or tasteful anniversary events. It needs people who can test claims fairly.
The Australian National Contact Point has done that work inside Treasury for decades. It has moved from a single official to a dedicated unit, supported by a multi-stakeholder Governance and Advisory Board and independent examiners.
An example of its work is the ANZ Cambodia complaint, completed in 2020. The complaint concerned ANZ bank’s involvement with the developer of a sugar plantation and refinery project in Cambodia, where communities were alleged to have been displaced and dispossessed of land and productive resources. The AusNCP recommended stronger due diligence arrangements and a human rights grievance mechanism, and helped facilitate an agreement between the parties. ANZ subsequently committed to strengthening its human rights policies, including by implementing such a grievance mechanism.
Reforms since then have strengthened the AusNCP. The 2018 independent review led to important changes in 2019, including new procedures, the creation of the Governance and Advisory Board, and the use of independent examiners. The 2021 OECD peer review made seven recommendations, all of which were agreed and implemented.
The theme of this year’s OECD Global Forum is “responsible business for a world in transition”. Geopolitical tensions are testing supply chains. New technologies are moving faster than many institutions can digest. Climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss are putting pressure on economies and communities. The temptation in such a world is to retreat into narrow thinking: my country, my firm, my balance sheet, someone else’s responsibility.
The Guidelines remind us that a firm’s success is strongest when it does not come at the expense of people who lack power. This is important for competition too. Responsible business conduct and competition policy are sometimes treated as separate rooms in the policy house. In truth, they share foundations. Competitive markets depend on fair dealing and informed consumers. Responsible conduct depends on firms taking seriously the social conditions that allow markets to flourish. A race to the bottom leaves workers, consumers, communities and firms themselves worse off.
For multinational enterprises, the challenge is to build the capacity to see risks early and act responsibly across complex operations. That can be difficult. Modern supply chains are long and sometimes murky. Corporate structures can be intricate. But difficulty is not an alibi. If a company can track a container across four oceans, optimise advertising to the second, forecast quarterly earnings to the decimal point, and manage currency risk, it can also invest in understanding its human rights and environmental impacts.
The good news is that many businesses know that responsible conduct is part of resilience. It helps protect reputation and manage legal risk. It helps attract talent and maintain a social licence. More importantly, it is simply the right way to operate. Markets are among humanity’s great co-operative inventions. They allow strangers to create value together. But they need norms and guardrails. Without them, the invisible hand starts looking suspiciously like someone rifling through the public cutlery drawer.
As we celebrate 50 years of the Guidelines, we should be proud of Australia’s role in helping to shape their evolution. We were there at the beginning. We have helped build the system. Our own National Contact Point has been strengthened. We have shown that a government can support open markets while insisting that openness must come with responsibility.
But anniversaries are also a chance to think about what comes next. The next 50 years will test the Guidelines in ways their founders could scarcely have imagined: artificial intelligence, the energy transition, critical minerals, and digital surveillance. The central question will remain familiar: how do we ensure that multinational enterprises contribute to human flourishing rather than merely extracting from it?
So let me close with thanks. Thanks to the OECD and to the countries that have adhered to the Guidelines for creating a framework that has endured precisely because it has evolved and continues to adds value for business and stakeholders. Thanks to the AusNCP, past and present, for the careful work of turning principles into practice. Thanks to business, unions, civil society, and communities for continuing to engage with the processes of National Contact Points like ours. And thanks to all of you for being here to mark 50 years of a set of Guidelines that began in a very different world, but still speak directly to this one.
At their best, the Guidelines say something simple and demanding: when business crosses borders, responsibility must travel with it. That was true in 1976. It is true today. And it will be even more important in the turbulent decades ahead.
ENDS