The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, and Treasury
Assistant Minister for Employment
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2CC CANBERRA, WITH LEON DELANEY
MONDAY, 31 MARCH 2025
SUBJECTS: Labor’s tax cuts, non-competes, cracking down on supermarket price gouging, Peter Dutton’s public service cuts plan and comments on The Lodge.
DELANEY: Well, we're headed towards an election whether you like it or not, so time to make your mind up. Will you be in voting for the Philistines or the Dilettantes? Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment, not to mention our local member here in the seat of Fenner, Dr Andrew Leigh good afternoon.
LEIGH: Good afternoon Leon. I was just trying to work out which of those insults you were going to apply to me.
DELANEY: Well, you know, you take your pick - Philistines, Dilettantes. I think it really sort of is kind of self-explanatory isn't it?
LEIGH: Well I prefer to be neither of course, and certainly spend my days trying to think about ways of making the lives of people in Canberra better.
DELANEY: Yeah, I'm obviously being a little bit facetious with that one but people do tend to be a little bit cynical about our political leaders. And do you blame them when we get a federal budget that really displays a significant lack of ambition? The centrepiece is a tax cut of $5 a week that we don't even get for another 15 months. By that time, it will have been eroded by inflation anyway, won't it?
LEIGH: Well Leon, you put together the tax cut budget with the tax cuts we've already delivered, you get some $50 a week. That might be trivial to you, but I don't think it's trivial to many Canberrans, and we'll have Peter Dutton going to the election promising to raise everyone's taxes. Every income taxpayer in Australia will pay more income tax under Peter Dutton to pay for his mad cap nuclear scheme. But also in the budget, some significant pro-productivity measures. What we've done with banning non-competes for workers earning under $175,000 will unlock job mobility, allow people to move to a better job or to set up a firm of their own, and that's great for long-term growth prospects for the economy.
DELANEY: Now that topic, the non-compete clauses in employment agreements, we have discussed many, many times before, but since the announcement on budget night last week there's been a bit of pushback from business groups, particularly the Business Council of Australia. They were very unimpressed by that. I've seen commentary from people that work as small business operators in hairdressing, for example, they're actually quite concerned that people they invest their time and money in training will just turn around and then open up in competition next door, causing them no end of headaches. They do have a legitimate concern, don't they?
LEIGH: Well, I've had a lot of productive engagement with business community over our non-competes policy, which all the experts tell us will be good for productivity. What's important to emphasize is that you've still got your intellectual property laws, copyright and patents. You've still got non-disclosure agreements - you can have a clause which prevents a worker from taking away secrets. But what you can't do is to bind your worker to stay with you or else become jobless. What those non-compete clauses are doing is dampening down wages by an average of $2,500 for every worker who's got one in their contract and dampening innovation by making it harder for people to start businesses. We want people to start businesses, and yes some of those businesses will compete with existing firms. That's the nature of a successful, fast-growing economy.
DELANEY: There is some evidence to suggest that the impact of these non-compete clauses isn't as great as some people seem to think it is, given that many legal experts suggest that they're largely unenforceable. A lot of business owners have reported that they don't bother trying to enforce them. It's one of those things that it's there on paper, but it's seldom actually used. Isn't that the case?
LEIGH: And yet it can have a chilling impact on mobility. So we have evidence from the United States that non-compete clauses, even when they turn out to be unenforceable in court, still slow down people from moving. Because the fact is, you read something in your employment agreement, and either you get a lawyer and pay potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars for a court case or else you abide by it and just sit tight in a job which is a bad fit for you and don't take the position of the new start-up down the road. That's bad for your employment prospect, it's also bad for the gross prospect to the economy. So even a legal thicket can constrain the economic growth.
DELANEY: Sure, I know that even the threat of legal action can give some people plenty of pause, and you know from our previous discussions I've not been a supporter of those clauses anyway. I think that they're an unconscionable restraint of trade of the individual who's no longer being paid by an employer, so therefore that employer should no longer have any right to dictate my time. So, moving on from there - price gouging. The Prime Minister has promised he will outlaw price gouging. Now, I thought that was already illegal. I mean, if somebody is deliberately charging way over the odds, isn't there already some sort of legal arrangement to deal with that.
LEIGH: It is in particular context Leon. So, when the GST was introduced, then price gouging laws accompanied that. When the COVID pandemic came along, we had price gouging laws around prices for rapid antigen tests and face masks. But in general, we don't have a constraint on businesses abusing market power to increase prices to unfair levels.
DELANEY: But isn't that just competition? If you compete so well that you've achieved some market power, then you deserve the benefits, the rewards of putting up your prices, don't you?
LEIGH: Well, I don't think you then get the right to gouge your customers. And certainly, the view that Britain, the European Union and 37 US states have taken is that price gouging is a way of constraining monopoly power. That's prices that are going well beyond where the economic value would justify, and doing so using the strong monopoly power of the company. So, our approach will be to get a taskforce together to move quickly on finding an appropriate legislative approach and to get that into the Parliament.
DELANEY: Okay, so specifically, the Prime Minister was talking about supermarket price gouging. But where's the evidence? The ACCC just found there is none.
LEIGH: Well, the ACCC has found a range of problematic behaviour by the supermarkets. They're already taking Coles and Woolworths to court for some those specials in which the specials were spiked temporarily. Prices were spiked temporarily and then dropped, but to a higher level than it has been, and that was called a special. We also saw some evidence of high-low pricing in which, oddly, the supermarkets were putting things on special week in, week out. We know that they're among the most profitable supermarkets in the world. I think it is appropriate that with that power that the supermarket monopoly enjoys, that they face appropriate price gouging laws, and on par with those of other countries we typically compare ourselves to.
DELANEY: Okay, so how do you define what is and is not price gouging? Where the Australian supermarkets quite clearly have been shown to be the most profitable in the world. But that's not a crime making a profit, and profits are still not egregiously high as a percentage of turnover. They're still within a normal sort of trading band, aren't they?
DELANEY: Well, it's a range of different approaches. The principle is that when businesses that use market power to increase prices to unfair levels - in the European Union, they talk about a price that has no reasonable relation to the economic value of the product supplied. The United States jurisdictions, the different states take different approaches to price gouging. So, that's why we're talking about getting a taskforce together to identify the best approach to tackle price gouging by food markets in Australia.
DELANEY: What do you make of the Prime Minister's apparent confusion today about whether he would or would not enter into a Coalition with the Greens. He said something along the lines of ‘If you ask me will I rule it out, the answer is no, no, no, I will not have discussions with the Greens’. But no means, you know, you're not going to rule it out - therefore you will consider it?
LEIGH: Well, the Prime Minister has been crystal clear that we're going for majority government. That's in the interests of Australians, and it is above all in the interest of Canberrans. Peter Dutton became Prime Minister and cut 41,000 public service jobs out of Canberra, then that would be almost two thirds of the Canberra public service workforce. If you cut it proportionally across the country, that completely destroys the ability of public servants to quickly process veterans’ claims, claims for new parental leave, passport applications and the like which we know were all problems of the old Robodebt days. So, do they deliberate the nation’s national security and pandemic preparedness capacity or do they debilitate frontline services? It's going to be one or the other.
DELANEY: Boy, you've been playing this politics game for a long time, haven't you? Because the question was actually about entering into a potential Coalition arrangement with the Greens, and you ended up on Peter Dutton cutting public service jobs. I don't know how you did it, but that was impressive. Back to the question though, if you're not successful at achieving a parliamentary majority, you will have to then negotiate with cross benches, won’t you?
LEIGH: Well of course that would then happen, but that's true of both sides and that's an inevitability. What we want is to get majority government, and we don't have to be in that that position. I think a majority Labor Government has served Australia well and served Canberra well for the last three years. We would continue to do so for the next three years. We've done a lot and there's much more to do.
DELANEY: Okay, the Opposition Leader - since you brought him up, did cause a bit of a stir with remarks he made on a radio station in Sydney that should he be successful and become Australia's Prime Minister he would live in Kirribilli. He said, ‘You know we love Sydney; we love the harbor. It's a great city when you've got a choice between Kirribilli and living in Canberra and The Lodge, I think you would take Sydney any day over Canberra’. Now, I realise that the Opposition Leader is saying that in full knowledge that he's got nothing to lose, because there's zero chance of any Coalition candidates winning a seat, even in the Senate here in the ACT. It's just not going to happen. But what would you like to say in reply to the Opposition Leader about the fair city of Canberra?
LEIGH: Well, this is the heart of Australia's democracy. Prime Minister Albanese lives here because he knows that when you want to lead a country, you have to respect its capital. For Peter Dutton, it seems to be about where he can get the nicest view of the ferry. For Anthony Albanese, this is about staying true to our national institutions. Menzies respected Canberra, and even Tony Abbott had a better attitude towards Canberra than you see from Peter Dutton. It's the Liberals that have chosen to give up on Canberra. There's no reason why they can't run a strong campaign here. There's no reason why they can't respect the national institutions that have served the country so well under Labor and Liberal governments.
DELANEY: It appears - now I could be wrong here, but it appears that the Opposition Leader is trying to win votes elsewhere by denigrating Canberra at every opportunity. Now that might play elsewhere in the country, but it's certainly not going to help his own candidates here is it?
LEIGH: He's taken Canberra bashing to a new high. I mean, we've seen Canberra bashing from previous Liberal Prime Ministers, but never like we're seeing from Peter Dutton. And the fact is that when he's disrespecting Canberra, he's not just disrespecting people like me, but also those who work in the national security agencies, those who are working in preparing Australia against the risk of a global economic downturn. He's disrespecting the Australian Federal Police. They're in extraordinary capacity here in the nation's capital. He doesn't seem to understand that an Opposition Leader who disrespects Canberra is also disrespecting the very national institutions that keep us safe and preserve our prosperity and our health.
DELANEY: Andrew, thanks very much for your time today.
LEIGH: Thanks Leon.
DELANEY: That’s Andrew Leigh, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities, Treasury and Employment but of course, our local member here in the seat of Fenner.
ENDS