The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2CC RADIO CANBERRA, BREAKFAST WITH STEPHEN CENATIEMPO
TUESDAY, 6 OCTOBER 2026
SUBJECTS: Scrapping card surcharges; Illicit tobacco
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Alright, time to talk federal politics with Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury and the Member for Fenner, Dr Andrew Leigh. Andrew, good morning.
ANDREW LEIGH: Good morning Stephen, great to be with you.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Before we start, I do want to talk about the illegal tobacco market, but, you know, you were one of the ones that put one of these videos out last week about these card surcharges. I hope in the interim you've gone and spoken to some local businesses about how bad this is and how it is actually bringing small business to its knees here in Canberra?
ANDREW LEIGH: Look, Stephen I've spoken to a lot of small businesses and they recognise that there's a great value in having a competitive market. Most small businesses weren't charging card surcharges, and they welcome the fact that they don't have competitors who are now throwing on an additional charge at the checkout. This is about price transparency and…
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Hang on a minute, hang on – let me stop you there, because that makes no sense at all. If there are businesses not charging it, why are they worried about businesses that are charging it? Aren't they already in the box seat?
ANDREW LEIGH: Because they're competing against a business which is advertising one price and then charging most customers a higher price. Card surcharges mean that the price you see on the shelf, the price you see in the menu, isn't the price you pay at the checkout. More than 80 per cent of Australian businesses don’t charge card surcharges…
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Right, but we all. But it was. But at least it was transparent? At least it was transparent. And now prices have all gone up because businesses have got to absorb the charges?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, businesses will deal with that in a range of ways. One of the things we're doing is bringing down the interchange fee. So on credit cards they come down from 0.8 per cent to 0.3 per cent. That more than halving of the interchange fees means that there's much less cost to be passed on. No payment mechanism is costless. Cash is not costless. Cards aren't costless…
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Yeah but here’s the…
ANDREW LEIGH: This ensures the 84 per cent of businesses that aren't charging card surcharges, that they're not competing against businesses that are advertising a lower price and then charging a higher price at the checkout.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Well yeah but you're making it sound like these businesses are doing something dishonest when they're actually promoting that they're charging a surcharge to cover their costs. But I want to go back a couple of steps here, is that why not crack down on the banks charging these? When you say there's a charge for cash and there's a charge for that, there shouldn't be.
What the law should have been is: ‘Banks, you cannot charge small businesses this, you cannot rape small businesses anymore’. I spoke to three businesses last week. One that's going to cost him $18,000 extra a year now and he can't recover any of that because he works in a fixed price industry. Another that's going to cost him $36,000 a year, and he has no choice but to put his prices up to cover that. And another that's going to cost $70,000 a year which is equated to a wage. How is this good for anybody?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well Stephen, we're doing exactly what you've suggested and bringing down those interchange fees. The Reserve Bank…
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: No, I said eliminate them, not bring them down.
ANDREW LEIGH: I don't think you can expect that a payment system will be provided free. There is a cost to providing those terminals and a cost to…
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Well, we used to expect that. Once upon a time, and then we had a Banking Royal Commission that was supposed to bring the banks into line, and now they're more rampant than they've ever been?
ANDREW LEIGH: Stephen, banking has never been free. You're suggesting a system that has never existed in Australia and doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. There is a cost to transferring those payments, but we have brought down the caps on those which ensures that businesses pay less, and particularly small businesses are benefiting from bringing those down…
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Well, I think you…
ANDREW LEIGH: Customers welcome price transparency. They welcome not being slugged with an additional card surcharge at the checkout. Most businesses weren't charging them. Now all businesses will cease charging those card surcharges.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Alright Andrew, I think you need to get out and speak to some of those customers and small businesses a little bit more.
ANDREW LEIGH: I'm out there all the time Stephen, chatting with those customers and with those small businesses and I know they welcome it.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Yeah. Alright. Well, I'm happy to take you and introduce you to. Well, is 100 enough to – anyway, moving right along. Let's talk about the crackdown on the illegal tobacco market. What are we actually doing here?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, we're seeing some good results coming out of Queensland and South Australia which are taking a really tough approach to these illegal tobacco stores. We know that cracking down on illegal tobacco is critical in order to get rid of the scourge of smoking, which is a product that kills half of its users if used as intended, and we're seeing a lot of work being done in closing down these stores. Particularly, the approach in Queensland ensures that when a landlord has someone who's been selling illegal tobacco, they have not only a right but an obligation to end that lease, and that allows that much more powers.
Another thing Queensland's been doing is going into particular areas and closing down all of the illegal tobacco stores at the same time, and so, you're not getting customers switching from one to the other, but you're getting an overall reduction. So, that's been really welcomed and I really commend the work my colleague Julian Hill's been doing on that.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Because that's always been my concern is that – and I'll get back to what I thought the solution could have been in a moment – but everybody knows where these illegal tobacconists are. I mean, why has it taken us this long to say, ‘Well, we're going to go and stop these people from engaging in this illegal trade?’
ANDREW LEIGH: Yeah, it's about putting a lot of policing powers behind us. We've provided significant resources and also doing seizures through the Australian Border Force. But it is state and territory police which have the power to do it and we're seeing a lot of closures taking place. So, you know, the funding that we are providing to states and territories is at record levels in order to support that street level enforcement.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Because Andrew, the blueprint for this existed long ago and I remember and, well it must be more than 10 years ago, because I was still broadcasting in the Hunter Valley when the New South Wales Fair Trading Minister at the time, Anthony Roberts, decided he was going to eliminate the synthetic cannabis trade and did it almost overnight by exactly what we're saying we're going to do with tobacco now. We don't learn from the past a lot in this country?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, we've taken a view that it's important to bring down the smoking rate and we've got the smoking rate at the moment at historic lows. So, it is good to see the smoking rate coming down, but we've been hit by this wave of illegal tobacco coming in from transnational criminals who are able to make cigarettes less than a dollar a packet, and they're just flooding world markets. Australia's being hit, but we're not the only country. A whole lot of other countries are being hit by this crazily cheap illegal tobacco. So…
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Do we really know that smoking rates are coming down though? Because surely that can only be measured on legal tobacco when anecdotally we know that people are out there buying these illegal cigarettes because they're so much cheaper?
ANDREW LEIGH: It's an excellent question. So, we're not getting these smoking rates based on what's being sold. We're getting it based on a survey of Australians. It's a big survey of Australians conducted by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. The data series goes back decades, and so, we do have confidence that smoking rates are coming down despite the fact this wave of illegal tobacco is hitting Australia.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Yeah, I just wonder if people are being honest in their surveys because of the stigma around smoking and more importantly, the fear that they might be targeted for purchasing the cheaper illegal cigarettes?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, the question is whether you've smoked, not how you got it. And there's confidentiality guaranteed around those surveys. So look, I'm pretty confident that the experts are getting an accurate picture as to what's going on with smoking in Australia, but it's no question that the government is in a fierce contest with illegal tobacco syndicates, which are trying to get illegal tobacco into Australia. These are big, sophisticated multinational businesses. They move not only through tobacco, but meth and other drugs, even illegal knockoff handbags. They are really pernicious and the government is working hard, led by the work that Assistant Minister Julian Hill is doing.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Well, let's hope that you have success on this. Andrew, good to talk to you. We'll catch up week after next.
ANDREW LEIGH: Sounds great, thanks Stephen.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Alright, talk to you then. Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, and the Member for Fenner.
ENDS