The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TV INTERVIEW
ABC AFTERNOON BRIEFING, WITH PATRICIA KARVELAS
TUESDAY, 6 OCTOBER 2026
SUBJECTS: Pre-COP; Pacific Engagement; Immigration Policies.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: For more on the news of the day, Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury. Welcome to the program.
ANDREW LEIGH: Thanks Patricia, great to be with you.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Isn't that rude? I mean, that's like a traditional offering and the Prime Minister snubs them?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well Patricia, it's the first I've seen it. The Prime Minister is engaging in the Pacific as no previous Australian Prime Minister has done. This is really important work that he is doing, which comes on the back of dozens and dozens of visits by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister into the Pacific. This is contested territory and the work that we're doing with our Pacific neighbours and the work that we will be championing as part of our bid for a UN Security Council seat really is unprecedented and vitally important for Australian national interests.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Okay. I want to take you to hearing from the government on what you make of the Coalition's immigration policy. Their policy is to reduce net overseas migration to 100,000 for the first two years, then it goes up a little. It is a big, big shift in the policy approach. 25 per cent reduction in foreign students. There are other changes too. There's a real focus on just skills. Is the policy what Australians want? Senator Matt Canavan told me earlier that across the country, people are saying they want lower immigration, and this is what they're delivering, and they've done it through the Parliamentary Budget Office.
ANDREW LEIGH: Well Patricia, we've already significantly reduced overseas migration by 45 per cent from its peak. We've got a target to bring net overseas migration down to 225,000. And the reforms that Minister Burke announced at the National Press Club a couple of weeks ago are a carefully calibrated set of measures which ensure that we don't smash the economy, don't overly hurt our universities and don't have an adverse impact on farmers.
But what you're seeing from the Coalition are measures which would have a huge negative impact on the economy. Where you're seeing the Coalition essentially chasing One Nation votes in delivering a policy which is going to be deeply damaging for Australians for the living standards that we expect, for the living standards that have been supported by a modest migration program.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Okay. So I asked the question to Matt Canavan about whether it would have, you know, lead to a recession, which some may argue, and he said no – he would not. And he was quite definitive about that. You're saying that this is the kind of level that will lead to a recession?
ANDREW LEIGH: I haven't done that modelling but I certainly know that as you take migrants out, you automatically have an adverse effect on the Australian economy. What the measures that we announced aim to do was to curtail second and third year work rights for working holidaymakers, to curtail the automatic ability of students to bring in family members.
Don't forget Patricia, that working holiday maker numbers increased largely as a result of free trade agreements signed by the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Governments which massively opened up working holidaymaker numbers, such that they're now our second largest source of net overseas migration. So that is a challenge which was created by the Coalition. We're setting about fixing it through careful measures which will put working holiday makers into a ballot rather than being guaranteed a second or third year of their visas when they've worked in a regional area.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Okay, that's your policy but the Coalition is now offering a policy which reduces migration much faster. And in fact, one of the points that Matt Canavan was making earlier was that you can talk about GDP growth and the economy at that kind of macro level, but at a household level, people feel the sting of a higher immigration policy and it doesn't benefit them economically. What's your response to that?
ANDREW LEIGH: I think people feel the impact of migration directly in services. We've got nearly half of our nurses, more than half of our doctors who are born overseas. If you go into a building site in Sydney or Melbourne, the vast majority of plasterers will be born overseas. Migrants are working in our aged care homes, they're working in our hospitals and they're working to build Australian houses.
And that's why we've prioritised getting migrants onto the tools faster in the latest budget – a big productivity measure. While of course, working to train up Australians to do those essential jobs. But if you massively cut back overseas migration, you're going to make food more expensive by driving up costs for farmers, you're going to make it more difficult to build the homes that Australians need. Migrants aren't just mouths to feed, they're muscles to build and minds to inspire.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Yeah. Well, they've got this skilled program. They say they're going to up the skilled numbers and construction workers is part of that. So that's their answer to that critique?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, we are already putting in place a migration program which is dominated by skilled migration. We've taken measures to curtail those sectors of the economy where we think it will have the smallest effect – those parts of migration where we think will have the smallest effect on the economy. Our measures are very carefully calibrated unlike the Coalition, which is really swinging a wrecking ball through the Australian economy in a desperate attempt to chase One Nation votes. And they're going to learn the hard way they can't out One Nation, One Nation.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Andrew Leigh, we're out of time. Thank you. Andrew Leigh there.
ANDREW LEIGH: Thanks Patricia.
PATRICIA KARVELAS: And that's Afternoon Briefing for today.
ENDS