The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO PERTH, MORNINGS WITH NADIA MITSOPOULOS
TUESDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 2026
SUBJECTS: Intergenerational report; AI; Productivity; Immigration; Senate Committee Triple Zero recommendations; Credit card surcharges; 2026 AFL Grand Final
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Well, I suspect most of you did not sit down yesterday and have a good look at the intergenerational report which had been released, and it's a snapshot of what the country is going to look like in 40 years. It’s going to be an aging population. People will be living longer, while fewer children are born and that means that for the first time, deaths will outnumber births by the 2060s.
So why is that a problem, and how expensive will managing an ageing population be? Well, I suppose this government can just kick that can down the road but let us discuss this in more detail with Andrew Leigh. He's the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury. He's a trained economist, so he knows a fair bit about this and he will tell you why this might be a bit of a worry for the government. He's in Perth and with me in the studio. Welcome, and nice to see you face-to-face!
ANDREW LEIGH: Great to be here Nadia, and always here for the long game.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Now as an economist, just tell us, help people understand what is concerning when deaths outnumber births, which is what is predicted to happen in Australia in the 2060s?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, it becomes a fiscal challenge and also a challenge for maintaining our quality of life. Productivity, participation and population are the three ‘P’s’ we often talk about in economics, and the intergenerational report projects our population will be a little smaller in 40 years' time than the previous report had forecast. Participation is up a bit. We're seeing increased participation by women and older Australians compared to what the previous IGR had said, and then the real action comes in productivity, in getting more output from every hour of work that we do. Artificial intelligence has great potential there, but of course some risks as well which the government is managing.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Okay, so let's go through a few of these things because what does it mean for government spending? Because this becomes a drain on the budget, caring for an older population – is that right?
ANDREW LEIGH: One of the great things about our system is we have universal superannuation. Most other countries would give their right arm for a system like ours, which ensures that that age pension spending will fall from 2.3 per cent to 1.8 per cent of GDP. So even though there will be more older Australians – three times as many people aged over 85, as my father now is, we're going to see decreased spending on the age pension because more Australians will have the dignity of retirement through universal superannuation.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: You'll have lower unemployment?
ANDREW LEIGH: We're projecting that unemployment will stay at the current levels, which is historically very low. As a labour economist, I never thought that I would see in my lifetime this sustained run of unemployment with a four in front of it. That just transforms the opportunities that a young person has. Now, I left school in 1990 when the unemployment rate was about to go double digit and there was no way a young person would get a job in that labour market. Now we've got a labour market offering many more opportunities, and one in which youth hiring has outpaced hiring among over-25s despite the rise of artificial intelligence.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: The Treasury in this report predicts Australia would have 1.7 million fewer people than would otherwise be the case. So would that mean that we would then have to rely heavily on immigration to provide workers, especially in the care sector looking after older Australians?
ANDREW LEIGH: A lot of care workers are immigrants and that's one of the areas that migrants have been overrepresented, along with doctors, nurses and construction workers. We've set to bring down immigration from the peak it was just after coming to government but we don't believe that the sort of slashing of immigration that One Nation and the Coalition are talking about is appropriate. That would really hammer our economy hard, hurt sectors like mining and agriculture and drive the economy into a tailspin. So, we've made some changes. You would have seen Tony Burke announce those at the Press Club last week around things like no longer guaranteeing that undergraduates coming to study from other countries can automatically bring in their family members.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: And yet your government has actually paused the processing or slowed down the processing of some visas, which means we have a lot of people in regional WA; farmers, grain growers, orchardists who are waiting for skilled workers to come in who have not yet been processed with harvest just a couple of weeks away?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, we had done that prior to the announcements that Minister Burke made, and as he said at the National Press Club he's now having that processing go ahead as normal. What curtailing the second and third year options has allowed him to do is to allow speedier processing of those visas. It doesn't mean that many people won't get that second year, which will now go into a ballot rather than having it guaranteed. And likewise for the third year.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: What about people that are, you know, there are people having fewer children. Why do you think that is?
ANDREW LEIGH: We're seeing this around the world. It seems to be what happens when people get to a certain level of income and part of it is just around choices that families make. We're not about telling families how many children to have but we do want to make sure that people don't have to choose between career and family.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Is it also cost of living, housing insecurity? I mean, do you think they're feeding into people's decisions to maybe not have children or have fewer than they may have wanted to?
ANDREW LEIGH: They certainly feed in. But if you look around the world, you're seeing exactly the same trend in countries which have more and less pressure on their labour markets, more and less pressure on their housing markets. You're seeing declining birth rates across India, China, much of the developing world, in countries such as Korea and Japan, this is really becoming much more existential. For us, we're seeing a moderating. Economists say that the best thing you can do in order to not force people to choose between career and family is to have accessible, affordable early childhood. We've made that a big priority as a government making child care cheaper but also ensuring that early childhood workers are paid properly so the quality of care remains strong.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: And it's interesting, people are listening to you, and you are an economist so you're taking the sort of the economic view of this. But people are going, ‘But isn't the world overpopulated? Shouldn't we be celebrating a decline in population?’ But then obviously, I guess, that also then feeds into productivity which probably is not as high as you would like in 40 years?
ANDREW LEIGH: World population is projected to peak within the period of the intergenerational report. We're already seeing China's population likely peaked. It may well be that India's population will peak soon. Both those countries are below replacement rate, which is 2.1 children per women. So, this whole idea that the world is going to be massively overpopulated is badly out of date and not in accord with what we're seeing with demography right around the world.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: This report talks about the uncertainty of artificial intelligence. What the uncertainty?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, we know that there's huge productivity gains. So, you have randomised trials of coders and consultants in which those given access to AI are about 25 per cent more productive. That's an astonishing uplift for a technology just being plonked down in front of somebody. But then also we have concerns about potential job losses. As I said before, we're not seeing that yet in the Australian labour market, but there are concerns around it.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Because you don't just want AI to automate?
ANDREW LEIGH: That's right. We want it to augment jobs rather than automate them. Perhaps the best example I can give you is radiologists who are now doing more scans and getting paid more than ever before, and where there's more demand for radiologists than ever before. AI is allowing radiologists to do a better job and so doctors were ordering more scans. That's the kind of picture that we're seeking to paint for a world in which AI is able to augment jobs, take away the drudge work and allow us to work more productively.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: And so, yet this report shows long-term economic growth slows down. So, does that mean the predictions are we are not going to be as productive as we should be?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, we've got demography coming against us. So up until about 2040, rising in participation takes account of some of that increased population ageing, and then comes a point where the population ageing overwhelms the participation effects and that's why productivity is so crucial. If we're able to boost productivity by just 0.4 per cent a year, then we become 15 per cent richer by the end of the 40 years.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: What is it now? Do you know that off the top of your head?
ANDREW LEIGH: So, our product productivity numbers have been fairly low. We've got it projected at 1.2 per cent over the period of the Intergenerational Report. We're doing a lot of work through National Competition Policy. Next year, Australians will find it easier to move to a better job as we get rid of non-compete clauses. We're working with Western Australia and other states in order to get more of a seamless national economy, which probably matters for WA as much as it does for any other state or territory.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Because is it the case that – is it only 1 in 10 businesses at the moment that use AI well?
ANDREW LEIGH: Using it substantially, yes, in a way that's transforming what they do. So really, the challenge of AI is not about how we push out the frontier further but about how we get the technology that's already there diffused and used in a way that encourages workers to be their very best, doesn't automate away jobs but makes jobs better. There's a whole lot of use cases for that, whether it's in bookkeeping, HR, managing websites as useful, ethical ways in which AI can be used but the government's AI Safety Institute is ensuring that work is done within an ethical framework, engaging with workers and taking account of course, those catastrophic risks which have been talked about a lot in the last couple of weeks.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: My guest is Andrew Leigh. He's the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury. Just a couple of other issues. A Senate inquiry into the Triple Zero emergency call crisis released its report yesterday. It recommends removing a Triple Zero service from Telstra and nationalising it. Would your government ever consider that?
ANDREW LEIGH: We're looking at the findings of the report. Obviously, when you make that most important call of your life, you want to be sure that it goes through, so…
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: And it hasn't always gone through?
ANDREW LEIGH: And we saw the Optus outage. We've immediately worked with ACMA to commence action which is now in the federal court. We put in place the Triple Zero Custodian. We've raised the penalties on telcos to $30 million, and we've ensured that when they're doing maintenance work, they have to prioritise access to Triple Zero. So, we'll give very serious consideration to the recommendations in the report, including recommendations such as being able to text Triple Zero. Again, though, you have to ensure you've got integrity around that, and that there are zero failures on the Triple Zero system.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Would it being in government hands make it a more reliable service?
ANDREW LEIGH: We're working that with the Triple Zero Custodian. That work is already underway. We very much value the work that the Senate Committee has done.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: My next question: I do remind you that you are statewide, and we're broadcasting into regional WA. But some of the other recommendations are mandating domestic roaming, so when you've got no service, you can use another carrier. There's a lot of people in regional WA that will probably love that?
ANDREW LEIGH: We need to work through and ensure that we get a better system as a result of this. That's something the Triple Zero Custodian is already looking at, but it's about ensuring the integrity of the system. So, we've got to be sure this system works, Nadia and that it has the reliability that Australians demand.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Assistant Minister, debit and credit card surcharges and those extra checkout fees on Visa, Mastercard, and EFTPOS payments are going to be scrapped from next Thursday. But what we've now seen is the big banks, the credit card companies are going to cut back on perks for cardholders to recoup the costs. Is that something you anticipated would happen?
ANDREW LEIGH: This is principally about ensuring that the price you see is the price you pay. That you don't have arbitrary fees that are being added on the last moment. In the days where only a few people were paying with credit cards, a credit card surcharge might have been reasonable. When most of us are paying with cards, then it becomes quite unreasonable. So, this is really about transparency and it'll be a matter for the card companies as to how they seek to run their programs. Some of them will continue with perks, others won't and I urge customers to shop around.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Some banks have lifted interest rates on unpaid credit. Does that, you know, also, you know, raising annual fees, scrapping some fee waivers? So ultimately, the customer will pay again. Does that disappoint you that we've seen that start happening?
ANDREW LEIGH: This is principally a transparency measure about ensuring that the price at the checkout truly reflects the total cost. That surcharge doesn't magically disappear. We would expect it to be to be folded in. In some cases, depending on how much competition there is, it may be taken by the bank's bottom line. In other cases, it may be reflected in the way in which those card systems are. But we get a much more transparent system where people have the confidence that the posted price that they see is the price they will actually pay and that's critical for consumers.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: And businesses could then pass that cost on that they have to bear through their prices?
ANDREW LEIGH: Businesses have costs of handling cash. Businesses have costs of handling credit cards. There's no costless way of businesses accepting payment. What this reform does is ensures that from 1 October 2026, people don't have an additional sneaky charge added on when they tap.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: I'll leave it there. You're in town for a rather exciting time for Western Australia. I don't know if you're a football fan, but there's plenty of room on the bandwagon if you'd like to jump on-board the Freeo bandwagon, Assistant Minister?
ANDREW LEIGH: Well, the market's saying Brisbane. It seems like most of Perth has other ideas. It's great to see the town painted purple.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Okay, we'll leave it there. He's saying the market – we're not going Brisbane! But lovely to see you in-person and thank you so much for coming in. Enjoy your time in Perth.
ANDREW LEIGH: Thanks so much, Nadia.
NADIA MITSOPOULOS: Andrew Leigh there. He's the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury.
ENDS