Andrew Leigh

The Hon Andrew Leigh MP 
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury 

The Diffusion Dividend

Chifley Institute Forum 'Prosperity With Purpose – How Labor Governs',
Canberra 

Friday, 15 May 2026

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, and acknowledge all First Nations people present.

My thanks to Chifley’s multitalented Executive Director, Emma Dawson, for bringing us together today at the end of budget week for this panel on ‘Innovation, Productivity and Prosperity for All’. It is a pleasure to open the session before we hear from the four brilliant panellists: Kate Cornick, Tony Sheldon, Amit Singh and Rob Nicholls.

A Paddock Revolution

Let me start with a story.

For thousands of years, farming began by turning the soil over.

The plough was one of humanity’s oldest technologies. It broke the ground, buried weeds and prepared a seedbed. It was so familiar that most people would scarcely have thought of it as a technology at all. It was just farming.

Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, some Australian grain growers began asking a provocative question: what if we stopped?

What if the best way to grow a crop in a dry country was to disturb the soil less? What if farmers could sow directly into the ground, keep stubble on the surface, reduce erosion and conserve moisture? What if progress meant doing less to the soil, rather than more?

At first, zero-till looked like a very antipodean kind of innovation: less big-screen announcement, more paddock trial. Less breathless futurism, more farmers standing beside seeders asking whether the thing would work after three dry months and a nor-westerly.

The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO SYDNEY, DRIVE WITH THOMAS ORITI
THURSDAY, 14 MAY 2026

SUBJECTS: Federal Court decision against Coles; Albanese Government cracking down on supermarkets

THOMAS ORITI: Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Competition. He is with us now on Drive. Andrew, good afternoon.

ANDREW LEIGH: Good afternoon Thomas, great to be with you.

THOMAS ORITI: Thanks for joining us. How are you feeling about today's decision?

ANDREW LEIGH: Oh, it's a great win for Aussie consumers and a real win for the ACCC and a tribute to Gina Cass-Gottlieb and her team. This reaffirms the basic principle that a discount should be a real saving, not a pricing trick and that you should be able to trust the ticket on the shelf when it says it's a discount that it actually is.

So this reinforces our reforms in which we've put more power behind the ACCC, we've increased the maximum penalty tenfold, we've better resourced the ACCC to go after misconduct in the supermarket and retail sectors and we're continuing to strengthen the laws.

THOMAS ORITI: I mentioned that Woolworths is waiting for a similar judgment to be handed down by the same judge. Now obviously we need to respect the judicial process with that, but does this serve as a warning to other retailers about misleading promotions?

The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO CANBERRA, BREAKFAST WITH ROSS SOLLY
FRIDAY, 15 MAY 2026

SUBJECTS: Delta Goodrem; Opposition Budget reply; Federal Court decision against Coles; Albanese Government cracking down on supermarkets

ROSS SOLLY: Congratulations to Delta Goodrem who has qualified for the final of Eurovision. And Andrew Leigh I mean, we love celebrating Australian success stories and this is building up, Andrew Leigh to a wonderful success story for Australia. Am I right?

ANDREW LEIGH: I think it is Ross, it's looking very, very exciting.

ROSS SOLLY: Has Eurovision fever taken over the Leigh household this morning, or are you trying to keep a lid on things?

ANDREW LEIGH: We're just managing to keep a lid on things but, you know, it is basically at simmering point as you say Ross.

ROSS SOLLY: Yeah. Well, you've got to wait now for the weekend to see if she can go all the way. Andrew Leigh, thanks for joining us. Of course, Member for Fenner, Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury. I want to talk to you about the Coles decision yesterday and what the ramifications might be for the supermarkets, but also for shoppers. But can I just get your response to the Budget reply speech last night from Angus Taylor? Some pretty strong initiatives there on immigration and also on bracket creep.

First of all, with immigration and a lot of people jumping on to say the text that I read out before the news when someone said, ‘Oh, it only takes four and a half months or four to eight months to then qualify to become a citizen’ – that's actually not correct. Once you've got four years of residency I understand, then it takes four to eight months. So it is a long process. But is Angus Taylor tapping into something of general concern out there, do you think Andrew Leigh, about the number of immigrants that are coming into Australia and, in his own words, accessing up to 17 different forms of welfare payments?

The Hon Andrew Leigh MP 
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury 

Only 7% of Australian businesses broadly use AI. That should worry us

Published in Startup Daily

15 May 2026

Australia will be more productive when good ideas travel faster.

We rightly celebrate invention: new medicines, better software, advanced manufacturing and clean technology. Discovery matters. But discovery is the opening chapter. The larger economic prize comes when useful tools and smarter systems spread across ordinary workplaces.

A breakthrough in a laboratory is valuable. A breakthrough that helps a nurse, teacher, farmer or small business owner do better work is more valuable still. Innovation changes an economy when it reaches the people who can use it.

That is the diffusion dividend.

Australian agriculture offers a powerful example. For thousands of years, farming began by turning the soil over. The plough broke the ground, buried weeds and prepared a seedbed. It was so familiar that many people scarcely thought of it as technology. It was simply farming.

Then Australian grain growers began asking a practical question: could crops be planted while disturbing the soil less? Could stubble stay on the surface, moisture stay in the ground, erosion fall, and farmers save time and fuel?

Zero-till farming was an antipodean kind of innovation: fewer launch events, more farmers standing beside seeders asking whether the thing would work. Scientists helped. Machinery changed. Farmers learned from farmers. Local knowledge turned a promising idea into a working system.

The Hon Dr Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury

Statement On Significant Matters - David Malouf AO
Federation Chamber, Parliament House

Thursday, 14 May 2026

I rise to honour David Malouf AO, one of the great makers of Australian literature who died on 22 April 2026 at the age of 92. Some writers describe a nation and some enlarge it. David Malouf did both. He widened the imaginative map of Australia and did so with a prose style so exact that many of his sentences seemed less written than tuned.

Born in Brisbane in 1934, Malouf grew up in a city often treated by the southern capitals as a place of verandahs, heat and provincial manners. Malouf turned it into one of the great literary landscapes of Australia. In Johnno, Brisbane became a place of memory, desire, comedy and loss. It gained weather, depth, danger and metaphysics. The jacarandas acquired a syntax.

As the son of a Lebanese Christian father and an English mother descended from Sephardic Jews, Malouf had an instinctive sense that identity is a set of crossings rather than a sealed compartment. Australia, in his work, became a country of inheritances and unsettled borders. His fiction understood that people carry histories they can scarcely name and that a nation is made as much by what it half remembers as by what it declares. Malouf's range was astonishing. He was a poet, novelist, essayist and librettist. For most writers, that would be a crowded CV; for Malouf, it seemed the natural result of having more than one instrument in the house.

He wrote in conversation with the great dead and the vividly living. An Imaginary Life returned to Ovid in exile; Ransom returned to Homer. He inherited a literary landscape in which Patrick White had shown that Australian fiction could bear the weight of myth and metaphysics. Yet David Malouf found his own light, which was quieter, more sensuous and more hospitable to ambiguity. Among later writers, Nam Le and Christos Tsiolkas have written of him with evident admiration. That's a mark of a major writer. He gives other writers permission to become more fully themselves.

The Hon Dr Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury

Thursday, 14 May 2026   

Standing Up For Shoppers, Backing The ACCC

Today’s decision against Coles is an important win for Australian consumers.

The Albanese Government acknowledges the Federal Court’s finding that Coles breached the law and thanks the ACCC for its careful work in holding large firms to account.

This case affirms a basic principle: a discount should mean a real saving, not a pricing trick. Consumers shouldn’t be treated like mugs. Shoppers should be able to trust the ticket on the shelf, without needing a spreadsheet at the checkout. Australians deserve clear and honest pricing every time they shop.

The ACCC is doing exactly what it should, enforcing the rules and taking on some of the largest players in the economy. Since 2022, the Albanese Government has backed that work by lifting maximum penalties to $100 million, strengthening consumer protections and investing in enforcement.

In this year’s Budget, we invested $100 million over four years to promote competition and protect consumers, including $67.7 million to boost the ACCC’s enforcement capacity, building on a further $30 million targeted at conduct in the supermarket and retail sectors.

The Hon Andrew Leigh MP 
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury 

A Leap Forward: Evidence, Inclusion and Economic Opportunity

Inaugural LGBTQ+ Economists And Allies In Asia-Pacific Summit (LEAP Summit),

Online Address

Thursday, 14 May 2026

Hello everyone – and thank you for the invitation to speak at the inaugural LGBTQ+ Economists and Allies in Asia-Pacific Summit. Economists are trained to respect marginal change, but this gathering feels closer to a LEAP.

I am recording this message from Canberra, a city that quietly tells an important story about modern Australia. According to the 2021 Census, 1.9 per cent of couples in the Australian Capital Territory are same-sex couples – well above the national average of 1.4 per cent. Anytime you would like to visit and check out our rainbow roundabout, you can be assured of a warm Canberra welcome.

I am also pleased that the upcoming August Census will, for the first time, include questions on sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. For statisticians, this is what progress looks like: fewer caveats and one fewer sentence beginning with “unfortunately, we don’t have data on…”. For policymakers, it means more informed decisions. Good policy begins with good measurement. When important variables appear in the data, they appear in the decisions that shape their lives.

As economists, you hardly need persuading of this point. Ours is the profession that believes if something moves, it is worth measuring – and if it stays still, it may simply require a better dataset.

Australia’s National Action Plan for the Health and Wellbeing of LGBTIQA+ People rests on exactly this logic. Its vision is straightforward: that LGBTIQA+ people achieve equitable health and wellbeing outcomes with access to safe, respectful, high-quality and inclusive services.

The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
Member for Fenner

Unfair Trading Practices – Summing-Up Speech,
House of Representatives, Parliament House 

Wednesday, 13 May 2026

I thank Members who have contributed to this debate: the Members for Page, Melbourne, Kooyong, Fisher, Maribyrnong, Mallee, Holt, Moreton, Griffith, Whitlam, Sturt, Forde, Barton, Bennelong, Hasluck and Brisbane. The breadth of the contributions reflects the passion that so many members feel about cracking down on unfair trading practices, subscription traps and drip pricing. It reflects the energy, particularly on this side of the House, directed towards making the Australian economy more productive, more competitive and more dynamic.

The Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Bill 2026 strengthens the Australian Consumer Law in three important ways: by banning unfair trading practices, by addressing subscription traps and by strengthening drip pricing protections. Together, the bill ensures that consumers are treated fairly and that honest businesses, including small businesses, aren't disadvantaged by competitors who rely on tricks and complexity rather than value and service.

Some in this debate have questioned whether these reforms are necessary, but the evidence before us is clear and consistent. Years of research, consultation and enforcement experience show that there are gaps in the current law. Certain practices may not be clearly misleading and may fall short of the high bar of unconscionability, yet they still distort decision-making and cause real detriment to consumers. These are practices that quietly pressure, confuse or obstruct consumers, often through design rather than deception.

For Australians, that harm is experienced in very practical ways: time wasted navigating complex processes, fees revealed late in a transaction, subscriptions that are easy to sign up to but difficult to exit and a growing sense that markets are structured to wear them down. Over time that erodes trust and when trust falls, competition and productivity fall as well.

That assessment is not contested among those who see these markets up close. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission supports this bill, informed by its enforcement expertise and its work across consumer-facing markets. On the day the bill was introduced, 17 consumer organisations welcomed it, including national consumer advocates, financial counsellors, legal services and community organisations. They were the Consumer Policy Research Centre, the Consumer Action Law Centre, CHOICE, the Financial Rights Legal Centre, Mob Strong Debt Help, the Consumer Credit Legal Service, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, the Consumers' Federation of Australia, Energy Consumers Australia, Financial Counselling Australia, Financial Counselling Victoria, the Justice and Equity Centre, National Seniors Australia, Way Forward, West Justice, AMES Australia and the Western Australia Consumer Advocacy Network. The sheer breadth of support reflects a shared conclusion: these reforms respond to persistent, well-documented problems in everyday transactions.

The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
Member for Fenner

Address to the ANU Post-Budget Breakfast,
Parliament House, Canberra

Thursday, 14 May 2026

Well thank you Nick and can I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people on whose lands we meet. I acknowledge all First Nations people present, and particularly the many organisations and people here who are engaged in work to close the gaps.

Nick described himself as a lapsed economist. I'm a lapsed professor, and so thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to play that role today. He was very firm on timing. He said, you've got a 10-minute time budget, and there'll be rewards for being in surplus. So I'm going to do my best on that front.

Now, a bunch of you will have heard a whole lot of speeches about the Budget. You will have heard the Budget speech itself and commentary and follow-up and so on. So I'm going to try and put this much more into an economist's frame. And the frame that I want to present to you this morning is that the Budget is about changing the incentives towards building rather than bidding. We're putting together this Budget in a state of unusual global turmoil. War in Iran was not anticipated at MYEFO and has given a significant shock to inflation, as well as necessitating a range of household supports. But nonetheless, I want to make the case to you that this is the biggest reformist Budget we have seen in over a decade, and there's four aspects to that building not bidding Budget that I want to talk about this morning.

The first is moving from asset inflation to asset creation. The negative gearing and capital gains tax changes have been modelled and discussed for decades. Reformers, including Chris Richardson, but also Allegra and the Grattan Institute –many other organisations have talked about the distortions that are caused by the combination of the 1936 change to negative gearing and the 1999 change to capital gains tax discount. Immediately after that, you saw net rental income turn negative as Australians were encouraged to buy a loss-making asset with the notion that in the future, its value would rise. In the old days, we used to call that encouraging speculation. The benefits of that have been modelled through for the average taxpayer since 2000. The cumulative benefits of the negative gearing capital gains tax measures at $12,000. But if you're in the top 1% then the benefits to you have been, on average, $700,000. These policies have been 50 times as beneficial to those in the top 1% as to the average income earner. Changing these policies changes the balance in auctions towards those who are buying their first house rather than their fourth house, and it sits neatly alongside the unprecedented measures we put in place on boosting housing supply, which is of course where the action is if you want to make homes more affordable.

The next big measure is moving from rent seeking to creating. The measures we put in place in business, really about incentivising long-term investment and encouraging the uptake of innovation. Loss carry back, making the instant asset write-off permanent, more venture capital incentives and changes to research and development tax credit that incentivise core research rather than some of those peripheral activities which have been shown not to have the same impact on R&D. All of this is about creating an environment in which there are stronger incentives for creating new knowledge and for diffusing new knowledge. So much of the productivity benefits come not from the first firm to come up with a shiny new technique, but from spreading that technique right across the economy. We've seen that in agriculture, with agricultural extension encouraging the uptake of new techniques on farms and as artificial intelligence spreads across firms, we'll see potentially the next productivity kick up as a result of a technology which has huge general purpose technology potential to improve productivity and to turn around that productivity challenge that Australia has been facing for so long.

The Hon Andrew Leigh MP
Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury
Member for Fenner

A Budget for Home Ownership
House of Representatives, Parliament House

Wednesday, 13 May 2026

My maternal grandfather, Roly Stebbins, was born in a tent in 1922. His dad was a veteran who'd fought in World War I and his dad could never afford a home of his own; he never owned a home. During the Great Depression, my grandfather left school at age 14 to support the family and then worked as a boilermaker. It was only after World War II that he was able to afford to buy a home of his own. He got a block of land in Seaholme, near Williamstown, and he and mates worked together to fire the bricks. He and my grandmother, Jean Stebbins, raised four kids in a home they built themselves.

My grandparents’ story was the story of Australia in that period. In the interwar era, about half of Australians owned a home but by the time you got to 1966, thanks to the Curtin, the Chifley and yes, the Menzies government, the homeownership rate had gone up to two-thirds. Yet, what we've seen over recent years is the reversal of that great Australian dream. We've seen the Australian homeownership rate falling now to a 60-year low. We've seen the abandonment of what used to be a great principle of the Liberal Party, just as the Liberal Party members in this House have abandoned so many principles of their party.

At street stalls and town hall meetings, teachers, tradies, nurses talk to me about their sense that it's become too hard to buy a home in Australia, that the statistics out there in the community are what they're feeling in their own lives as homeownership soars out of reach. They keep on saving for a deposit, but house prices are soaring out of reach. And it's not just young Australians; it's their parents and their grandparents that are repeatedly getting in touch with me and so many members on this side of the House, saying we need to do something to boost homeownership.

We have the most ambitious plan on housing supply of any government in recent decades but we're also, through this Budget, tackling the challenges in the tax system. How did we get here? Well, it's the combination of two policies. In 1936, Australia moved to allow taxpayers to deduct interest losses against their salary. You can't do that in Britain. You can't do that in the United States. And then in 1999, the Ralph review was handed to the Howard Government. With not a word on real estate, it was a report that suggested that putting in place a 50 per cent capital gains tax discount would turbocharge investment in innovative firms.

We immediately saw the result of that. The impact was principally felt in the housing investment sector. Previous to that, net tax paid by landlords was positive, but it very quickly turned negative and, in most of the period since those changes, we've seen landlords lose on net some $4 billion to $10 billion a year. Landlords in Australia have become among the biggest recipients of tax handouts.