Andrew Leigh

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

Supermarket smarts: Helping shoppers find the best deals

25 June 2025             

The fifth Albanese Government funded CHOICE quarterly report into supermarket prices released today gives consumers the latest pricing information on household products, including popular ingredients for winter meals.

Kicking off the second year of reports for supermarket shoppers, CHOICE priced groceries at 104 supermarkets in 27 locations across Australia in March.

Overall, Aldi was once again the cheapest supermarket for a basket of 14 goods (without specials), followed by Woolworths, Coles, then IGA.

Including specials, CHOICE found that Aldi was still the cheapest, followed by Coles, Woolworths, then IGA. However, the gap between Aldi and Coles and Woolworths was smaller than in previous reports. This is due to the shopping basket in this year’s quarterly report comparing more fresh fruit and vegetables.

‘Winter warmer’ items like vegetable stock, sour cream, drinking chocolate, butternut pumpkins, quick oat sachets, garlic, and brown onions are in the spotlight for this quarter’s report.

Comfort food and confident customers are a good recipe, with the government backing consumers to get the best deals in the supermarket aisle.

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, 24 JUNE 2025

SUBJECTS: Oil prices, petrol price monitoring by the ACCC, Israel-Iran ceasefire, Coalition’s regulation hypocrisy, Labor’s abundance agenda, Reform Roundtable

PATRICIA KARVELAS: My guest this afternoon is the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, Andrew Leigh -welcome to the program.

ANDREW LEIGH: Thanks, Patricia. Great to be with you.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: I want to start on the conflict, and then we'll move, of course, on to these domestic economic issues which are huge. We're yet to hear from Israel in relation to this ceasefire. It's been several hours now since the President declared a ceasefire. Are you worried that sends perhaps a message that this cease fire may not hold?

ANDREW LEIGH: I'm certainly hopeful that it does Patricia. We need sustained peace in the Middle East, and the prospect of an ongoing Middle East war - a conflagration that's even worse than we're seeing now - would be desperately dangerous for so many people in the region, including thousands of Australians who are there right now. It's important that we keep Iran within the non-proliferation treaty that allows that IAEA monitoring of its nuclear capability, which has been important. And long-term, we want Iran to be joining that prosperity agenda which has been pursued by other countries in the Middle East, which is of course in the interests of Iran and its people.

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, 20 JUNE 2025

SUBJECTS: Labor’s productivity agenda, GST, competition reforms, Labor investments in Canberra, bulk-billing, universal basic income

ROSS SOLLY: Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Productivity, and he joins us this morning. Andrew Leigh good morning to you.

ANDREW LEIGH: Good morning Ross, great to be with you.

ROSS SOLLY: It is great to have you on the show this morning. Did you go a run in the minus seven this morning? Just out of interest Andrew Leigh?

ANDREW LEIGH: I was on the bike trainer this morning, so a little bit warmer, but I was out running yesterday – wonderfully crisp.

ROSS SOLLY: Lovely, best time of year to be out and about. Andrew Leigh first of all, can you tell me why does nobody ever talk about increasing the level of GST? When it came in at 10% the discussion was, you know, that there was - in future we could move it around. You'd need all the states and territories on board but if the moment required that it would be something we could look at. But nobody ever talks about it?

ANDREW LEIGH: Ross, that's not the way I remember things. I remember it very much as being John Howard saying very firmly, ‘this is locked in at 10% and the way I'll prove to you it's locked in at 10% is I'll include in the legislation, a requirement that every single state and territory has a veto power over any change’.

ROSS SOLLY: Yeah.

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

Mutual Gains: A Co‑operative Approach to Competition

Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals’ CEO Strategy Roundtable
Online Address

Thursday, 19 June 2025

G’day everyone – and thanks for inviting me to be part of the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals’ CEO Strategy Roundtable. I acknowledge the Gadigal people of Sydney and the Ngunnawal people of Canberra, and recognise the important work that cooperatives and mutuals do to spread opportunity in First Nations communities. My thanks to the remarkable Melina Morrison for the invitation to speak with you today.

Let me start with a story. My grandfather, Keith Leigh, was born in 1912. When the stock market crashed in 1929, he was just 17 years old. To make ends meet during the Great Depression, he became a travelling salesman – mostly selling hosiery. As Keith liked to say, he was a “traveller in ladies’ underwear”.

The 1930s were tough, as they were for many Australians. Toward the end of that decade, Keith and his friend Lindsay Brehaut decided to do something practical to help their community. They set up the Hobson’s Bay Co‑Op – named after the little inlet at the top of Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. It gave locals a way to pool their buying power – at a time when every penny counted.

That spirit – people working together to meet shared needs – is the foundation of the co-operative and mutual movement. And it’s why I’m so pleased to join you today.

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, 17 JUNE 2025

SUBJECTS: Charity fundraisers, Labor’s productivity agenda, working from home

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: One person who has done a few of these CEO sleepouts is the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, Andrew Leigh. Good morning Andrew.

ANDREW LEIGH: Good morning Stephen, great to be with you.

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: You're not joining us this year?

ANDREW LEIGH: I'm not. I'm doing a different fundraiser. I'm raising money for the Indigenous Marathon Foundation by doing an Ironman triathlon. I’m currently at about where you are in terms of fundraising. And congratulations to you on raising money for a terrific cause. Vinnies just does such terrific work in the community.

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: I'm going to call you out on this, because you run for fun!

ANDREW LEIGH: And you sleep for fun!

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: I wish I did sleep. Look, let's talk federal politics. You've talked about sluggish productivity. You've warned that excessive regulation and red tape are choking growth, housing and innovation. We've talked about this ad nauseam. It's no secret to anybody, why hasn't it been done already? You've been there for three years?

ANDREW LEIGH: Yeah, one of the big challenges here is that you're working across a range of tiers of governments, and so it's local, state and federal governments have these regulations. In many cases well meaning, but often the cumulative effect of them is to create this thicket of regulation. You see in the housing space, Clare O'Neil taking a leadership role there, being very clear about the importance of engaging on regulation that’s slowing down building. We've got an ambitious housing target. We need to make sure we're not just putting the dollars behind it but that we've also got regulatory structures to make it happen.

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

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
MONEY NEWS WITH DEBORAH KNIGHT
MONDAY, 16 JUNE 2025

SUBJECTS: Labor’s productivity agenda, artificial intelligence, G7 summit, AUKUS, US tariffs, the Abundance Agenda

DEBORAH KNIGHT: We need all the help we can get with our economy barely growing at the moment and the government Assistant Minister with the job of getting productivity back on track is Andrew Leigh, Assistant Manager for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury. Assistant Minister, welcome to Money News.

ANDREW LEIGH: Thanks Deb, great to be with you.

DEBORAH KNIGHT: So you've got a decisive election win under your belt. Now is the time, presumably, for action and bold reform from your government?

ANDREW LEIGH: Well, we inherited a real problem with productivity. In the quarter we came to office, productivity fell more than it had the previous four decades, and that decade leading up to 2020 was the worst productivity decade in Australia's post war history.

DEBORAH KNIGHT: Admittedly that's a global problem though, not just a problem for Australia?

ANDREW LEIGH: That's right, there's global challenges here and that's something that isn't going to be fixed overnight. We know that productivity reform sometimes takes years to have an impact, but we've got to get going on this. The Treasurer announced in the last Budget the scrapping of non-compete clauses for low and middle income workers, making it easier for people to move to a better job. That will help start-ups and it will improve the productivity of the economy. And that's just one of the measures we're putting in place.

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

Address to staff at the Australian Bureau of Statistics

Australian Bureau of Statistics
Canberra

Thursday, 12 June 2025

Good morning everyone,

It’s a pleasure to be here with you – the kind of people who quietly judge those who say “data is,” who experience mild distress at exploded pie charts, and who’ve been known to correct a dinner guest on the difference between mean, median and mode.

People after my own heart.

As someone with a long-standing affection for statistics – bordering on the statistically significant – I feel very much among kindred spirits. While others unwind with reality TV, I’ve been known to relax by running a fixed-effects model and checking for heteroskedasticity. I find a well-behaved residual plot oddly soothing. And I’ll admit: I’ve lost more than one afternoon to a debate about instrument validity.

I know I’m among people who’ve said the phrase “conditional on observables” in casual conversation – and meant it.

That’s why I’m proud to serve as the Assistant Minister responsible for the ABS – an institution that proves, day after day, that good government begins with good data.

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

More To Give: New Giving Fund Rules Aim To Boost Charity Support

10 June 2025             

The Australian Government is strengthening philanthropy by consulting on new rules to ensure more money flows from charitable trusts to Australian charities.

As part of these changes, public and private ancillary funds will be renamed ‘giving funds’ – a clearer term that better reflects their role in supporting charitable giving.

Giving funds are philanthropic trusts that distribute money to Australian charities. The government is seeking feedback on two proposed changes:

• Increasing the minimum annual distribution rate, so more funds reach charities sooner, and
• Allowing distributions to be averaged over three years, helping funds plan their giving more effectively.

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

Consultation on cost recovery fees for new merger system

5 June 2025

The Albanese Labor Government has today released a consultation paper on proposed cost recovery fees under the new merger system – as part of the biggest reforms to Australia’s merger system in 50 years.

This reform will make our merger approval system faster, simpler, more targeted and more transparent.

Under the new merger system, a mandatory notification system will apply for mergers above certain thresholds, with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to be the decision maker on approvals.

The new system will make it easier for most mergers to be approved quickly, so the ACCC can focus its resources on the minority that could pose a threat to competition.

This change recognises that most mergers have genuine economic benefits and are an important feature of any healthy, open financial system.

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

National Police Legacy Day Launch

Parliament House
Canberra 

Wednesday, 4 June 2025

I begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal peoples, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet, and extend that respect to all First Nations people here today.

We gather this morning to launch National Police Legacy Day – a new national tradition, built on more than half a century of compassion, commitment, and care.

Police Legacy was founded in 1971 – born from tragedy, but sustained by generosity. Over the past five decades, it has grown into one of the most enduring support networks for policing families in Australia.

Its guiding message is simple, but powerful: those who serve – and their families – should never stand alone.

Australians rightly expect a great deal from our police. We ask them to be brave in dangerous situations, fair in high-pressure moments, and calm amid the unpredictable. But we should also recognise that behind every officer is a network: of family, colleagues, and community.

When tragedy strikes, Police Legacy is there – not just in the immediate aftermath, but in the months and years that follow. It provides emotional support, financial assistance, and – just as importantly – a deep sense of ongoing connection. These organisations check in, stay close, and remind families that they remain part of something larger.