Andrew Leigh

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

Fuel Security

Matters of Public Importance

House of Representatives

Wednesday, 11 March 2026

At the beginning of 2022, after claiming that only the Coalition could be trusted to keep petrol prices low, the Morrison Government saw petrol prices hit 216c a litre in Sydney and 212c a litre in Melbourne. What did fuel companies face if they were engaged in a breach of the competition law? They faced not a serious penalty but a slap on the wrist - a $10 million penalty. That really wasn't a penalty; it was the entrance fee to the bad behaviour club. The fuel industry is one of our more concentrated industries. The big four have more than two-thirds of the market, compared to just a fifth for the big four fuel retailers in the United States. And so, when we came to office, we raised the penalties for anticompetitive conduct. We raised that maximum dollar figure from $10 million to $50 million - a five-fold increase because under Labor, penalties will not be a cost of doing business.

Today, the Treasurer, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy and I have announced that a Labor Government will double penalties for false or misleading conduct and cartel behaviour. Up to $100 million per offence, across the economy. This very clearly demonstrates that only Labor can be trusted when it comes to looking after consumers and ensuring we have a more competitive and dynamic economy.

Under the Coalition, we saw a rise in market concentration, an increase in mark-ups and a decrease in the small-business-creation rate, and we saw significant signs that the Australian economy wasn't as dynamic. Under Labor, we've set about putting in place a strong competition agenda. We've reformed Australia's merger laws - the biggest overhaul of our merger laws in 50 years - to ensure that the competition watchdog is able to properly scrutinise mergers and keep a lid on excessive market concentration in the economy. We've got national competition policy going again with a $900 million productivity fund, working with the states and territories to try and get those sorts of productivity-boosting competition reforms that turbocharged productivity and boosted household living standards to the tune of some $5,000 a household in the 1990s. Reflecting that 1990s experience, we've refreshed the National Competition Council, now chaired by Marcus Bezzi, and we're working collaboratively with states and territories on a robust competition agenda. Labor knows that if we are to get productivity going again after it languished for the nine years in which the coalition was in office, we need competition reforms that'll work for Australians.

Today the Treasurer, the Energy Minister and I announced that we will task the ACCC to ramp up fuel price monitoring, reporting weekly with a focus on unusual price spikes. We'll work with industry to increase fuel supply to service stations, including by helping the fuel sector secure ACCC authorisation to coordinate supply and unlock bottlenecks. This follows the Treasurer having written to the ACCC last week asking them to ensure that motorists aren't being taken for mugs. The ACCC has issued their own statement to retailers.

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

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
2XX FM CANBERRA, BREAKFAST WITH NOAH SECOMB
WEDNESDAY, 11 MARCH 2026

SUBJECTS: Productivity; Middle East conflict; Australia’s fuel supply; supermarkets; travel insurance; volunteering passport

NOAH SECOMB: And now we're talking to the Assistant Minister for – here we go: Competition, Charities and Treasury. I've missed one. I've missed one in there. I think productivity is somewhere in that pile. So, here's to Andrew Leigh and first of all, thanks for coming on.

ANDREW LEIGH: My pleasure.

NOAH SECOMB: For those who perhaps aren't engaged in federal politics too much – talk us through what your portfolio means, what your job looks like and how that kind of fits in with representing a chunk of Canberra?

ANDREW LEIGH: So my job is the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, which means I assist the Treasurer on a range of issues in his portfolio. Productivity is a big challenge for the government in this term. Productivity has languished over the course of the last 15 years and one of our big priorities is getting a strong growth agenda.

Part of that is through competition. We've done some competition reforms, national competition policy and mergers but we've got a lot more to do, including holding the supermarkets to account. I'm responsible for the government's regulation of charities, which I think of as kind of a community building portfolio. Rebuilding that sense of shared purpose that increasingly Australia has struggled with. And then Treasury is the sort of catch all for the work that I do on a range of issues, including the Mint, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and multinational taxation.

NOAH SECOMB: Yeah right. So, you've got plenty to do. That's always good.

ANDREW LEIGH: I'm very lucky. Yes. Lots of interesting things to work on with the Treasurer.

NOAH SECOMB: And so looking at some of the news of this last week, especially coming out of Iran and the conflict in the Middle East. A lot of concern has been going to the rising petrol prices and we've heard in recent days that the Treasurer has empowered the ACCC to really look into petrol price gouging. So what does that actually look like when we're talking about empowering the ACCC to do something like that?

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

How Should Australia Grow its Tech Sector? Charting a Digital Future

Tech Council Breakfast Event, 
Parliament House 

11 March 2026

Good morning everyone, and thanks to the Tech Council of Australia and Capital Brief for bringing together such an interesting group of policymakers, technologists and thinkers.

The tired old stereotype of innovation is a lone genius in a garret or garage. It’s a tidy tale that makes for engaging biographies and simple stories.

It is also misleading.

The reality is that innovation operates more like a team sport. A founder depends on engineers, designers, investors and early customers. Researchers exchange ideas with industry partners. Infrastructure providers support the digital backbone. Regulators set the boundaries of fair play.

Anyone who watched last weekend’s Melbourne Grand Prix race saw this in action. At the end of the race, the drivers stand on the podium. But each of them know that they’re only there because of the work of their teams.

In Formula One, around twenty mechanics change four tyres in about two seconds. If any one of them hesitates for half a second, the car loses position on the track. It’s the purest demonstration I know that performance comes from teamwork.

Successful technology sectors resemble strong sporting teams. They combine talent, coaching, facilities and well-designed rules.

So this morning I want to explore Australia’s digital future through that sporting lens. What does it take to field a winning innovation team?

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, 10 MARCH 2026

SUBJECTS: The Shortest History of Innovation; Middle East conflict’s impact on Australia’s petrol; Iranian women’s soccer team

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Time to talk federal politics with the 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: Now, there's a lot to talk about this morning but I just want to touch on something. You've written a follow-up to your book, ‘The Shortest History of Economics’ – ‘The Shortest History of Innovation’ this time?

ANDREW LEIGH: Yes. I'm fascinated by innovation Stephen, by those new gadgets but also by the people that make it happen. The argument of ‘The Shortest History of Innovation’ is that innovation is rarely just a lone person with a breakthrough. Much more often it's a team of people tinkering away and trading in ideas. So good teamwork and open societies really are at the heart of driving innovation.

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: I've heard an interview early in the early hours of this morning talking specifically about your book, and the fact that Australia has made a lot of innovative breakthroughs over the years and there's a lot of technologies that we now take for granted that were developed here. But the argument from this academic was that the chances of those breakthroughs are limited these days and it's more just about tinkering around the edges. What did you find in the process of writing this book?

ANDREW LEIGH: Well, Australians of course can take credit for things like Wi‑Fi, the hills hoist and the black box flight recorder but we've also managed to extend a whole lot of innovation. So we didn't invent the plough, but we invented the stump‑jump plough, which was revolutionary for the circumstances in which Australian farmers found ourselves.

We do still produce a lot of that basic R&D – our university sectors are doing very strongly, but building the linkages through to business is an area where we don't do as well as many other advanced countries.

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

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TV INTERVIEW
ABC AFTERNOON BRIEFING, WITH STEPHANIE BORYS
MONDAY, 9 MARCH 2026

SUBJECTS: Middle East conflict’s impact on Australia’s petrol; inflation; One Nation

STEPHANIE BORYS: Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition Charities and Treasury, and he joins me now. Andrew, thank you for your time this afternoon. Is there more the government can do to ensure there's no restriction to fuel in the regions?

ANDREW LEIGH: We've already done a lot Stephanie. Since we came into office, we've ensured that our fuel reserve is kept onshore or within our Exclusive Economic Zone. Under the Coalition, you had Australia's fuel reserve being kept in Texas and Louisiana. Now it's in Brisbane and Geelong. We've also put in place minimum stockholding obligations on large fuel users and we've also overseen a significant electrification of the vehicle grid which ensures that there are fewer motorists who are putting demands on the fuel supply.

I understand there's a lot of pressure on at the moment. The Treasurer has written to the competition watchdog to keep a close eye on any price gouging at the bowser and we are working constructively with the industry, as you heard before from Minister Bowen.

STEPHANIE BORYS: So when did he write to the competition watchdog –the Treasurer?

ANDREW LEIGH: So, that was last week in order to ask them to – in addition to their usual fuel monitoring program – to pay particular attention to any price gouging that's going on at a time where the prices are rising. This is a significant challenge. But Australia is better placed to meet this challenge than we have been at any other time in the last 15 years – both in terms of the fuel stocks that are in place, but also the decreased pressure that we have for fossil fuels in the grid.

The electricity usage over summer 2022 was almost twice what we saw drawing from gas than in the most recent summer. So we're demanding less gas for our energy usage, we're demanding less fuel as a result of the electrification of the vehicle fleet and we've done much better than the Coalition did in terms of the size of the fuel reserves and keeping them onshore.

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
THURSDAY, 5 MARCH 2026

SUBJECTS: Conflict in the Middle East; return of Australians and repatriation flights; cheaper home batteries in the ACT; visit of Canadian Prime Minister to Australia

ROSS SOLLY: Well, let's talk about what's happening in Iran and in particular, what's happening here in Australia. Andrew Leigh is the Member for Fenner, also Assistant Minister for Competition. Andrew Leigh, good morning to you.

ANDREW LEIGH: Morning Ross, great to be with you.

ROSS SOLLY: And good to be with you as well. I'm assuming – now, I don't know if you've got figures and you've been briefed on this but I'm assuming there are Canberrans who are caught up in the Middle East at the moment who are desperately trying to get home?

ANDREW LEIGH: Well Canberra is, I guess, 2 per cent of the Australian population, so we know we've got over 100,000 people in the Middle East region, suggesting there’s a couple of thousand Canberrans over there. We're doing all we can, but working primarily with commercial airliners. As you know, the first one arrived this morning. We're hopeful of three more airliners taking off, but it really is dependent on conditions on the ground as to whether it's safe for those planes to leave Dubai.

ROSS SOLLY: And it's absolutely not an option for the government to charter a plane – a Qantas plane or something, as it did in COVID and other times and fly that in there and get people out?

ANDREW LEIGH: The scale of this is massive, and really working with commercial airliners is the best way to go. They have the planes. It's just a matter of being able to take off and where it takes off is the main constraint, rather than the hardware. It makes sense to be relying on those commercial options.

The UAE has been very good in terms of providing accommodation for Australians who are stranded there, and we've extended our thanks to the government for the way in which they've handled that. And we're working, of course, with those crisis teams, having deployed six crisis teams to the region. This is one of the biggest disruptions we've seen to the travelling patterns of Australians, just because that Middle East hub is so central to the way Australians get to Europe these days.

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

Closing the Gap

House of Representatives

4 March 2026

The latest Closing the Gap dashboard is troubling. Nineteen national targets - four on track, and several improving, yet still off the pace required to meet the 2031 goals. In areas such as incarceration, youth detention and suicide, the trajectory is headed the wrong way. In others, including family violence, baseline data is still incomplete. The gap narrows in some places and widens in others, and, in too many domains, progress lacks momentum. If outcomes are uneven, our response must be sharper. Closing the Gap rests on partnership, and partnership must be matched with precision. Governments need to know which policies shift outcomes and which leave them unchanged. That requires disciplined evaluation.

The Australian Centre for Evaluation is strengthening that discipline across government. It supports rigorous methods, including randomised trials where appropriate, so policy is tested rather than assumed. Evidence from past trials shows why this matters. In the Northern Territory, the School Enrolment and Attendance Measure linked welfare payments to school outcomes and school attendance. In a study run by Rebecca Goldstein and Michael Hiscox, around 400 children were randomly assigned to treatment, and a similar number to control. Attendance did not improve. The trial provided clarity in a contested policy area and informed a shift towards community led approaches to school attendance. In Dubbo, a study by Isabella Dobrescu and colleagues tested whether culturally relevant exam passages improved literacy outcomes. Replacing unfamiliar contexts with local references produced a substantial gain, roughly halving the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. A carefully designed trial revealed how assessment design itself can shape performance.

In a report last year, Patrick Rehill, Ethan Slaven, Harry Greenwell, Peter Bowers, Scott Copley and Eleanor Williams of the Australian Centre for Evaluation identified 369 published randomised policy trials conducted in Australia since 1976. More than two dozen of these trials were undertaken in First Nations communities. Some of those trials show strong positive effects. Early childhood intervention that began during pregnancy reduced dental decay among Aboriginal children by more than 80 per cent in early follow-up. A Victorian trial found that sending personalised letters to parents increased influenza vaccination rates among Aboriginal children, while pamphlets alone made little difference. A school-based program in remote communities targeting executive function and self-regulation showed gains reported by parents and carers, shaping how such interventions are delivered across home and school settings.

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

Constituency Statement

Medicare, Broadband, Renewable Energy, Consumer Protection: Subscription Traps

Federation Chamber

Wednesday, 4 March 2026

Labor created Medicare and Labor has always set about making bulk-billing stronger. In the ACT, bulk-billing rates are among the lowest in the nation, and we've worked assiduously since coming to government to boost bulk-billing rates for Canberrans. We're now seeing fully bulk-billing clinics reopening across Canberra, revitalising that promise that, when you go to a Canberra doctor, you can show just your Medicare card and not need to pull out your credit card. We've increased bulk-billing incentives so they cover all patients, and provided additional incentives to fully bulk-billing practices. We're also funding a $24 million plan to roll out three fully bulk-billing clinics right across the ACT. Labor created Medicare, and only Labor will strengthen bulk-billing in Canberra.

The National Broadband Network was an invention of the Rudd and Gillard Governments that was left on hold when the Coalition Government decided that running fibre cables to the box in the street would be good enough. But we know now, with more people working from home and an average of 25 devices connected to the internet in a typical household, that you need fibre to the premises to make it work. That's why, here in the ACT, Labor is rolling out broadband to 97,000 more Canberra homes. That's 2,500 kilometres of additional fibre cable, ensuring people can work from home and do teleconferences, online education and telehealth. We're ensuring that the National Broadband Network is available to more Canberra businesses and more Canberra households.

Here in the ACT, we're also ensuring that cheaper home batteries are available to more Canberrans; 4,500 Canberra households have taken up a battery in order to bottle that solar energy and put downward pressure on their energy prices. Cheaper home batteries have been rolled out right across the ACT, with many households taking advantage of the moment to upgrade their solar installations. With solar and batteries, households are able to bring down their energy bills and have less impact on the environment. I've appreciated the jobs that that's created and the chance to meet apprentices in workshops in Fyshwick and Mitchell, and I know more work is going on across the ACT. Cheaper home batteries are a Labor legacy which will be vital in reducing pressure on the grid and reducing the household bill pressure that Canberrans face.

Subscription traps are one of the issues that Canberrans have spoken to me about repeatedly. We know that subscription traps are a scourge for many households who sign up to subscriptions only to find they can't cancel as easily as they got in. Whether it's an online service or a local gym, people want to be able to cancel their subscriptions with an ease that reflects modern society.

Ends

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

Randomised Trials

House of Representatives

3 March 2026

In the 1950s, a significant change took place in medicine. The advent of evidence-based medicine saw that field move from an approach which had previously prized grey-bearded experts towards a more scientific and critical approach, which looked to test new treatments. Streptomycin, the polio vaccine and other treatments were evaluated using randomised trials. This was a significant step forward for medicine, saving thousands of lives. Treatments which were previously thought to be effective turned out, when subjected to a rigorous control, to be ineffective. Treatments which had been thought to be long shots turned out to save lives.

The shift towards evidence based medicine has marked one of the most crucial changes within medicine over the course of recent centuries. Right now, public policy is going through the same transition. Effectively, what we're trying to do with a randomised trial is to identify the counterfactual - what would have happened if the treatment hadn't been put in place. You can think of this a bit like Gwyneth Paltrow from Sliding Doors. In that movie, we get to see both of the alternatives - what happens when she catches the train and what happens when she doesn't. But real life isn't like that. We only get to see one pathway through, and, in evaluating new medicines or evaluating new policies, it's critical to have in our minds what would have happened if the policy hadn't been delivered.

Randomised trials assign people to the treatment and control groups through the toss of a coin. That approach ensures the two groups are identical when you have a large sample on both the observables and the unobservables. I've spent much of my career as an economist using natural experiment approaches, trying to tease out a treatment group and a control group using differences in state variation, using a regression discontinuity or using instrumental variables. But what we're trying to do in each of those instances is to benchmark against a randomised trial; to see what would have happened if we'd been able to put a randomised trial in place.

Senator The Hon Tim Ayres
Minister for Industry and Innovation
Minister for Science
Senator for NSW 

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

Lights, Camera, Science: Funding For Scinema 2026

4 March 2026

The Albanese Labor Government is supporting science engagement with $17,205 in funding for the 2026 SCINEMA International Science Film Festival.

Awarded under the National Science Week 2026 - Science Engagement Program grants, the grant will help deliver SCINEMA from 15 to 23 August, giving schools and communities across Australia free access to high-quality science films.

For 25 years, SCINEMA has used storytelling to make science accessible and compelling. Through an international competition, a student film competition and a curated national screening program, the festival connects Australians with scientific ideas in creative and engaging ways.

It’s one of 28 projects that will be supported by a National Science Week grant this August.

In 2025, National Science Week drew record participation numbers, with around 3 million people taking part in more than 2,500 events nationwide.