Andrew Leigh

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

 She Who Leads: Launch of the NETRI Report

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
 

Saturday, 20 September 2025

I begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal peoples, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, and pay my respects to Elders past and present. I extend that respect to all First Nations people here today.

It’s an honour to be with you this afternoon to launch the NETRI Report. My thanks to Dr Madhumita Iyengar for her leadership of Initiatives for Women in Need (IWiN), and to collaborators Raffy Sgroi from Sage Advice and Hari Iyengar from South Asian Federation ACT (SAFACT). Above all, I want to recognise the NETRI participants – the graduates whose energy, ideas and determination are at the heart of today’s celebration.

NETRI is a beautiful word. In Sanskrit, it means “she who leads”. But NETRI is more than a name. It’s a philosophy. It is about recognising the leadership potential that exists in women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and giving that potential room to grow.

When you read the report, you see how NETRI created a space where women could bring their whole selves. It wasn’t about leaving culture at the door, it was about weaving culture into leadership. It was about saying: your heritage, your stories, your experiences are not barriers to leadership; they are the very qualities that make your leadership distinctive.

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

From Wi-Fi to what if?: Andrew Leigh on Australia’s innovation gap

Published in SmartCompany

17 September 2025

When Australian scientists at CSIRO developed the technologies behind modern Wi-Fi, it was a breakthrough that reshaped how people connect and communicate. The organisation secured some royalties, but the technology never became the foundation for a home-grown industry. That experience captures a familiar Australian pattern: we are good at creating knowledge, but less effective at turning it into lasting economic capability.

For decades, Australia’s economic model has relied heavily on adoption. We pride ourselves on being quick to pick up technologies developed elsewhere, and adoption will always matter. But adoption alone is no longer enough. One of Australia’s productivity challenges arises from the fact that only 1-2 percent of our businesses engage in innovation that is new to the world. As the Productivity Commission has observed, many businesses may not realise how far they sit from the global frontier. It’s like a track athlete running alongside the race leader, unaware that they’re being lapped.

As the Strategic Examination of Research and Development has noted, the weak point is often experimental development: the messy, unglamorous work of moving from prototype to product. In the most successful economies, firms invest heavily in this stage, working side by side with customers. In Australia, the investment is lighter. Our universities are strong in basic research and have grown stronger in applied research. But too often ideas do not get pulled through to the market. The result is a conveyor belt of discoveries that stop short of the customer.

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

Startups for Growth

Ecosystem Startup Leaders Lunch
UTS Startups, Sydney

Wednesday, 17 September 2025

I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet, and pay my respects to Elders past and present.

UTS Startups

Murray [Hurps], thank you for convening us and for what you are building here at UTS. The scale and ambition of UTS Startups is remarkable. It reaches students, alumni and schools, offers free access to desks and support, and has grown student interest in entrepreneurship from about one third to over one half in recent years. It is producing jobs, internships and real-world capability that spills over into the broader economy.

It is a treat to be in a room of builders: from Stone and Chalk and Fishburners to Cicada, EnergyLab and The Melt; from UNSW Founders and I2N to Spark Festival. Most people are very good at explaining why something can’t be done. Founders specialise in proving them wrong. And support organisations like yours provide the scaffolding that lets those efforts stand tall.

The case for startup support organisations

Startup support organisations are the connective tissue of an innovation economy. You lower search costs between ideas, talent, customers and capital. You coach founders through the messy middle. You convert research assets into commercial capability.

That role becomes critical when an economy has strong research outputs but an uneven mechanism for translation. Australia does well on publications and citations. Yet too often Australia celebrates the paper and outsources the product. That pattern carries a hidden cost: Australia pays more, waits longer, and imports capability that could have been built domestically. As the Strategic Examination of R&D’s discussion paper noted in February of this year, the real prize is not simply producing knowledge, but embedding it in firms and industries.

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

The Great Unbinding: Non-Competes, Freedom and the Future of Competition

Sydney Institute

Tuesday, 16 September 2025

1. Unbinding the Debate

I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all First Nations people here today.

Anne and Gerard Henderson, thank you for having me back for a fourth time to speak at the Sydney Institute – an institution with an abiding belief in the competition of ideas.

Let me start with three stories.

A laundromat manager in a small regional town was made redundant. Instead of just receiving a thank-you and a payout, she was given a letter claiming she had an ‘implied’ restraint. For a year, she was told, she couldn’t work in the same industry. She had never agreed to such a clause. Yet the threat hung over her: take another laundry job in town, and you could end up in court

A health worker on less than $80,000 read his contract and saw a restraint with no end date at all. ‘Indefinite’, it said. And the scope? Not just his neighbourhood, but all of Australia and New Zealand. His employer might as well have written: ‘You can work anywhere in the world, as long as it’s not here.’

Then there was the graduate engineer, starting out on $63,000. His contract barred him from working for any competitor, anywhere in Victoria, for twelve months. For a young worker at the beginning of his career, it felt less like a career ladder, more like a trapdoor

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

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO SYDNEY, MORNINGS WITH HAMISH MACDONALD
TUESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2025

SUBJECTS: Non-competes, National Climate Risk Assessment Report, Net Zero

HAMISH MACDONALD: Imagine for a moment you've worked your whole life in one particular industry - something you love doing, then one day you receive a redundancy. It feels pretty disheartening, obviously. You take it on the chin, you go back on the job hunt, then you realise that your redundancy came with a non‑compete clause meaning for the next year, maybe even longer, you can't do the work that you love that you've trained for. Surveys are showing that as many as one in five employees in Australia are bound by these non‑compete clauses. Now the government is taking measures to end the practice for low and middle‑income earners. Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury. It's a mouthful of a title. Good morning to you Dr Andrew Leigh.

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

HAMISH MACDONALD: You've encountered a few horror stories of non‑compete clauses. What sort of situation do people end up in?

ANDREW LEIGH: Absolute shockers. There was a laundromat manager in a small regional town who was made redundant and told that she had an implied restraint of trade that stopped her working in the same industry. There was a health worker on $80,000 who had a non‑compete clause that said they couldn't work anywhere in Australia or New Zealand. There was an engineer on $63,000 who was banned from working anywhere in the same state for 12 months. These are clauses that are originally designed for CEOs, but now cropping up in the employment agreements of early childhood workers, security guards and fitness instructors.

HAMISH MACDONALD: Why do employers want to put them in? What's the benefit to the employer?

ANDREW LEIGH: Well, the benefit for the employer is they get to get a leg up over their competitors. If you're a stagnant firm, where you might be concerned that your employees could go to work for a fast‑growing competitor. That's of course good for their wages, and it's good for the productivity of the economy, but it's not good for the incumbent. And so, firms have just been chucking these things in because a lot of employment agreements these days are standard forming agreements written by the boss, so why not throw in a clause which is advantageous to the employer?

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
TUESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2025

SUBJECTS: National Climate Risk Assessment Report, North West Shelf, ANZ

ROSS SOLLY: So, we mentioned this morning to Shane Rattenbury, and you would have heard it in the news yesterday. Georgia Stynes also covered it on the Drive show yesterday. This climate report that came out, the National Climate Risk Assessment, which has now put the government in a tricky position because later this week it will be revealing its own targets, but also how to prepare Australia for what looks like a very, very troubling future climate-wise. Andrew Leigh is the Member for Fenner, of course, also Assistant Minister for many, many portfolios and joins us this morning. Andrew Leigh, good morning to you.

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

ROSS SOLLY: You're a father. Does this report worry you?

ANDREW LEIGH: Yes, it really does. You look at these impacts and realise that the severe weather events that we've had - those awful bushfires in 2019/20, Cyclone Alfred, the significant events of flooding, and so on - things are only going to get worse from here. So, we need to invest in adaptation, and most importantly, we need to make sure that Australia is doing its part. And when I hear senior members of the Coalition out there today saying they want to walk away from even Scott Morrison's minimalist commitment to net zero by 2050, that really scares me for the nation's future.

ROSS SOLLY: Well, also some people are scared because your government has just signed up to the expanded Woodside program, which they're saying just flies in the face of anything we might be doing here in Australia to tackle climate change.

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, 16 SEPTEMBER 2025

SUBJECTS: Non-competes, immigration

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: It’s time to talk federal politics with the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, and the Member for Fenner, Andrew Leigh. Andrew, good morning.

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

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: And to you too. You’re giving a speech at the Sydney Institute today believe?

ANDREW LEIGH: Yes, my fourth time speaking to the Sydney Institute, and this time talking about non-compete clauses - clauses that shackle one in five workers to their jobs and make it tougher for the people to get a pay rise.

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Andrew, you’ve been talking about this since the election. Is there anything being done about it?

ANDREW LEIGH: Yes, there is. So, we’re banning non-competes for people earning under $183,000, which is nine out of 10 workers, and that will…

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Why 183 and not 180 or 190? How do you get to that figure?

ANDREW LEIGH: Yeah, great question. It’s a standard benchmark in the Fair Work Act: the high-income earner threshold. And so that’s already there in legislation and it kicks in for a range of other things. It seemed a straightforward way of drawing the line. We’re looking at how we’d handle non-compete clauses above that range, but certainly below it we think that there’s no place for non-competes. And so, we’ll have that legislation in the Parliament before long. But we’ve just closed consultation. We’ve got some really shocking stories, you know, a graduate engineer on $63,000 that couldn’t work anywhere in the state. A health worker on $80,000 who had a non-compete with no end date at all covering all of Australia and New Zealand. So, you know, there’s some pretty shocking clauses being put on employees.

STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Okay. What are you doing in this legislation, though, to protect intellectual property? Because, you know, I think about this industry here for instance and, you know, I mean, I guess we’re a little bit different to say, a hairdresser or, you know, somebody working in a retail job or whatever. But there are instances where somebody can be built up by a company only to leave and take that skill and expertise somewhere else. How do you protect businesses in this area?

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

Data Without Borders: Sharing for Smarter Policy

Public Sector Data Sharing Network
Online Address

Tuesday, 16 September 2025

Good morning. It is a pleasure to join the Public Sector Data Sharing Network.

For those of us who spend much of our time working with data, it is easy to forget that most Australians do not wake up thinking about linkage protocols or metadata standards. They are more likely to wake up wondering if the coffee machine still works or whether the kids remembered their homework. But while people may not think about data integration, they do care deeply about what it makes possible: better schools, safer medicines, smarter infrastructure and more effective social services.

As Assistant Minister for Productivity, I believe that good policy rests on good evidence, and good evidence rests on good data. Data sharing is the invisible plumbing that makes this possible. Like any plumbing, you tend not to notice it when it’s working smoothly, but you really do when it springs a leak. Our challenge is to build the pipes, valves and pumps of the data system so they deliver seamlessly, without Australians having to think twice about it.

Today, I want to reflect on the progress Australia has made, share concrete examples of how data sharing is improving lives, and look at what we can learn from other countries that are pushing the frontier.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics is a world leader in data linkage. Two of its integrated data assets stand out: the Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA) and the Business Longitudinal Analysis Data Environment (BLADE). PLIDA safely links 37 datasets spanning the Census, tax returns, welfare payments, migration, health, education, disability, and state-level data such as crime, courts and corrections. More than 84 additional datasets have been linked for single-use projects, ranging from NAPLAN to hospital data. BLADE links taxation, trade, intellectual property, employment and insolvency data with ABS survey data, creating a rich resource for understanding business performance and productivity. Since 2017, almost 800 projects and 5,000 researchers have used these assets. Without them, our understanding of entrenched disadvantage, business dynamism, health and skills would be far more fragmented.

Consider some of the ways these datasets have shaped policy. The Life Course Data Initiative is a pilot that links PLIDA with select ACT and South Australian datasets, state birth registries, university and childcare data. It focuses on childhood disadvantage, looking particularly at ages zero to fourteen. This linked data can help us understand protective and risk factors in the early years, giving policymakers a sharper evidence base for interventions. And because it links so many different strands of a child’s life, it helps policymakers see people not as data points in silos, but as whole humans whose health, education and family experiences intersect.

The Department of Education and the ABS used integrated data to develop a fairer way of allocating non-government school funding. By linking family income data, government now bases non-government school funding on the actual median income of families of students at each non-government school, shaping the distribution of around $18 billion annually. It’s a reminder that sometimes data integration isn’t about adding complexity, but about making policy simpler and fairer.

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

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TV INTERVIEW
ABC AFTERNOON BRIEFING WITH PATRICIA KARVELAS
MONDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2025

SUBJECTS: National Climate Risk Assessment Report, net zero, immigration

PATRICIA KARVELAS: I want to bring in my political panel for today. Andrew Leigh is the Assistant Minister of Productivity. Matt Canavan is an LNP Senator for Queensland. Welcome to both of you.

ANDREW LEIGH: G'day Patricia, great to be with you.

MATT CANAVAN: G'day Patricia.

PATRICIA KARVELAS: Matt Canavan, starting with you on this Climate Risk Assessment. Does any of it land on you? And you think, ‘oh, this is serious, this is real.’

MATT CANAVAN: Well, I've always said there's an impact of industrialisation on the climate. I've just started reading through it, but the detail of it, when you get to the detail is pretty standard. The problem always with these reports is governments cherry-pick the most extreme and outrageous scenarios to justify what they already want to do. I mean, it's clear the government wants to increase its climate targets. Clear the government wants to increase carbon taxes on Australians. They want to massively expand the intrusion of government in your life. And so, they released this report – the government's released this report to try and scare people into accepting such change. That's what they've always done; governments have always done this. But if you go into the details, the report actually shows that there is not an increasing risk of cyclones to Australians. Finally, that's out there. I mean, hopefully people say that because every time we get a cyclone coming, including earlier this year to Brisbane, we're warned it's because of climate change. And so, climate change is something we should respond to, but it's not something we should panic over. And it's clear the government is not doing much on climate change. The emissions are the same as what they were when they came to office three years ago. They believe this report. Why haven't they taken any action?

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

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TV INTERVIEW
SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA, AFTERNOON AGENDA WITH TOM CONNELL
WEDNESDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER 2025

SUBJECTS: Shrinkflation, AI, Jacinta Price comments

TOM CONNELL: 'Shrinkflation'. You're aware of this term, where a price or a product is the same price but suddenly smaller in size. Chocolate chips, rice, whatever it might be. The government says it's going to crack down on it. Joining me is Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities, Treasury - other things. Andrew Leigh, thank you for your time.

ANDREW LEIGH: Thank you Tom.

TOM CONNELL: You're allowed to do this. I mean, it's kind of another form of increasing a price per unit. You're not going to make it illegal, but what will happen? You'll have to label a product for a couple of months. We're now smaller. How would this work for a consumer?

ANDREW LEIGH: Yeah, you're spot on Tom. That's one of the things we're considering, because people have come to us frustrated that they see biscuits being taken out of packets and they see cereal sizes shrinking. We've seen shrinkflation hit toilet paper and the concentration of detergents. And one of the things we're consulting on right now is whether to expand the Unit Pricing Code to cover more retailers, and how to treat instances in which products shrink and the price stays the same. We think it may be important for customers to be notified in that instance, so they might choose to shop around and buy a different product. So, that consultation's open for 9 more days on the Treasury website. People can have their say.

TOM CONNELL: Unit Pricing Code, and I can feel people thinking this is pointy, but it's great because if there's the same product and four different sizes, you can instantly see what the cheapest is. One will say it's 52 cents per litre and the next one's 70 cents per litre. The only downside to expanding that is it's not - I guess it's a bit of red tape for a small shop going up against Coles or Woolies. They'll go, ‘oh, this is hard for us, and makes things more difficult’. How do you balance the consumer and the business there?