KAREN MIDDLETON:
Hi, I’m Karen Middleton, Guardian Australia’s Political Editor coming to you from the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples.
Today on Australian Politics I’m speaking with Andrew Leigh, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Employment. We’re talking supermarket prices and how the system is allowing Coles and Woolworths to flourish at the expense of competitors, and sometimes also the rest of us.
We’ll look at the case for more transparency in their practices and what’s causing higher prices and limiting options for shopping around.
We’ll also talk about housing and why we can’t seem to discuss negative gearing, and because he also oversees the Census, I’ll ask about that controversy over questions and what happened.
Andrew Leigh, thanks for joining us.
ANDREW LEIGH:
Such a pleasure, Karen, thank you.
MIDDLETON:
Big week for you. We’ve heard an awful lot about supermarkets this week. We’ve had the Competition Watchdog, the ACCC announcing they’re taking legal action against the 2 majors for – well, they’re accusing them effectively, I think, of price gouging, hiking prices and lowering them a bit and then saying – calling it a discount. We’ve had the consumer group, CHOICE, look at prices generally; I think their survey results have confirmed that Aldi is indeed cheaper than the majors. The government’s released its exposure draft of a Food and Grocery Code of Conduct, and now the ACCC has released its interim report, or you’ve released its interim report on supermarkets, and that talks about an oligopoly of grocery retailers, and it looks in particular at issues like land banking, buying up and allegedly sitting on land, and loyalty programs, those kinds of things, and the impact on competition.
So there’s a lot there. Where do we start? Maybe I start by just saying to you, what is your view about – what is the biggest and most urgent issue to address in the competition space in terms of supermarkets that would have an impact, do you think?
LEIGH:
Well, right now our focus is on not a single approach, Karen, but on a range of different approaches. When we look at the impact on consumers, the ACCC work and the CHOICE price monitoring are really critical. When we came to office we raised the penalties for anti‑competitive conduct and the action that the ACCC announced this week against Coles and Woolworths would, if proven, see them pay higher penalties as a result of Labor’s increase in the penalties.
And then the work that we’re doing on the supplier side with the mandatory food and grocery code finally sees farmers get a fair deal, and that’s because under the voluntary code set up by the Liberals and Nationals the suppliers were just reluctant to make a complaint. They couldn’t get a big penalty, but they could potentially lose a contract, so they stayed silent.
That won’t be the case under the new code, which will have anonymous complaints through the ACCC and providing multi‑million dollar fines for supermarkets that do the wrong thing.
MIDDLETON:
So is that the main focus of the code of conduct, the supermarkets dealing with its suppliers?
LEIGH:
That’s right, that’s right, so it governs that relationship. One way economists talk about this, since we’re on the wonderful Guardian podcast, let me slip into a bit of jargon ‑
MIDDLETON:
And you are one of those people, yes, so –
LEIGH:
Economists talk about monopoly power which is how firms can affect their consumers, but they also talk about monopsony power, which is how firms can affect their suppliers, and what we’re doing this week is announcing measures that go to both of those, that go to the supermarkets’ power over their consumers and the supermarkets’ power over their suppliers. We have to hold the supermarkets to account to make sure that farmers and families get a fair deal.
MIDDLETON:
My quick skimming of the new ACCC supermarket inquiry’s interim report suggests that there are problems arising for suppliers, such as they are being made to tender, I think almost even weekly, for contracts with major suppliers. Now that kind of thing cannot provide certainty to suppliers, right? If you’re a grower with a crop that’s a perishable crop, for example, how on earth can you plan ahead if the big supermarkets are forcing you to tender week by week and you can’t be sure you’re going to have a buyer for something that’s just going to go off in 3 or 4 days?
LEIGH:
Yeah, the issues, as you say, really are really acute for the fresh produce suppliers for whom, if they don’t sell their product it quickly becomes worthless. So for them there’s particular provisions which go to the determination of pricing, that it be consistent, and also to the determination of quality standards.
We’ve heard allegations from growers that the majors have rejected produce which is perfectly saleable, so those quality standards will now need to pass a reasonableness test. That’s particularly protecting those fresh produce suppliers, but all suppliers will benefit from the mandatory food and grocery code.
MIDDLETON:
How would those work, for people that don’t know what the quality standards system is, how would that work to enforce something on quality standards and what impact would that have directly?
LEIGH:
Well, that means that there’s an oversight body which looks at the way in which the supermarkets are assessing standards. So they can’t just say, ‘Yeah, nah, not having it’. They need to have objective criteria for determining the quality, for example, of berries that are coming to them.
MIDDLETON:
So is this because there’s a suspicion that sometimes they are saying, ‘Oh, that’s a bad quality product’ but in reality they’ve got a different reason for rejects it; maybe they can get it cheaper somewhere else or maybe they just want to put pressure on the sector to drive the prices down – I’m hypothesising here, but is that what you’re talking?
LEIGH:
Yeah, that’s right. And what the food and grocery code reflects is that there is a significant power imbalance between the supermarkets and the suppliers. There are many, many suppliers, there’s only a couple of supermarkets, and so we need the Code in place, and we need it to be mandatory, where it was just voluntary under the Liberals and Nationals.
MIDDLETON:
You talked about the couple of supermarkets, I think the finding is it that Coles and Woolworths really have about more than 60 per cent of the market, and a competitor like Aldi, which I was a bit surprised to find it’s been around for more than 20 years, I feel like it hasn’t been here that long, but I think 2001 it came in, but even in 2 decades it still only managed to capture about 9 per cent of the market share; what are the obstacles to competitors coming in, that’s a slightly different, I guess, to the behaviour of the 2 with their suppliers, because obviously something that is – maybe it’s all of a piece, but is there something else that is stopping competitors getting greater access to the market?
LEIGH:
Well, one of the challenges is potential access to land, and so the issue of land banking is raised by the ACCC inquiry. They identify more than 100 sites that are held by Coles and Woolworths and talk about the importance of states and territories getting planning and zoning right so that new entrants can come into the market.
We’ve had Costco as well entered in 2009, which is since the ACCC last did its supermarkets inquiry. They’re growing, and they’re just a little shy of the $5 billion threshold that would bring them into the mandatory Food and Grocery Code of Conduct.
MIDDLETON:
Right. I was going to say that that doesn’t capture them yet, right?
LEIGH:
No, but it’s a turnover threshold, and at their current rate of growth, you’d expect it to in a number of years.
MIDDLETON:
I think the ACCC didn’t look at Aldi in particular. Is there a reason for that? It didn’t look in as much detail at Aldi as it looked at the 2 majors. Is that just because they have so much market share?
LEIGH:
I mean, it’s looking, I think, proportionately at the market share of the supermarkets there. It does talk about the number of sites that Aldi has, for example, Aldi’s not exempt from the analysis, but in terms of the way in which discounts are managed, for example, that’s a practice that is pursued much more by Coles and Woolworths, so it’s not surprising that the ACCC’s analysis of promotional pricing focuses on the chains that have specials.
MIDDLETON:
You mentioned land banking and the ACCC fines. I think it’s that Woolworths has some 110 properties that they’ve bought up but haven’t done anything with yet. I think Coles has 42, if I’m right, and Aldi has about 13. Why do they not have to action anything on these sites? Is there a way of putting some kind of time limit, or some kind of obligation clause that they need to declare their intention, or off load the sites? How, practically speaking, without wanting to be restraining trade, but how in a legal sense could the government change the arrangement so that they can’t sit on these sites just to keep competitors out?
LEIGH:
All states and territories have requirements about how long after getting an approval you need to start building. That’s one of the issues that we’ve been talking to the states and territories about in the context of national competition policy.
So national competition policy, as you know, Karen, turbo‑charged productivity in the 1990s. One estimate was that by the end of the decade we’d seen a permanent lift of 2.5 per cent of GDP. In today’s terms that’s $5,000 a household.
So what we’re doing with getting national competition policy going again is looking for gains of that magnitude. Obviously we won’t do the kind of reforms that happened in the 1990s; changes to retail trading hours and allowing people to shop around for electricity, but there’s a new set of reforms which include some of the issues we’ve talked about, as well as issues in the care economy and the data and digitalisation economy, which can produce huge gains for consumers.
MIDDLETON:
How important do you think is the issue of transparency, and just knowing what’s going on, because I think that’s a frustration for customers, and it goes to the sorts of allegations that the ACCC has made this week about Coles and Woolworths. They’ve said Coles and Woolworths have been holding prices on a certain product at a level for like almost a year or more, and then suddenly raising them 15 per cent or so, and then after a short time pulling them back just a little bit and saying, ‘Woo hoo, it’s a discount’. Is part of the problem here transparency? Should they be required to disclose or publish more information about their behaviour, and even the prices that they are paying for things?
LEIGH:
Well, that’s one of the things the ACCC’s report’s gone to, the ability to get prices and do price comparison, there’s a number of price comparison sites that look at Coles and Woolies, but they get in trouble when they’re looking at discounts which are applied across multiple products, which end up being really hard to compare.
Then there’s the issue the ACCC’s brought suit on this week, one of the examples they raise in their media release is a pack of Oreos selling for more than a year at $3.50 raised to $5 for a couple of weeks, dropped to ‑
MIDDLETON:
That is a hike, I have to say, all of a sudden.
LEIGH:
Right. And then dropped to $4.50 and advertised for the ‘prices dropped’ label. If that’s true, then that doesn’t seem like a real special, and the ACCC has talked in its interim supermarkets inquiry about some set of standards that would govern promotions.
MIDDLETON:
And how do you stop retailers in the grocery sector, and maybe food and beverage retailers too – I’m thinking about coffee in particular – we know when there’s a crisis of supply in some circumstances, we saw it can COVID obviously, then once the supply’s drying up, we sort of expect the price is going to hike, but it’s supposed to be a temporary thing until supply resumes, and yet often it isn’t, or we see retailers – it feels like they’re hiding behind some kind of crisis in a sector to hike the price, and it never really comes back down to where it was.
Is there anything the government can do about that kind of behaviour in a transparency sense to ensure that they’re not padding those price rises beyond what is reasonable in a set of circumstances?
LEIGH:
There’s a significant economic literature which looks at the way in which firms behave in an environment in which prices are going up, and finds exactly the sort of thing that you’ve talked about.
I think the best answer is information in the hand of consumers, so the CHOICE quarterly price monitoring provides information which isn’t just a ranking of who’s cheapest but is actually an estimate of the price of a basket of groceries at Aldi, Coles, Woolworths and IGA. That allows people to shop around, and those results are different across the states and territories and CHOICE has reported all of those.
Getting more competition really matters. So if you’re in the Northern Territory or Tasmania, you don’t have access to Aldi, which means that you don’t get those 25 per cent cheaper baskets that Aldi is offering to shoppers in other states and territories.
MIDDLETON:
Is there an argument for the ACCC to publish regular price monitoring on supermarket prices? It does it with petrol, why would it not do it on supermarket prices?
LEIGH:
Our views is that CHOICE have the best expertise on this, the shadow shopper exercises that they have done for many years are valuable, but they weren’t always publicly accessible, and they weren’t always conducted regularly.
So we decided to fund them to be public and to be conducted every 3 months, and in our view that basket‑of‑goods approach that they take is most straightforward. We’re not trying to track the prices of every single commodity, we’re just telling people for a representative basket of groceries, where will you do best.
MIDDLETON:
You don’t think it’s better done by government rather than an organisation where people have to kind of pay to have access to some of their information?
LEIGH:
Well, that’s the point, they don’t. So the CHOICE quarterly grocery price monitoring is freely accessible to everyone, unlike the other products that CHOICE offers, which are sitting behind the subscription paywall, because CHOICE after all has to pay its employees.
I think that’s a good use of taxpayer money to fund that grocery price comparison, make it public for everyone and bring it out every quarter.
MIDDLETON:
And still to the point of transparency and going to the issue of suppliers again, is there any way that the retailers could be forced to publish the mark‑up, what they’re paying wholesale versus what they’re charging? Is that a possibility, because that seems to be a frustration for people. They have no idea what the suppliers are being paid, and the suppliers are clearly frustrated that they’re having prices driven down. How do you introduce transparency at that point?
LEIGH:
I think that will come through with the ACCC’s deep dive into a number of particular commodities that they’ve flagged in their final report. There’s a bit over a dozen commodities where they’re going to look at the supply chains and also the prices that people are paying; things like beef, which will be tracked rigorously, and then we’ll get that sense of both sides of the market. What are the farmers getting? What are the families paying?
MIDDLETON:
What about the issue of loyalty programs? How are they damaging competition, if you like, according to the ACCC, and what do you think about loyalty programs and whether they’re a good or a bad thing?
LEIGH:
They’re used by many shoppers. Some are concerned about privacy, and that’s one of the issues that the ACCC raises, others are simply not taking advantage of them, which means that there are sort of 2 classes of consumers going through the store.
The government hasn’t reached a considered view on this, but we’re certainly interested to see where the ACCC lands.
MIDDLETON:
Because some people are worried about the extent of data that creates information that the supermarkets have on them, maybe they know how often they’re shopping, they know when, they know what they’re buying, and they can track that every time you use a loyalty card. Is there a concern about that pushing prices up?
LEIGH:
I think the concern is about whether this takes away some of the overall price competition that you get if you just have a single price for everyone. A similar issue has been raised with the ACCC in the context of fuel cards in the petrol sector where people are more likely to shop at a particular outlet because they have a loyalty program or discount voucher. That might mute the impact of price competition because you don’t have a situation where every motorist is simply looking for the best price.
MIDDLETON:
Back on the suppliers question, there’s an issue in relation to them being made to pay rebates for special promotions. Often the promotions relate to those people holding loyalty cards. What can you do about that, that suppliers are being made to almost sort of pay to have their own product discounted as part of a promotion? I guess they’re being told, ‘You’ll ultimately benefit from this, it will cost you a bit upfront’. The ACCC seems concerned about that practice as well.
LEIGH:
Yeah, I’ll be interested to see where they land in the final report. The interim report is very much a laying out of the issues rather than putting recommendations on the table, but you need to ensure that the supermarkets aren’t being unreasonable in what they ask of their suppliers.
And I’m most concerned about this, Karen, when it comes to the small suppliers. If it’s a case of Coles and Woolworths negotiating with a major multinational food manufacturer like Mars, I’m less concerned about any potential power imbalance, Mars can look after itself. But if it’s them dealing with a small berry supplier, then we need the food and grocery code there in order to rein in inappropriate conduct.
MIDDLETON:
And is there an argument for more active intention to support those smaller retail chains or the one‑off grocery stores? What can a government at the national level do to help level the playing field for them, because we obviously want them to stay in the market, especially if you’ve got a local supermarket, you know it’s got what you need, but maybe it just can’t compete price‑wise with Woolworths and Coles, and they might be, you know, hoping they can drive it out of business.
LEIGH:
I love the fact that at my local supermarket you don’t just pick up groceries, you pick up gossip as well, that’s a good chance to catch up with people in the local neighbourhood and just swinging by the shops there gives you much more of a sense of community that you get at a major supermarket chain.
MIDDLETON:
This is really important for an elected representative, I guess.
LEIGH:
It’s important also for somebody who cares about social capital and about the strength of community. I think one of the reasons that Canberra has the highest level of community engagement in the country is you don’t have to burn a litre of petrol to buy a litre of milk. You can often walk down to the local shops, and you get those serendipitous conversations with your neighbours.
So that’s an issue of planning and zoning and ensuring that those sites are accessible for an independent supermarket.
MIDDLETON:
To the issue of access, easy access, walking to the shops, I can think of – and this is, I suppose, an anecdote – but I can think of one example that I’m aware of where there was a redevelopment planned, there was one of the majors already there, one of the other majors was coming in, but there was a plan to have Aldi come in as well, and then there were some local residents concerned about the scope of the footprint of the proposed development, there was a bit of back and forth, there was a challenge that I think went some legal processes, but all of a sudden Aldi wasn’t coming in.
Do you have concerns that there are some other things going on beyond just the 2 majors, but maybe even involving, you know, other supermarket chains, because the whole point with a supermarket like Aldi, you know, the research suggests that people are going to Aldi for particular things, but because the range is quite narrow they then buy other things at the majors or at another supermarket. So proximity is important to your point about not burning petrol.
Does that concern you that there might be other things going on that are adding incentives to a third party to not join, and therefore, people aren’t getting the opportunity to shop between and the opportunity to have prices lowered?
LEIGH:
I’m very concerned about anything that keeps out supermarket competition, and a lot of this, as you say correctly, Karen, goes into the remit of states and territories and how they do their planning and zoning rules.
Interestingly, Aldi seems to have built this kind of ‘buy half your groceries with us and the rest with the majors’ notion into their business model.
MIDDLETON:
Yeah, it’s kind of upfront and acknowledged, right?
LEIGH:
Yeah. So the ACCC report released finds that half of all Aldi stores are located within 400 metres of a Coles or Woolworths.
MIDDLETON:
So it’s kind of almost their model seems like it’s dependent on being close by those others. So in a sense if the majors got together, hypothetically speaking, and found a way to discourage Aldi from being close by, it not only damages consumers in that local area, but potentially it’s undermining Aldi’s model ultimately as well.
LEIGH:
Yes, and undermining grocery competition.
MIDDLETON:
So you’d want to be looking at ways to avoid that kind of thing going on.
LEIGH:
Yes, and that’s what we’re doing with national competition policy. So national competition policy is one of the things that’s being spearheaded by the Competition Taskforce that we set up in Treasury, and the Competition Taskforce just runs for a couple of years, but national competition policy, we want to run for a decade or more. We want this to be a series of reforms which keep on delivering for Australians.
MIDDLETON:
To that point, The Guardian’s been running a series on real estate, and particularly looking at the fact that we’ve got 2 major real estate players in the market, you know, realestate.com.au, and Domain, so there’s a sense of a duopoly there, a bit of along the lines that we’ve been talking about with supermarkets. What’s the government’s attitude to the real estate market? Do you need to do more about competition in real estate like you’re doing with supermarkets?
LEIGH:
I’ve spoken to Sarah Martin about this, and I think her reporting on it’s been excellent. It is a really important issue because this is the biggest purchase for most Australians. To buy a home, you’re often stretching your finances to the limit, and so anything that increases the cost of selling a home is important.
The government’s also been looking at PEXA, the eConveyancing monopoly, and whether we can get more competition into that sector, pushing the states and territories who privatised PEXA before it then became a textbook monopoly to do more to encourage the entry of competitors into that market.
There’s barely a market in Australia, Karen, where I wouldn’t look at the competition concerns and see opportunities to create more dynamism and more competition.
MIDDLETON:
Well, the Opposition’s solution to the competition issue in the supermarket sector is divestment. You don’t like that idea. Why not?
LEIGH:
So every major report that’s been done on competition has recommended against divestiture. The Dawson Report, the Hilmer Review, the Harper Review. And if you look to the major peak groups, it’s not supported by the National Farmers Federation, nor by the ACTU.
MIDDLETON:
I think Alan Fels, the former ACCC Chairman, if I’m right, has said it’s not a bad idea.
LEIGH:
It’s not as though it’s entirely friendless, but the expert reports have recommended against it, and when you look overseas you don’t see other countries breaking up their supermarkets left, right and centre. Where divestment exists, it’s very rarely used. The large major divestment attempt in the United States was the Microsoft case in the late 1990s, which ended up not proceeding.
So ultimately, if it’s a tool that isn’t utilised, it’s difficult to see how it’s likely to affect behaviour. And we’re focusing on the things that really matter, and as past reviews have told us, we need to reform merger laws, and we’re doing that. They’ve told us we need to revitalise national competition policy, and we’re doing that.
MIDDLETON:
We were talking about housing a minute ago in terms of real estate, and obviously there’s a lot of debate around this week about housing and the suggestion that the government might be looking again at tweaking negative gearing. I can see there’s a smile on your face, you were expecting this question from me, but – and also Capital Gains Tax. What is the government doing? Is it looking at these things as an option?
LEIGH:
We’ve got a big housing reform agenda, and this isn’t part of it. Our focus in the housing reform space is on the Housing Australia Future Fund, which passed the Senate, and has now 14,000 of its 30,000 homes announced. The program that we’ve proposed, Help to Buy, aims to help young Australians get a foothold in the housing market by putting in place a shared equity scheme like the scheme that’s operated in Western Australia for many years.
Surprisingly the Greens who went to the last election with a shared equity scheme in their platform are voting against it in the Senate. They’re joining the blockers in the Coalition, which is really disappointing, because these are measures that make a difference.
MIDDLETON:
They’ve had quite a bit of success in raising the profile of renters as a constituency in Australia though, haven’t they? Isn’t there an argument the government hasn’t done enough yet for renters?
LEIGH:
Well, politics isn’t about talk, it’s about action. If you look at Commonwealth Rent Assistance, that’s gone up some 45 per cent since Labor won office. That means that around a million Australians are getting more rental support. The work that we’ve done on the Social Housing Accelerator has been critical in providing more housing, particularly for women and children fleeing domestic and family violence. We’re focused on building because all of the experts tell us that housing supply is the key issue in improving housing affordability.
MIDDLETON:
Let me ask you a different question that I think, for me anyway, arises out of this debate this week, and it’s a broader question about the debates that we have. It seems to me that there’s an allergic reaction from governments generally to having difficult debates about things like tax reform or, you know, a number of other issues that might be sensitive, immigration, for example, in public.
You know, we’ve heard, I think David Pocock, the Senator – Independent Senator from the ACT made this point this week, that he wishes we could have more debate in public about some of these more difficult issues. But governments are increasingly, because of the political environment, maybe because of the social media environment we’re in, worried about having those debates. So they’re obviously very keen to know what people think about various ideas, but they find out in private through focused testing or they have private consultations with stakeholders, and they make them sign non‑disclosure agreements.
Can we not have difficult debates in public anymore?
LEIGH:
Karen, a public policy debate is my idea of a good time. I’m somebody who came into politics because of my love for good public policy making, who’s cared about this for a long period.
MIDDLETON:
Well, you were in favour of adjusting negative gearing.
LEIGH:
It’s no secret that we took those policies to the 2016 and 2019 election. But I also think that there is a tendency to look for the exciting shiny new thing rather than to focus on what the government’s doing, and actual what we’re doing in the housing space is really substantial. Our 1.2 million home target over the next 5 years working with states and territories, that’s a huge addition to the housing stock.
We’ve built more social and affordable housing than the Liberals and Nationals in their 9 years in office. So we’re doing an awful lot, and I think having that conversation about what’s being blocked in the Senate, Build‑to‑Rent and Help to Buy being blocked by a Coalition of Liberals, Nationals and Greens, that is the salient debate for the country at the moment.
MIDDLETON:
But in the broader sense is it too hard to have tough economic conversations anymore? We’ve had tax summits and the like, but people come with kind of pre‑ordained positions, and governments just seem to increase, and be just too worried about letting a debate get away from them.
How do we avoid that, given that you do love public policy, as you said, isn’t it important that this debate is had in the public arena rather than just behind closed doors with people trying to draft legislation?
LEIGH:
I’m always happy to talk tax with people. We’re doing quite a lot in the multinational tax space, closing multinational tax loopholes, improving transparency. I don’t think there’s a government in Australian history that’s done more on multinational tax.
So when the public debate turns to economics, I think that’s a good thing, I think it’s healthy for the country. But if you ask me ‘what’s the government focusing on?’, I can tell you very squarely in the housing space, it’s housing supply. In the tax space it’s multinational tax reform.
MIDDLETON:
You’re also the Minister responsible for the Census. You’ve got all the fun jobs, Andrew Leigh. We saw controversy about that recently in relation to questions that were sort of coming, and then not coming, and then kind of coming on issues around sexuality and gender in the next Census in 2026. What happened?
LEIGH:
Well, Karen, we’ve ended up adding a new topic to the Census which will ask about gender and about sexual orientation. These are questions have been asked in the New Zealand Census and included in past ABS surveys. They’ll be voluntary and only asked of people aged over 16.
So I think this will be an important step forward in ensuring that LGBT+ Australians are counted in the 2026 Census, and we’ve worked really constructively with an expert advisory group that’s advised the ABS in bringing this new topic forward and will inform the precise questions that are drafted by the ABS.
MIDDLETON:
There were some other issues that were supposed to be in. What’s the status of those? I’m thinking there was particularly – we know that there was a different gender question about trans and intersex people that I think is not going to be there in the same form as originally was planned, is that right?
LEIGH:
You’re conflating 2 issues there, so by asking about gender as well as asking about sex at birth, it’s possible to identify people who are non‑binary or trans.
There was also a proposal for a question about intersex status, also known as variations of sex characteristics. These are characteristics are people are born with particular genetic features which are not characteristic to their biological sex. A question about that was found to be too complicated to correctly identify that population.
It’s quite a small population, so all you need is a small fraction of respondents who should be answering no to incorrectly answer yes before the false positives completely outweigh the true group. So we’ll continue to work with the intersex community to find a way of measuring the prevalence of variations of sex characteristics in the general population.
MIDDLETON:
Because they particularly would be the group that were missed. I can understand you’re – I think you’re saying there’s another to find – to identify a group of transgender people if they have changed their gender from birth, but the intersex people might be a bit more difficult to find with the questions the way they are.
LEIGH:
Yes. The true question as drafted wasn’t producing usable data, so the ABS didn’t recommend that we include it in the 2026 Census, and the census won’t be including that question.
MIDDLETON:
There was to be a question on Indigenous people as well. Is that – what’s the status of that question; is that going forward or not?
LEIGH:
There’s no change to the questions around Indigenous people, so it will stay the same as it was in the 2021 Census.
MIDDLETON:
Okay. Because there was a proposal for a change in that regard, but that’s not going ahead either.
LEIGH:
I don’t recall that proposal having gotten to the final stages of the consultation. The ABS has been doing a lot of consultation over the last couple of years, and there’s been a range of things which were sort of considered through that process. I don’t recall this being one of the major questions of contention.
MIDDLETON:
And as a result of this whole public debate we’ve had recently and the sort of changes we were talking about before, has the process changed at all since that public debate about how these questions are drafted and the process that they go through before they’re ticked off? Has there been a change to that as a result of this?
LEIGH:
No, it’s just the standard process that we go through before a Census. It’s the biggest peacetime operation that we run, and so it is important that there’s appropriate lead time and appropriate testing, and the government is giving the ABS that period, they’ve obviously got to get numbers of enumerators out there, and they want to make sure that the questions are going to produce maximum response rates.
A real big challenge that the ABS and its counterpart statistical agencies around the world are facing is declining response rates. People just aren’t doing surveys in the numbers they used to. So getting the Census right is really critical.
MIDDLETON:
Yeah, that’s probably a whole other discussion, isn’t it, about why people don’t like filling in forms. I feel their pain, I have to say, but I am a Census filler‑inner.
Andrew Leigh, I really appreciate you coming in to talk about a wide range of things, and I think things people are really interested in, so thank you.
LEIGH:
Thanks Karen. Really appreciate the thoughtful questions.