Portfolio — 26 May 2026

Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh steered the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Responding to Exceptional Circumstances) Bill through all remaining House stages on 25 May, securing a third reading and completing the bill's passage through the lower chamber. The bill is the legislative centrepiece of what Leigh described as a fuel resilience plan, built around three pillars: increased fuel supplies, a permanent fuel security reserve, and interest-free loans for supply-chain upgrades.

The bill's two substantive schedules do distinct work. Schedule 1 gives the Treasurer and the ACCC new powers to declare extraordinary circumstances and to grant authorisations or exemptions to businesses — a mechanism designed to allow coordinated industry responses that would otherwise raise competition law concerns. Schedule 2 raises the maximum penalty for breaches of the Oil Code of Conduct to $10 million or 10 percent of turnover, a significant escalation intended to deter misconduct during supply shocks [TA-260525-house-43807c883b19:s025].

During the consideration-in-detail stage, proposed amendments were put to Leigh. He rejected them, arguing the measures must retain the breadth in the bill as introduced to be effective as a crisis-response toolkit. Leigh framed the government's position around the scale of the global disruption, characterising the current situation as the largest shock to oil supply in history and describing the government's response as unprecedented.

He argued the bill enables coordinated action that benefits motorists without harming consumers — the consumer protection framing running alongside the competition law mechanism [TA-260525-house-43807c883b19:s061].

Leigh then moved the third reading. The House agreed and the bill passed [TA-260525-house-43807c883b19:s062]. The vote to pass the bill unamended confirms the government held the floor without conceding ground to the amendments put during consideration in detail.

The through-line across all three stages is consistent: Leigh presented the bill as pre-emptive emergency architecture, not a reactive measure. The combination of new declaration powers for the Treasurer and the ACCC, sharply higher penalties under the Oil Code, and the supply-side investment package positions the portfolio to act rapidly and deter non-compliance before a crisis deepens.

No opposition position on the bill is recorded in the segments provided; the record of the consideration-in-detail debate is therefore partial — the source of the proposed amendments and the arguments advanced for them are not captured in the available Hansard excerpts.