Politics With Michelle Grattan: Graeme Samuel On 'Doomsday' Attacks On The Federal Budget

This year's federal budget has been the most controversial since the Abbott government's 2014 budget, with Labor struggling to sell its new capital gains tax changes and crackdown on trusts.

Its changes have produced howls of outage from those potentially affected, and criticism from some experts.

But there have been notable supporters of the changes. Those in favour find some echoes of past tax reform from the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello years.

We're joined on today's podcast by Graeme Samuel, the former head of the national competition watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. He's a long-time participant in and observer of economic reform, including helping, as the head of a business group, usher in the goods and services tax (GST) back in the 1990s under the Howard Coalition government.

Samuel says the latest budget's reforms“are actually quite mild” compared to how much Australia was transformed in the 1980s and 1990s.

Samuel says the fierce criticism of the Labor changes shows why politicians have been scared of real reform for too long.

Samuel says some media outlets had given people with“vested interests” against the budget too much uncritical coverage.

It reminded him of the“end of the world” claims he heard back more than two decades ago, when he was the National Competition Council's president and helping the Howard government introduce the GST.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has taken legal action against supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles. Last month, the consumer watchdog had a win when a court found Coles had misled shoppers with its“Down Down” discounts.

Asked about the supermarkets' public reputation, he agreed they've“copped a reputation battering” – but argued some of that has been unfair.

A 2025 ACCC report found“the supermarket industry is highly concentrated”, with two-thirds of supermarket grocery sales made at Woolworths and Coles, leaving only a small share for competitors such as Aldi and independent stores.

But Samuel said there's now stronger competition than many people realise, including from online retailers.

The ACCC was given another $67.7 million over four years in last month's budget to strengthen competition and consumer law enforcement, with much of for monitoring petrol pricing.

Yet Samuel said there's nothing the ACCC can do to significantly change petrol prices.

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