Ask anyone who has worked with competition tsar Gina Cass-Gottlieb to describe her, and you’ll hear the same refrain: “She’s the smartest person in any room – but she doesn’t need people to know it.”
But first, there’s much to discuss. Cass-Gottlieb has had a busier year than most. As well as a flurry of merger activity and litigation, the ACCC wasof the childcare system and a slew of reports on regulating digital platforms, and it’s little wonder she wakes up at 5am on weekdays.“We’re at an important juncture from the economy’s point of view, everybody’s concerned about how to introduce more dynamism, more Australian business innovation, and that comes from competition,” she says.
Sims, ironically, was the only person to predict she would prove as active as he was. “I don’t see why people think lawyers aren’t interested in changing the law – many politicians are lawyers,” he said at the time. Many corporate lawyers feel betrayed by her push to tighten merger rules – after all, it appears to go against the interests of their clients. But others admit privately that some of her suggestions are needed to bring Australia in line with international standards.As for Cass-Gottlieb, she sees no difference between what is good for consumers and what is good for business. To her, rigorous competition and consumer protections benefit the public, the economy and business by extension.
Add this gene pool to the social and political upheaval of Cass-Gottlieb’s formative years as a teenager in the 1970s, and it’s little wonder she is something of a reformer. She did a double degree at the University of Sydney but, back in those dim, dark ages, without any studies in competition law.Luckily, the United States was well across “antitrust”, as Americans call it, by the time Cass-Gottlieb headed to UC Berkeley for a masters degree in the 1980s.
Women head a majority of the most influential competition regulators globally and are disproportionately represented in the senior ranks of corporate antitrust teams.for competition law last year were women. The year prior, only two lawyers achieved that rating nationally – Cass-Gottlieb and Liza Carver, who has since also joined the ACCC.
Cass-Gottlieb is digging into how Kwong has flavoured the dish. It turns out one of her favourite cookbooks is Kwong’s There are two months left in the year, however and big companies are on notice that she isn’t on holiday yet.