Transcript
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Acknowledgement of country
I wish to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Traditional Custodians of this beautiful land and waterways.
I pay my respects to them and their cultures and to their Elders past, present and emerging. I acknowledge their continuing connection to the land, sea and community.
I also pay my respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with us this evening.
Introduction
You may be thinking it is an odd choice to ask the Chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to speak for the Collaborate 2024 CEW Annual Dinner on the theme of Collaboration. At its heart competition is rivalrous contest, apparently the opposite of collaboration which is working jointly for a shared goal.
But on deeper reflection while competition and collaboration are each powerful processes stemming from opposing drives, both can serve the public good. Australian competition law, as the object of our 50 year old Competition and Consumer Act enshrines, protects and promotes competition, not as end in itself, but as a means to enhance the welfare of Australians. CEW harnesses collaboration in the mission of women leaders empowering all women. Tonight I plan to address three questions:
- The importance of collaboration in my career development and approach to leadership
- Why is competition important
- How collaboration features in the work of the ACCC
The importance of collaboration in my career development and approach to leadership
I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s in a close family with both parents working and heated discussions on political and social matters at the kitchen table. My parents handed to me a strong work ethic, strong feminist ethos, and a commitment to serve. My father, Cecil Cass, a surgeon, followed a lifelong calling to take care of his patients and my mother, Professor Bettina Cass was and continues to be a prominent sociologist and social policy academic who worked with Government and in research on the position of women, children and the care economy. My uncle Dr Moss Cass was Australia’s first Minister for the Environment, and continued throughout his life writing on how to improve public outcomes.
In 1978 when I was finishing high school at Sydney Girls High and spending much time debating I had chance encounters with two prominent judges. The first was Dame Roma Mitchell who gave the prizes at an Australian High Schools Debating competition in Adelaide. She was the first Australian woman to be a Queen’s Counsel, was in 1978 a Supreme Court judge and later to be the first Chair of the Human Rights Commission. She briefly spoke to me and suggested that I should consider a career in law. Later that year I was given an award for Plain English Speaking by then Chief Justice of the High Court Sir Garfield Barwick. Very quietly he said to me as he gave me the award that I was a dangerous woman because I could talk. I am pleased to say I took up the advice given me by both of the justices.
After studying both Political Economy and Microeconomics, with Economic History and Law at Sydney University and writing an honours thesis on the Economic History of Worker’s compensation in NSW, well might you ask, how did I commence a career in private practice? You would not be alone in asking this question. At one of the interviews that I did for a summer clerk position I was asked the question “Why do you want a job at this firm?”. I answered honestly “Because I want to apply my knowledge and professional skills to help people”. After the partners interviewing me stopped laughing and picked themselves off the floor they thanked me for coming. I did not receive an offer from that firm.
During my career as a competition law adviser I was incredibly fortunate to have opportunities to not only work on transactions that were part of clients making critical changes in their markets and industries — I was always given and sought the opportunity to see the broader impact of what was happening. I also acted for industry associations and, not infrequently, for governments looking at regulatory design and policy, and making submissions on finding new approaches to challenges. In addition, I continued to look for opportunities to contribute to our community through work on Government and not for profit boards.
Throughout my career, collaboration with women both within the firm I was working in, and across the profession gave me support, the ability to test propositions and the chance to make change. It has given me great fulfilment to work with and help the development and promotion of many women and culturally diverse team members. Frequently women senior executives and board members gave me opportunities to advise and to pitch for work. This way we all invest in each other and accelerate the rightful contribution of women in all spheres.
Each of my steps from my family background, education in economics and law, private practice and board work, gave me the experience, learnings and opportunities to take up my current role.
Why competition?
It is both an exciting and challenging time to be leading the ACCC. The Australian government and community rightly expect the agency to be a bold and effective champion of competition and protector of consumers and small business. At the same time business rightly expects that compliance should come without undue burden. One of the keys to meeting these high expectations is an appreciation of the strengths and limitations of competition as a means to enhance economic efficiency and consumer welfare.
At its core competition is the process of rivalry between individual sellers to win and retain customers on their merits. It is a powerful force that promotes economic efficiency and consumer welfare by aligning the profit seeking behaviour of firms with the interests of consumers.
In markets where competition is effective, firms pursue profits by beating rivals to supply the products and services that consumers need and want at the best price. Firms with price-quality-range-service offerings that best meet consumers’ preferences tend to prosper, while those that do not may be taken over or forced to exit if they do not improve. This spurs firms to innovate to develop new and better products and production methods in a quest to obtain a temporary advantage over rivals.
Central to the ACCC’s work is the belief that informed and confident consumers benefit and are benefited by effective competition. Competition benefits consumers by encouraging new and better products and services, cost-reflective pricing and more choice. In turn, the purchasing decisions of well-informed consumers, acting in their own self-interest, enhance the effectiveness of competition by rewarding the firms that best meet consumers’ needs and budgets.
We recognise that there are occasions when the competitive process, left to its own devices, may fail to maximise efficiency and consumer welfare. This can happen, for example, due to the presence of market power, insufficient or asymmetric information in the marketplace, or negative externalities, such as environmental costs that are not captured in decision making on how much we produce or consume. Any of these forms of market failure can cause misalignment between profit seeking behaviour of firms and the welfare interest of consumers.
The ACCC contributes to the mitigation of market failure in three important ways. First, we use our investigative and enforcement powers to limit the creation, extension, entrenchment or exercise of substantial market power through mergers or anti-competitive business conduct captured by our Act. Second, we grant exemptions from prosecution for breaches of competition law for conduct that requires cooperation between competitors to address market failure problems where we are satisfied that the conduct is not likely to substantially lessen competition or is likely to confer a net public benefit. And finally, through our market studies work, such as our recently completed Childcare Inquiry, we cast light on the nature and sources of market failure in various markets and identify potential solutions for consideration by government.
Like many modern competition agencies, our toolkit has evolved beyond traditional competition law enforcement and merger assessment so that we may advocate more widely and effectively for competition and foster awareness of how business conduct may harm competition. In addition to expertise in competition law and economics, this requires skills in critical thinking, public policy formulation, data analytics and different styles of communication. It also requires openness to criticism and better ideas.
How collaboration features in the work of the ACCC
From the commencement of the competition law 50 years ago, the ACCC (then Trade Practices Commission) has had the power to exempt co-operation between competitors from the application of the Act where we are satisfied there is a net public benefit. This reflected the broad welfare purpose of the law and the thinking of pioneers of our competition law including Professor Maureen Brunt, the first woman to hold a chair of economics in Australia. Professor Brunt directly expressed this breadth when she said:
‘For antitrust law to be relevant and socially useful it must have mixed economic and legal content with due attention given to each term…most obviously antitrust law is a type of regulatory law directed to achieving economic and associated social and political objectives.’
In recent years the ACCC has applied this exemption power in applications where we are satisfied that collaboration between competitors will achieve environmental outcomes that cannot be achieved alone. Between 2016 to 2021, about a quarter of the applications for conduct authorisation we received involved an assessment of claimed environment benefits. Some environmental collaborations authorised by the ACCC have included joint buying groups of smaller businesses collectively tendering for renewable energy, joint tendering by councils for recycling services and industry stewardship schemes where a levy is imposed to support proper disposal of environmentally harmful products.
A more recent example of collaboration featuring in the ACCC’s work is in our co-ordination of the fight against scams through the National Anti Scam Centre.
The NASC was launched last year and has brought together all key parties within government, law enforcement and the private sector to advance strategies for combating scams. Australians reported $82.1 millon in losses to Scamwatch in the December 2023 quarter. This is a reduction of 43% from the same quarter in 2022 and a 26% reduction from the July to September 2023 quarter.
Based upon Scamwatch data we are cautiously optimistic that we are now seeing the prior trend of increasing losses to scams beginning to turn around.
But, the job is far from done - we know that scams are often perpetrated against those in our society who can least afford it. A whole of ecosystem legislative framework with mandatory, enforceable codes applying to each key sector remains critical to ensure Australia becomes the world’s hardest target for scammers.
The ACCC continues to work closely with domestic and international regulators to achieve genuine collaboration and mutual assistance to share intelligence, new tools and approaches, and identify new risks and challenges in our globally connected world. I am very proud of the work of the ACCC in supporting the development of competition law and consumer protection law in our Asia Pacific region and the building of capacity in new agencies in our region. The ACCC has been, and continues to be, deeply involved in our Competition Law Implementation Program with ASEAN national agencies both multilaterally and bilaterally and last year in November, the ACCC and its counterpart competition, consumer protection, and economic regulators from across the Pacific announced the formation of the Pacific Island Network of Competition Consumer and Economic Regulators or PINCCER. This initiative will share information, investigative techniques, and authority best practice.
I am now privileged to lead an agency that is committed to gender equity, diversity and inclusion. It is important that we foster a workplace that reflects the community we serve. We know that gender, racial and ethnic diversity brings a range of experiences, perspectives, and ideas to our workplace to better inform and guide our collaborative work.
I have placed a strong emphasis on reflecting in my leadership my commitment to our progress in implementing these policies, holding myself accountable to our performance. I also work to encourage a wide range of perspectives and voices, to be raised and heard.
The ACCC has achieved close to equality in representation of women and men across the ACCC staff, including in our Senior Executive ranks, and 4 of our 7 Commissioners are women. We have been calculating the gender pay gap in our workplace for 5 years and have made significant progress on the back of our gender equity strategy. In 2022 we reached a gap of 5%, when in 2018 it was 9.4% and we expect when the 2023 figures are announced in coming months that we will have narrowed the gap further.
At the ACCC our Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Employee Network runs a Speak Up Listen Up, program of reverse mentoring for senior staff and commissioners paired with CALD staff. I take part in the ACCC’s reverse mentoring program, where I am being coached by the female head of our First Nations employee network who is a key member of our First Nations Outreach team. I am being mentored so that I understand the issues my mentor is seeing through her own personal experiences and from the ACCC’s community outreach.
This relationship gives me better perspective to appreciate the disproportionate and continuing impacts of First Nations dispossession, and the importance of remaining deeply engaged culturally with family and community to inform the ACCC initiatives internally and externally in the communities we serve.
Supported by collaboration with family, my Commissioner colleagues, senior leadership group and the full team at the ACCC across the country, I am now charged with a mandate to serve the Australian people – truly to use all our tools to help people by promoting competition and enhancing the welfare of Australians. My goal is to achieve this including by supporting and inspiring greater diversity and inclusion, that will outlast our time at our agency, for the generations to come.