Why Gina Cass-Gottlieb is proving critics wrong in landmark cases against Coles and Qantas
Many Australians were concerned that the Morrison government had appointed Gina Cass-Gottlieb to run the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Kevin Rudd said in 2021. Rudd accused the competition lawyer of being a “long-serving associate of the Murdoch family”. Rudd stated that he was “Lachlan Murdoch’s former personal lawyer” and a director of Cruden Financial Services, the corporate trustee of the Murdoch family.
Rudd, then at the height of his post-prime ministerial anti-Murdoch activism, said: “Given that the Murdoch family’s media power in Australia is unparalleled in the democratic world, his close relationship with the Murdochs will cause legitimate concerns from many Australians.”
What this meant was that he was something of a victim to the corporate world. It hasn’t aged well.
Cass-Gottlieb, a partner at the major law firm Gilbert + Tobin, consistently voted the best antitrust lawyer in the country, had no shortage of corporate clients besides the young Murdoch. Over the years he has held positions at Tabcorp, Wesfarmers, Westpac, Woolworths, Telstra and the Australian Banking Association, as well as many other organisations.
These former clients have now become the kinds of firms he holds accountable, winning landmark case after landmark case.
In 2024, Qantas agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the ACCC for $120 million in penalties and damages for allegedly selling tickets for thousands of “ghost flights” it had already cancelled. On Thursday, Federal Court Judge Michael O’Bryan Ruled that Coles (once owned by Wesfarmers) misled millions of customers He claimed the products were “More Down” while the “specials” were at increased prices for a month, causing the cost of the “discounted” items to be higher than they were weeks ago. The ACCC is awaiting a decision in a similar case against Woolworths.
Danny Gilbert, co-founder and president of Gilbert + Tobin, says Cass-Gottlieb’s role reversal was only natural for a woman he’s known for decades.
“Commandments of religions [ACCC’s governing] “The movement will inform what he does, and he will do it to the fullest, just as he acts on his own goals for clients,” says Gilbert. “There really is very little difference. “People want to suggest there is a different method… I don’t think there is.”
But for all the talk in legal circles about solicitors and barristers acting as simple servants of the court and available for hire by any interested party, the reality is often different. There is no shortage of lawyers working solely for unions or solely for employers; only for the tax office or only for wealthy families. When a white-collar professional switches sides, the results can be less than ideal. In an extreme example, tax experts from PwC, who were brought in in the 2010s to help the government draft legislation against multinationals shifting profits overseas, used this knowledge to boost the business of large corporations.
When pressed, Gilbert concedes that Cass-Gottlieb had a strong sense of duty, a “good social conscience” and was a progressive thinker. Did he take a big pay cut to take on the ACCC role (he comes with a substantial pay packet of around $880,000 a year, but still much less than some top corporate lawyers make)? “I wouldn’t want to comment on that,” Gilbert says. The treasurer who appointed him, Josh Frydenberg, who is now chairman of Goldman Sachs Australia, will also not speak.
The only thing that doesn’t drive Cass-Gottlieb is ego. His spokesman did not make himself available for an interview, stating that the ACCC’s case against Coles was not yet over (penalties, such as potential damages in a related class action, were not yet determined) and that there was no similar case against Woolworths. But Cass-Gottlieb passed up the opportunity to tribune when asked at a press conference in Sydney whether Coles CEO Leah Weckert should apologize in light of this week’s decision.
“It is important that Coles and the CEO make decisions about responsibility to their customers,” he continued. The answer is characteristic of his style: precise, abbreviated and austere, with which some of his predecessors deployed the bench as part of their regulatory arsenal.
One person who worked with Cass-Gottlieb and spoke on condition of anonymity said he cared deeply about his employees and was “almost always the smartest person in the room” but had no desire to show off. “Gina would be among the first to say that any results the agency achieves are the product of the efforts of a large number of people” – around 1,700 people as of the ACCC’s last annual report – says her former colleague. It’s the kind of sentence any public relations-trained senior executive would spew, but in the Cass-Gottlieb case it rings true. Mid-ranking agency staffers say the same thing about their eventual bosses’ attitude.
This may be a product of coming from a liberal Jewish family with high expectations but little left to prove. His late father, Dr Cecil Cass Head of orthopedics at St Vincent’s Hospital in inner Sydney. His mother, Professor Emeritus Bettina Cass, was dean of arts at the University of Sydney and had a brilliant career as a sociologist, among many other positions. Cass-Gottlieb’s late uncle, Moss Cass, was a pioneering environment minister in the Whitlam government and led reforms that helped protect K’gari-Fraser Island and the Great Barrier Reef.
Cass-Gottlieb’s biggest policy victory was persuading the government to introduce laws forcing companies to provide information about mergers and acquisitions to the regulator, preventing big companies from snapping up rivals and stifling competition before the regulator had a chance to intervene. This was scorned by some in the business community who claimed it would disrupt business with red tape, but in the first quarter of the scheme’s operation the ACCC exceeded its benchmarks in terms of responding quickly to businesses.
And in the Coles case, the judge peppered the ACCC’s lawyers with critical questions and ultimately awarded the regulator a win. Clearly, being led by a woman deep into the corporate world does no harm to the regulator. This imprint attempted to contact Rudd for comment.
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Nick Bonyhady is the business editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a former deputy federal editor, technology editor and industrial relations correspondent.Connect with: X or email.
