Gary Banks - Chairman

Gary Banks AO

Gary Banks has been Chairman of the Productivity Commission since its inception in 1998, having originally been appointed to the Commission’s predecessor, the Industry Commission, in 1990. He was reappointed in April 2008 for a further 5 year term.

In addition to overseeing the Productivity Commission’s activities, he has personally headed national inquiries on a variety of public policy and regulatory topics. He presided on the Commission’s Review of National Competition Policy Arrangements and led its studies for COAG into Economic Implications of an Ageing Australia and the Benefits of the National Reform Agenda. He also chaired the Regulation Taskforce, which issued its report Rethinking Regulation in January 2006.

Gary Banks chairs the inter–governmental Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, which produces a major report (the Blue Book) annually. He was the initial convenor for the Review’s Working Group on Indigenous Disadvantage. He is on the judging panel for the BHP Billiton/Reconciliation Australia ‘Indigenous Governance Awards’. For many years, he oversaw the work of the Office of Regulation Review, and he established its successor body, the Office of Best Practice Regulation (now in the Finance and deregulation Portfolio). In 1997–98 he was a member of the Commonwealth’s Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy.

Gary is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Melbourne Institute and Monash University’s Department of Economics, and is on the Board of Advisory Fellows for the Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet) at the Australian National University. In 2008, he was made a National Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA).

Gary Banks was born in Melbourne and holds degrees in economics from Monash University and the Australian National University. In 2007 he was made an officer of the Order of Australia for services to the development of public policy in microeconomic reform and regulation.

Before joining the Commission, he worked at the Centre for International Economics, Canberra, and has been a consultant to the OECD and World Bank. In earlier years, he was a Senior Economist with the GATT Secretariat in Geneva, and Visiting Fellow at the Trade Policy Research Centre, London. He has published widely. His speeches and papers as Chairman are available on the Commission’s website.