Professor Gary Banks AO is Chief Executive and Dean of ANZSOG.  He holds degrees in economics from Monash University and the Australian National University.

Gary was Chairman of the Productivity Commission from its inception in 1998 until 2013. He has headed national inquiries on a variety of significant public policy and regulatory topics. For many years, he chaired the COAG Steering Committee for the Review of Government Services, and was the Convenor for the Review's Working Group on Indigenous Disadvantage. For several years, he also had responsibility for overseeing the Commonwealth’s regulation-making processes through the Office of Regulation Review. In 1997-98 he was a member of the Commonwealth’s Committee of Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy. In 2006, he headed the ‘Regulation Taskforce’ for the Prime Minister and Treasurer, and in 2013 he was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council.

Gary is a Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research within Melbourne University, where he is also a member of the Advisory Board. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Australian National University (ANU), where he is a Public Policy Fellow. 

Gary has chaired the Regulatory Policy Committee of the OECD since early 2012. In earlier years, he worked at the Centre for International Economics, Canberra, and has been a consultant to the OECD, World Bank and WTO. He was previously a Senior Economist with the GATT Secretariat in Geneva, and Visiting Fellow at the Trade Policy Research Centre, London.

Gary became a Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia in 2001 and a National Fellow in 2008. He was elected to the ANU Economics Department’s ‘Hall of Fame’ in 2002 and received the Chancellor’s Medal in 2004. In 2010 he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. He was also awarded an inaugural Monash University Fellowship. In 2013 he was made an Alan McGregor Fellow of the Centre for Independent Studies. In 2012, his last year at the Productivity Commission, he was included by the Australian Financial Review as one of 25 ‘true leaders’ and in The Australian newspaper’s top 50 politically influential Australians.  In July 2014 he was awarded the Economic Society's inaugural Distinguished Public Policy Fellow Award. Gary received the Centenary Medal in 2003, and in 2007 was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for ‘services to the development of public policy in microeconomic reform and regulation’