281 research outputs found
The New Australian System of Corporate Governance: Board Governance and Company Performance in a Changing Corporate Governance Environment
This paper investigates the changing duties and responsibilities of boards and directors of Australian public companies. The corporate governance environment in Australia is currently going through a period of significant transformation raising the question of whether in this fluid and shifting environment company and board performance can still be assessed largely on the basis of profit, share price and dividends generated over the short term. These almost certainly will continue for some time to be the key metrics of company and board performance and it is hard to see how it could be otherwise. Nevertheless, a growing chorus of influential stakeholders is calling for the introduction of a more balanced and comprehensive suite of performance indicators that better reflect the realities of corporate governance early in the Twentyfirst Century. The paper examines how these stakeholders are reshaping corporate governance in Australia and also calling for a reconsideration of the way in which performance is assessed
Liberty, National Security and the Big Society
[No abstract][No keywords]
(Re)form with Substance? Restructuring and governance in the Australian health system 2004/05
The Australian health system has been the subject of multiple reviews and reorganisations over the last twenty years or more. The year 2004â2005 was no different. This paper reviews the reforms, (re)structures and governance arrangements in place at both the national and state/territory levels in the last year. At the national level some progress has been made in 2004/05 through the Australian Health Ministers' Council and there is now a national health reform agenda, albeit not a comprehensive one, endorsed by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) in June 2005. Quality and safety was an increasing focus in 2004â2005 at both the national and jurisdictional levels, as was the need for workforce reform. Although renewed policy attention was given to the need to better integrate and coordinate health care, there is little evidence of any real progress this last year. More progress was made on a national approach to workforce reform. At the jurisdictional level, the usual rounds of reviews and restructuring occurred in several jurisdictions and, in 2005, they are organisationally very different from each other. The structure and effectiveness of jurisdictional health authorities are now more important. All health authorities are being expected to drive an ambitious set of national and local reforms. At the same time, most have now blurred the boundary between policy and service delivery and are devoting significant resources to centrally 'crisis managing' their service systems. These same reasons led to decentralisation in previous restructuring cycles. While there were many changes in 2004â2005, and a new national report to COAG on health reform is expected at the end of 2005, based on current evidence there is little room for optimism about the prospects for real progress
Small-scale Intensity Mapping: Extended Halos as a Probe of the Ionizing Escape Fraction and Faint Galaxy Populations during Reionization
We present a new method to quantify the value of the escape fraction of
ionizing photons, and the existence of ultra-faint galaxies clustered around
brighter objects during the epoch of cosmic reionization, using the diffuse
Ly, continuum and H emission observed around galaxies at
. We model the surface brightness profiles of the diffuse halos
considering the fluorescent emission powered by ionizing photons escaping from
the central galaxies, and the nebular emission from satellite star-forming
sources, by extending the formalisms developed in Mas-Ribas & Dijkstra (2016)
and Mas-Ribas et al. (2017). The comparison between our predicted profiles and
Ly observations at and favors a low ionizing escape
fraction, , for galaxies in the range . However, uncertainties and possible systematics in
the observations do not allow for firm conclusions. We predict H and
rest-frame visible continuum observations with JWST, and show that JWST will be
able to detect extended (a few tens of kpc) fluorescent H emission
powered by ionizing photons escaping from a bright, , galaxy.
Such observations can differentiate fluorescent emission from nebular emission
by satellite sources. We discuss how observations and stacking of several
objects may provide unique constraints on the escape fraction for faint
galaxies and/or the abundance of ultra-faint radiation sources.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, re-submitted after referee report to Ap
Knowing what you need to know about needs assessment
This paper reviews the scientific literature on needs assessment of individuals living in the community. Providing an overview of the field with a focus on capturing useful information for planning health interventions in the community, this paper will highlight: The current policy context that underpins the importance of needs assessment in health care; Key papers and basic theoretical concepts that can guide a coherent approach to community care needs assessment, including Bradshaw, 1972 and Stevens & Gabbay, 1991; The development of semi-structured interviews in mental health as a focus for designing new tools - with the Camberwell Assessment of Need (CAN) being the most well known; How to deal with the organisational issues involved with the assessment of unmet need in the community; The current evidence base for developing a national approach to needs assessment; And a brief look at the latest self-reported needs assessment instruments
Public interest litigation: making the case in Australia
Litigation is widely and appropriately recognised as an important component of the public interest advocacy \u27toolkit\u27. Yet, little attention has been paid in Australian research and scholarship to an important question: under what circumstances is public interest litigation (PIL) an effective way to bring about progressive social change? Informed by a review of the international literature on PIL, the authors of this article argue for the importance of drawing on Australia\u27s rich history with PIL to develop a solid empirical evidence base which can inform future decision about the strategic employment of PIL in campaigns to address the concerns and needs of disadvantaged and marginalised sections of Australian society
Connecting the Milky Way potential profile to the orbital timescales and spatial structure of the Sagittarius Stream
Recent maps of the halo using RR Lyrae from Pan-STARRS1 have clearly depicted
the spatial structure of the Sagittarius stream. These maps show the leading
and trailing stream apocenters differ in galactocentric radius by a factor of
two, and also resolve substructure in the stream at these apocenters. Here we
present dynamical models that reproduce these features of the stream in simple
Galactic potentials. We find that debris at the apocenters must be dynamically
young, in the sense of being stripped off in the last two pericentric passages,
while the Sagittarius dwarf is currently experiencing a third passage. The
ratio of apocenters is sensitive to both dynamical friction and the outer slope
of the Galactic rotation curve. These dependences can be understood with simple
regularities connecting the apocentric radii, circular velocities, and orbital
period of the progenitor. The effect of dynamical friction on the stream can be
constrained using substructure within the leading apocenter. Our ensembles of
models are not intended as statistically proper fits to the stream.
Nevertheless, out of the range of models we consider, we consistently find the
mass within 100 kpc to be , with a nearly
flat rotation curve between 50 and 100 kpc. This points to a more extended
Galactic halo than assumed in some current models. As in previous work, we find
prolate or triaxial halos ease agreement with the track of the leading stream.
We display the behavior of our models in various observational spaces and
characterize the substructure expected within the stream. In particular, the
young trailing stream visible near trailing apocenter should exhibit a tight
trend of velocity with distance separate from the older debris, and we suggest
that this will serve as an especially useful probe of the outer Galactic
potential.Comment: Submitted to MNRA
- âŠ