Submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage : Inquiry into a Sustainability Charter by the Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation

The Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation1 (hereafter called Construction Innovation) supports the notion of the establishment of a Sustainability Charter for Australia and is interested in working collaboratively to achieve this outcome. A number of challenges need to be addressed to develop this Charter. This submission outlines these challenges and possible responses to them by a Sustainability Commission.

Internal audit quality, audit committee independence, growth opportunities and firm performance

This study explores whether the relation between internal audit quality and firm performance is associated with firm characteristics of information asymmetry and uncertainty (growth opportunities) and certain governance controls (audit committee effectiveness). The results from this preliminary study of 60 Malaysian companies show that the association between internal audit quality and firm performance is stronger for firms with high growth opportunities and that this positive association is weakened by increasing audit committee independence. These findings demonstrate the internal auditors conflicting roles and question the governance recommendations that require all members of the audit committee to be non-executive directors.

Uncertainty budget in the measurement of typical airborne number, surface area and mass particle distributions

The effects of particulate matter on environment and public health have been widely studied in recent years. A number of studies in the medical field have tried to identify the specific effect on human health of particulate exposure, but agreement amongst these studies on the relative importance of the particles’ size and its origin with respect to health effects is still lacking. Nevertheless, air quality standards are moving, as the epidemiological attention, towards greater focus on the smaller particles. Current air quality standards only regulate the mass of particulate matter less than 10 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM10) and less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5). The most reliable method used in measuring Total Suspended Particles (TSP), PM10, PM2.5 and PM1 is the gravimetric method since it directly measures PM concentration, guaranteeing an effective traceability to international standards. This technique however, neglects the possibility to correlate short term intra-day variations of atmospheric parameters that can influence ambient particle concentration and size distribution (emission strengths of particle sources, temperature, relative humidity, wind direction and speed and mixing height) as well as human activity patterns that may also vary over time periods considerably shorter than 24 hours. A continuous method to measure the number size distribution and total number concentration in the range 0.014 – 20 μm is the tandem system constituted by a Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS) and an Aerodynamic Particle Sizer (APS). In this paper, an uncertainty budget model of the measurement of airborne particle number, surface area and mass size distributions is proposed and applied for several typical aerosol size distributions. The estimation of such an uncertainty budget presents several difficulties due to i) the complexity of the measurement chain, ii) the fact that SMPS and APS can properly guarantee the traceability to the International System of Measurements only in terms of number concentration. In fact, the surface area and mass concentration must be estimated on the basis of separately determined average density and particle morphology. Keywords: SMPS-APS tandem system, gravimetric reference method, uncertainty budget, ultrafine particles.

The role of the audit committee and institutional investors in constraining earnings management : evidence from Chinese firms listed in Hong Kong

Using data from 2004 to 2008, we find that an audit committee is an important monitoring mechanism as audit committee independence, expertise and size are associated with reduced levels of abnormal accruals, our measure of earnings management. This study also attempts to discern when the monitoring role of the audit committee is more salient for the firm. We find that ownership concentration and the presence of government officials on the audit committee are important determinants of the negative association between audit committee characteristics and earnings management. In contrast, we find no significant associations between the audit committee and abnormal accruals for Chinese firms listed only on the Chinese domestic Stock Exchanges. The paper contributes to the corporate governance literature in a transitional economy. Identifying the role of audit committees of firms listed on markets other than the domicile market demonstrates the importance of considering the institutional setting in governance research.

Can an effective audit committee help to mitigate earnings management in Chinese firms listed in Hong Kong?

This paper attempts to determine whether the adoption of recommended corporate governance practices by Chinese firms is associated with less earnings management proxied by abnormal accruals. We examine the role of the audit committee and ownership concentration in preventing earnings management using Chinese firms listed in Hong Kong. The results of this preliminary analysis show that the frequency of audit committee meetings is associated with reduced levels of abnormal accruals, our measure of earnings management. We conclude that audit committee activity is an important factor in constraining the propensity of managers to engage in earnings management. In contrast, we find that the size of the audit committee is associated with increased levels of abnormal accruals and suggest that increasing the size of the audit committee creates information asymmetry between the audit committee and management that reduces the monitoring capacity of the audit committee. We do not find any association between audit committee independence, financial and industry experience, or ownership concentration and abnormal accruals.

Submission to Victorian Parliamentary Committee on Economic Development and Infrastructure

In the networked information driven world that we now inhabit the ability to access and reuse information, data and culture is a key ingredient to social, economic and cultural innovation. As government holds enormous amounts of publicly funded material that can be released to the public without breaching the law it should move to implement policies that will allow better access to and reuse of that information, knowledge and culture. The Queensland Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF) Project4 is one of the first projects in the world to systemically approach this issue and should be consulted as a best practice model.

The Relative Efficiency of International, Domestic, and Budget Airlines : Nonparametric Evidence

This study determines whether the inclusion of low-cost airlines in a dataset of international and domestic airlines has an impact on the efficiency scores of so-called ‘prestigious’ purportedly ‘efficient’ airlines. This is because while many airline studies concern efficiency, none has truly included a combination of international, domestic and budget airlines. The present study employs the nonparametric technique of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to investigate the technical efficiency of 53 airlines in 2006. The findings reveal that the majority of budget airlines are efficient relative to their more prestigious counterparts. Moreover, most airlines identified as inefficient are so largely because of the overutilization of non-flight assets.

Optimal budget allocation in budget-based access control

In dynamic and uncertain environments, where the needs of security and information availability are difficult to balance, an access control approach based on a static policy will be suboptimal regardless of how comprehensive it is. Risk-based approaches to access control attempt to address this problem by allocating a limited budget to users, through which they pay for the exceptions deemed necessary. So far the primary focus has been on how to incorporate the notion of budget into access control rather than what or if there is an optimal amount of budget to allocate to users. In this paper we discuss the problems that arise from a sub-optimal allocation of budget and introduce a generalised characterisation of an optimal budget allocation function that maximises organisations expected benefit in the presence of self-interested employees and costly audit.

Submission to House Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications : inquiry into the role and potential of the National Broadband Network

Just as telecommunications has played a key role in the global economy,1 high-speed broadband will have a significant role to play in the future of the digital economy. In particular high-speed broadband will have a role to play in the delivery of applications and services necessary for acquiring, and maintaining into the future Australia and Australians’ appropriate education level; community; health services, information provision and support; government services and engagement and participation by the public in the political process.