Costs of raising equity capital by renounceable rights issues in Australia

Rights issues remain a common method for raising equity capital in Australia for companies listed on me Australian Stock Exchange. This study investigates the capital raising costs of Anstralian renounceable equity rights issues from 2001 to 2006. Both direct and indirect costs are investigated and the explanatory power of potential influencing factors is analyzed. The total direct costs averaged nearly 4% of gross proceeds raised and the mean offer price was discounted around 17% from the current market price. Issue size, percentage underwritten, concentration of ownership and issuer risk significantly influence the percentage direct costs of the rights issue. The age of the issuer, the average historical volume of shares traded and the offer price appear to influence the percentage discount.

A-REIT rights issues

Purpose – This is the first REIT paper to seek to empirically examine potential influencing factors on the discounts and underwriting fees of Australian REIT rights issues.

Design/methodology/approach – Using a methodology similar to Owen and Suchard, and Armitage, a sample of 62 A-REIT rights issues during 2001-2009 is analyzed. A variety of potential factors influencing discounts and underwriting fees are explored.

Findings – Over A$20 billion was raised by A-REIT rights issues during 2001-2009 (this around three times that raised through A-REIT initial public offerings during the same period). The mean offer price was discounted around 9.5 percent from the current market price and underwriting fees averaged 2.9 percent of gross proceeds raised – both substantially less than for industrial rights issues. The standard deviation of daily returns for the past year appears to influence the percentage discount offered to subscribers. This volatility was particularly noticeable in 2008 and 2009, during the global financial crisis, where new issues were discounted substantially so as to raise equity to repay debt. This historical risk variable appears paramount in determining the discounts to subscribers and fees to underwriters.

Practical implications – A-REITs seeking to minimize the discounts offered to subscribers and to minimize their underwriting costs with rights issue equity capital raisings must first minimize their share price volatility.

Originality/value – This paper adds to the international costs of capital raising literature of REITs by examining such costs with A-REIT rights issues and is the first paper to examine factors influencing these costs.

Sex offender risk assessment : consideration of human rights in community protection legislation

ObjectivesRisk assessments provided to judicial decision makers as a part of the current generation of legislation for protecting the public from sexual offenders can have a profound impact on the rights of individual offenders. This article will identify some of the human rights issues inherent in using the current assessment procedures to formulate and communicate risk as a forensic expert in cases involving civil commitment, preventive detention, extended supervision, or special conditions of parole. MethodBased on the current professional literature and applied experience in legal proceedings under community protection laws in the United States and New Zealand, potential threats to the rights of offenders are identified. Central to these considerations are issues of the accuracy of current risk assessment measures, communicating the findings of risk assessment appropriately to the court, and the availability of competent forensic mental health professionals in carrying out these functions. The role of the forensic expert is discussed in light of the competing demands of protecting individual human rights and community protection. ConclusionActuarial risk assessment represents the best practice for informing judicial decision makers in cases involving sex offenders, yet these measures currently demonstrate substantial limitations in predictive accuracy when applied to individual offenders. These limitations must be clearly articulated when reporting risk assessment findings. Sufficient risk assessment expertise should be available to provide a balanced application of community protection laws.

Registered and enrolled nurses : experiences of ethical issues in nursing practice

Research aims:
To explore and describe registered and enrolled nurses’ experiences of ethics and human rights issues in nursing practice in the Australian State of Victoria.

Method:
Descriptive survey of 398 Victorian nurses using the Ethical Issues Scale (EIS) survey questionnaire.

Major findings:
The most frequent and most disturbing ethical issues reported by the nurses surveyed included: protecting patients’ rights and human dignity, providing care with possible risk to their own health, informed consent, staffing patterns that limited patient access to nursing care, the use of physical/chemical restraints, prolonging the dying process with inappropriate measures, working with unethical/impaired colleagues, caring for patients/families who are misinformed, not considering a patient’s quality of life, poor working conditions.

Conclusions:
Nurses in Victoria frequently experience disturbing ethical issues in nursing practice that warrant focussed attention by health service managers, educators and policy makers.

Navigating human rights across the life course

Issues related to human rights have increasingly moved to the forefront of professional concern in recent years. Despite this, there has been minimal attention paid to exploring how changing human needs across the lifespan impact upon human rights. This paper takes a broad look at human rights issues that occur across the life course, and uses examples of life course transitions to illuminate issues related to moral rights and human rights. The examples include family formation, raising children, adolescent maturation in the context of youth offending and grandparents parenting their grandchildren. Each example explores the contestable rights and responsibilities of children, young people and adults and the ways in which these are negotiated within the context of the family.

Human rights performance reporting : a study of corporations within Australian financial sector

This paper investigates the human rights performance reporting practices of the top 50 Australian financial service companies listed in the Australian Stock Exchange. All corporate reporting media, including annual reports, Social Responsibility Reports (CSR) and company websites, were reviewed to document their disclosure practices for the current period (2009/2010). In considering a number of international voluntary guidelines on human rights, a content analysis instrument containing 80 specific human rights themes, under 10 general categories, was developed to examine corporate reporting media. The results remain intensely unimpressive. The number of companies that disclosed human rights items is extremely low; the majority of the items were not disclosed by any of the companies under investigation. However, compared to CSR reports and company websites, annual reports were the preferable media used to disclose human rights issues. The result indicates how ineffective the voluntary global guidelines are in ensuring that Australian financial corporations report on their human rights performances.

North Korean human rights and the international community: responding to the UN Commission of Inquiry

Of all the difficult conversations to have with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) regime, the one over human rights has proven the most troubling for the international community. Once human rights issues are placed on the table, diplomatic efforts become quickly de-railed. Because of this, and because issues such as non-proliferation are seen as more pressing than human rights, there has been a conspicuous absence of any official, systematic response to the question of human rights violations in North Korea. Of course, most human rights campaigns experience some amount of politicisation. This is unsurprising, given the deeply political nature of the very concept of human rights. The North Korean human rights issue, however, suffers from this phenomenon more than most, tied up as it is with wider ideological battles that hark back to the circumstances of the division of the Korean peninsula. In this context, the 2014 report delivered by the United Nations (UN) Commission of Inquiry (COI) into North Korean human rights represents an effort to move above and beyond the politicisation of the issue and was largely successful in this regard.

Mental health and human rights: the MI Principles - turning rhetoric into action

The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain General Assembly Resolution 46/119 United Nations Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and for the Improvement for Mental Health Care and situate them in the current examination of mental health and human rights issues. The paper will provide country examples of human rights standards in mental healthcare, will exemplify some of the failures to use the MI Principles and comment on why this has occurred. The paper will also discuss the 'Principles to Respect': Initiative on Mental Health and Human Rights, a practical strategy to address the human rights standards of persons with mental illness.

Comparison of Australian and Malaysian views on the use of biometric devices in everyday situations

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, many countries including Australia and Malaysia have been able to justify the use biometric devices such as fingerprint scans, retina scans and facial recognition for identification and surveillance of its citizens and others in the name of national security. In addition, biometric devices are increasingly being used worldwide by organizations to keep track of their employees and their productivity, leading to concerns of privacy and civil rights violations. Taking the critical theory perspective, this paper will analyse the data collected and report on the findings of a survey carried out in Australia and Malaysia, with respect to the responses provided and opinions expressed to the survey's open ended and other questions by individuals as to their current use, experiences, preferences, concerns about the devices and the situations in which they think biometric devices should be used, including in their workplaces. This descriptive study uses both quantitative and qualitative data to examine what Australians and Malaysians think about the use of biometric devices in everyday situations and compare them as to their similarities and differences within the context of each nation's culture and political systems. The paper will then critically examine the ethical and civil rights issues involved in the use of biometric devices in everyday life and what regulatory and legal measures should be taken to safeguard the rights of citizens while maintaining security and productivity, in order to avoid the situation of Michel Foucault's Panopticon becoming an unpleasant everyday reality, which could negatively influence social justice and create social change due to its effects on individuals in two multicultural societies. the apper will argue about the need to educate the general public as to the issues of surveillance and privacy involved in the use of biometric devices in everyday situations.

Activism, reflection and Paulo Freire – an embodied pedagogy

This paper explores the critical pedagogy of activists as they participate in activism on some of the most important human rights issues of our time. I argue the pedagogy of activism is critically cognitive and embodied in a practice that is inherently social. The paper commences with some writing on what I claim is Freire’s own activism, always working towards a struggle for social justice and social change. His educational practices were never removed from sites and movements of struggle and resistance and he encouraged teachers to be political, that their teaching should never be disassociated from a critique of the political and social realities that impact on and create impediments to a democratic education.The paper then outlines empirical research on the learning dimensions of activists conducted in Australia and draws on some of the personal narratives of activists. I explore the reflexivity of activists as they work within and against the state, on issues of indigenous self-determination, racism, religion, homophobia, urban development, climate change, civil liberties, economic inequality and others. I argue for a critically reflexive pedagogy, as Paulo Freire reminds us, activism without purposeful reflection has the potential to become what he termed “naïve activism’’. That is, a focus on the theory and philosophical underpinnings of activism, and the tactics and strategies necessary to instigate social change, can create a pedagogy that is wanting in praxis. Yet the urgency of activism and the desire for significant social change often prevents a critical space for reflection to occur.The paper concludes with some suggestions for how Freire’s writing on praxis, can improve activists important practice.

Recognizing appropriate representation of Indigenous knowledge in professional design practice

This paper focuses on the need for designers to follow clear, concise, workable practises to engage appropriately and ethically with indigenous knowledge on projects involving the graphical depiction of indigenous culture. Incorporating indigenous symbols into visual communication design strategies impacts a wide range of stakeholders and therefore requires a sensitive approach with broad consultation in regard to permissions and intellectual property rights; issues can be worked through if respectful practice methods are applied. This paper acknowledges cultural appropriation is not new and that creative, cross cultural interpretation and expressions of hybridity should be encouraged. However respectful communication, consultation, and collaboration are required whenever commercial application of indigenous culture is attempted. To demonstrate the need for clarity, three case study examples will be presented, each with design solutions involving the use of graphical depictions of indigenous culture and each selected due to the varying degrees of stakeholder engagement undertaken in the design process. The introduction of the ladder of stakeholder engagement theory is a new concept introduced in this paper that can be employed to better consider the appropriate and ethical engagement of designers with indigenous knowledge.