Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between environmental reporting and corporate governance attributes of companies in Australia.Design/methodology/approach -The paper adopts a quantitative analysis approach. It examines the 2008 annual reports of the largest 100 Australian firms listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) to determine the amount of environmental reporting -these data are compared with various corporate governance measures.Findings -Analysis found a significant positive relationship between the extent of environmental reporting and the proportions of independent and female directors on a board. The analysis did not, however, support a negative relationship between the extent of environmental reporting and institutional investors and board size as has been previously predicted, rather, it showed a positive relationship.Originality/value -This paper offers insights to both regulators and company strategists. Regulators such as the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) could consider expanding its Corporate Governance Council guidelines to include consideration of the environment, which is increasingly considered to be an important aspect of corporate social responsibility, and one of the responsibilities of the board of directors. In addition, for companies which include a commitment to the environment in their mission and strategies, it suggests consideration of the impact of board structure and composition is important as both of these are shown to have a significant effect on the amount of environmental information disclosed by companies.

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Housing is a central component of productive, healthy, and meaningful lives, and a principle social determinant of health and well-being. Surprisingly, though, evidence on the ways that housing influences health in Australia is poorly developed. This stems largely from the fact that the majority of the population are accommodated in good quality housing. The dominance of a "good housing paradigm" means that households living in poor quality and unhealthy housing are doubly disadvantaged-by the quality of their housing and because policy makers in Australia do not acknowledge the health effects of housing. In this article, we examine the relationship between health outcomes and quality of housing. We base our analysis on data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, a panel dataset that is representative across Australia. We find a sizeable, policy-important, and to date under-acknowledged cohort of Australians whose health is influenced by poor-condition dwellings.

In seeking to understand the relationship between housing and health, research attention is often focussed on separate components of people’s whole housing ‘bundles’. We propose in this paper that such conceptual and methodological abstraction of elements of the housing and health relationship limits our ability to understand the scale of the accumulated effect of housing on health and thereby contributes to the under-recognition of adequate housing as a social policy tool and powerful health intervention. In this paper, we propose and describe an index to capture the means by which housing bundles influence health. We conceptualise the index as reflecting accumulated housing “insults to health”—an Index of Housing Insults (IHI). We apply the index to a sample of 1000 low-income households in Australia. The analysis shows a graded association between housing insults and health on all outcome measures. Further, after controlling for possible confounders, the IHI is shown to provide additional predictive power to the explanation of levels of mental health, general health and clinical depression beyond more traditional proxy measures. Overall, this paper reinforces the need to look not just at separate housing components but to embrace a broader understanding of the relationship between housing and health.

The risk that flexible forms of employment are harmful to the health of workers is a major public health issue for the many countries, including Australia, where such forms of employment are common or have been growing. Casual, contract and part-time employment in Australia rose rapidly in the decade to 1998 and remains high at 40% of employees in 2011. We investigate the impacts on mental health of employment on these terms and of unemployment. We use nine waves of panel survey data and dynamic random-effects panel data regression models to estimate the impact on self-rated mental health of unemployment, and of employment on a part-time, casual or contract basis, compared with permanent full-time employment. We control for demographic and socio-economic characteristics, occupation, disabilities status, negative life events and the level of social support. We find almost no evidence that flexible employment harms mental health. Unemployed men (but not women) have significantly and substantially lower mental health. But among the employed, only men who are on fixed-term contracts, most especially graduates, have lower mental health than those who are employed on full-time permanent terms. Women have significantly higher mental health if they are employed full time on casual terms.