2010

ACSI's 9th Annual Conference a great success

ACSI’s 2010 Annual Conference was held in Melbourne on Thursday 20 May and was entitled ‘Governance – let’s get practical’. This year’s conference theme discussed the practical issues relating to the environmental, social and corporate governance investment risks that affect key asset classes.

Ann Byrne, ACSI CEO said “this year’s sessions provided an excellent overview of a range of practical considerations that impact on the corporate governance objectives of superannuation funds. The conference allowed us to analyse the ‘state of play’ on these issues in the Australian Equities, Property and Private Equity markets.

”During the day, delegates heard from a number of excellent speakers including representatives from the asset classes, academics, governance organisations, board directors and the Australian Federal Government.Some key highlights on the day included observations from the likes of Graham Kraehe, Catherine Livingstone, Patricia Cross and Rob Ferguson during the Directors Panel discussion that amplified the challenges of performance reviews of directors and the difficulty in conveying results to shareholders.

Former BHP Billiton Chairman Don Argus provided an honest and frank insight of a respected and experienced Chairman, when he spoke about the scope for governance reform in Australia, including the introduction of annual elections for directors. Geoff Miller, Australian Treasury, outlined the Federal Government’s agenda on governance, and Graham Hubbard from the University of Adelaide said that there is a lot of noise around sustainability reporting, but a general lack of agreement on what should be reported leads to limited comparability and limited credibility.

Conference Program

To view the program click here

Speaker presentations

pdf graham hubbard - integrating esg into equities 505.65 Kb