Private health insurance (PHI) is an important part of the Australian health system. During the introduction of the recent PHI reforms it was argued that, without the reforms, the public hospital system would undoubtedly collapse under the increased demand for public health services. The increase in PHI coverage might also have been expected to result in an increase in the revenue earned by public hospitals as a result of treating privately insured patients. However, the decline in numbers of privately insured patients using their PHI in public hospitals has continued, with adverse impacts on public hospital budgets in some states. This article addresses the complex interactions between various policy instruments and their impact on public hospitals, and reports the results of a study conducted at the Austin & Repatriation Medical Centre (A&RMC) which examined the reasons for privately insured patients electing not to use their insurance in public hospitals, and methods by which they might be overcome.

This article gives an overview of the 'varieties of capitalism' and 'legal origins' literature to develop a stylised model of various complementarities between corporate governance and the management of labour, with an emphasis on the role of corporate law and labour law. The authors then apply this model to interrogate the development of Australian labour law and corporate law, and consider whether a case can be made for an Australian exceptionalism.

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This Article introduces the Worker Protection Index (WPI), a new measure for quantitative cross-national comparison of the strength of worker protection provided by law. After presenting an overview and critique of existing labor regulation indices, the Article outlines the conceptual and methodological innovations used in order to develop the WPI. The WPI is wider in scope than many other comparable indices and arguably is more sensitive to variance in labor regulation systems around the world. We then briefly present some initial coding results for Australia, China, Indonesia, and New Zealand, illustrating the impact of our innovations by contrasting these findings with the Cambridge Centre for Business Regulation (CBR) Labour Regulation Index (LRI).

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