International and Comparative Perspectives on Governance and Regulation of Charities: Book Launch and Conversation

On Monday 11 December 2023, the Corporate Law and Financial Regulation program of the Melbourne Centre for Commercial Law celebrated the launch of Governance and Regulation of Charities: International and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Professor Rosemary Teele Langford.

Sue Woodward AM, Commissioner of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) launched the edited collection and, with Rosemary Teele Langford, discussed important aspects of governance and regulation of charities, including recommendations for reform.

View the event recording

About the speakers

Sue Woodward AM commenced as Commissioner of the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profit Commission (ACNC) on December 12, 2022. Previously she was Chief Adviser for Not-for-profit Law with the charity Justice Connect. Sue was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2021 for “significant service to the not-for-profit sector, fundraising and the law.” Sue played an instrumental role in the formation of the ACNC, serving as the inaugural Director of Policy and Education during the early years of the Commission.

She has been involved with a number of leadership bodies including: the Victorian Government Volunteer Strategy Taskforce, the Victorian Government’s Social Services Regulator Taskforce and the National Strategy for Volunteering Council.

In pursuit of a stronger, more resilient sector, Sue also contributed to the governance of organisations in the sector, most recently sitting on the boards of the Victorian Council of Social Service (VCOSS), the Human Rights Law Centre and the Australian Communities Foundation, and previously SANE Australia.

As an academic at Melbourne Law School, she made a seminal contribution to reform of the regulation for the charity and not-for-profit sector with her 2004 research report: ‘A Better Framework: reforming the not-for-profit regulation’. Justice Connect’s Not-for-Profit Law service was established in 2008 based on her research recommendations.

Sue is also a staunch supporter of reducing unnecessary regulatory obligations on the sector. She has worked with an alliance of peak bodies and federal and state governments to make modernised and harmonised fundraising laws a priority.

To hear more from Sue, you can follow her on Twitter @acncommissioner and on LinkedIn, and read her monthly Commissioner’s Columns. You can also listen to Sue talk about her career in the charity sector and her vision for the ACNC in our Charity Chat podcast.

Professor Rosemary Langford is Harold Ford Professor of Commercial Law, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, where she is Director of Studies of the Commercial Law Masters and Associate Director, Corporate Law and Financial Regulation, Melbourne Centre for Commercial Law. Rosemary has published widely in the areas of corporate law and corporate governance, including Directors’ Duties: Principles and Application (Federation Press, 2014), Company Directors’ Duties and Conflicts of Interest (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Technology and Corporate Law (Edward Elgar, 2021). She is a member of the Corporations Committee and Not for Profit Law Committee of the Law Council of Australia and of the Law Committee of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, as well as editor of the directors’ duties section of the Company and Securities Law Journal.

Rosemary has recently completed a four-year project on governance and regulation of charities funded by an Australian Research Council grant, encompassing comprehensive and comparative investigation of governance and regulation in the charitable sector in a number of jurisdictions with the aim of making recommendations for legislative and policy reforms. Further details can be found at: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/centres/mccl/research/projects/projects/restoring-public-trust-in-charities.