Our CR&S Approach

About this report

This is our fourth CR&S Report and covers our performance during our financial year, 1 July 2008 to 30 June 2009 (FY09). It follows our Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report 2008 which covered our previous financial year ended 30 June 2008 (FY08).

This report explores how we see our responsibilities to our stakeholders and to the environment. It sets out our CR&S strategy and how we have performed against targets we set in our FY08 report. We highlight our achievements as well as share the ongoing and emerging challenges we face.

Identifying important issues

In line with our CR&S strategy we have reported on material issues that are considered important to us as a business, and our stakeholders.  We took a two-step approach to identify these issues:

Step 1) Information capture

This included examining:

• Thematic areas identified from an internal CR&S strategy workshop and a CR&S report review workshop, both involving feedback from internal and external stakeholders,
• Board papers and employee feedback from employee engagement research,
• External stakeholder views from targeted feedback sessions and consumer research.

Step 2) Prioritisation of issues

This process prioritised issues based on:

• How often they occurred, with the highest weighting applied to issues identified in our CR&S workshop process and employee feedback,
• Materiality assessment by our internal CR&S Report Editorial Panel,
• Materiality review by our assurance providers.

This led us to identify a number of material themes for the coming year:

• Our approach to stakeholder engagement,
• Employee engagement and wellbeing,
• Embedding sustainability into business activities,
• Health and safety of our people and contractors,
• Affordability of our products and services, particularly housing,
• Community development,
• Energy efficiency and our response to climate change,
• Managing the use of, and impacts on, natural resources, particularly water and biodiversity.

We developed our report in a highly collaborative manner. Following extensive briefings, over 40 employees contributed data, case studies and discussion of our performance to an online wiki. The use of this online tool enabled a high level of participation in our report from across the organisation. Our CR&S team then reviewed and coordinated the editing of the wiki content, prior to and during the assurance process.

• This report is an online report.
• A downloadable PDF version of this report is also available. This version is designed specifically for those seeking full documentation of our performance, for example environmental, social, governance (ESG) analysts.
• Summary information from the report forms part of our Shareholder Review 2009 distributed to our securityholders. In previous years, we produced a CR&S Summary Review. As part of our strategy to integrate CR&S into the entire business we have consolidated this information into the Shareholder Review 2009.
• Our Financial Report 2009 completes our suite of annual reports.

We have chosen once again to submit our report to assurance, applying the revised AA1000 Assurance Standard's principles of inclusivity, materiality and responsiveness.

We have also reported against the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), applying the indicators to application level B+. Our response to GRI criteria varies in response to our level of control as owner, manager, developer and/or fund manager of assets. We have also used GRI criteria to report on our performance in the UK.

This year we have also applied in part the Property Council of Australia's (PCA) Draft Guide to Corporate Responsibility Reporting in the Property Sector. This guide was developed as a means to identify property sector-specific material indicators, building upon the GRI. Some of our employees were instrumental in developing this draft guide. We expect that the guide will be applied by other property companies in Australia leading to a more consistent application of metrics. Longer term this will allow for more useful benchmarking across the property sector. We are aiming to report against the PCA guide more completely in our next CR&S report.

We have incorporated our UK operations into our main report. All material is to be read as relating to our Australian operations except where indicated. Greater detail on what this report covers for our respective business units can be found on the Residential and Commercial Property pages. Data measurement techniques and calculations appear in this report as footnotes where relevant.