- A $10 billion social and affordable housing fund forms the centre of Labor's response to the latest federal budget.
- Social services advocates have praised the proposed measure as a "solid start" to assist vulnerable Australians, including women and children escaping domestic violence.
- Labor leader Anthony Albanese said the party would prioritise green jobs with a multi-million dollar package for apprentices working in renewable energy and associated fields.
- Visit Business Insider Australia's homepage for more stories.
A $10 billion future fund guaranteeing social housing to vulnerable Australians forms the centrepiece of Labor's federal budget response, which social services advocates say is a welcome but incomplete alternative to the Morrison government's economic plan.
Speaking in Parliament Thursday night, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese outlined Labor's reply to the 2021-2022 federal budget, which he billed as a $589 billion "showbag" with "nothing built to last."
At its centre is the promise to create a $10 billion investment fund, with the proceeds going towards the creation of 20,000 new social housing properties in the first five years of its existence.
Labor says 4,000 of those doors would be opened to women and children escaping domestic violence, and older women in financial distress.
While women's advocates have commended elements of the Morrison government's Women's Budget Statement, including a new funding package intended to help at-risk women secure accommodation, some have criticised a lack of new funding for social housing and its focus on the private housing market.
Labor's stated commitment to social housing is a "very solid start", said Kate Colvin, spokesperson for anti-homelessness campaign Everybody's Home.
"Expanding social and affordable housing means greater choice and relieves pressure."
The Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) has also welcomed the Opposition's focus on social housing, and its hopes of deploying $100 million to provide crisis housing for at-risk women.
"While this won't meet the full housing needs of people on low incomes and in housing crisis, the fund would exist in perpetuity, providing a sustainable funding base to give more Australians greater housing options," said ACOSS CEO Cassandra Goldie.
Under Labor's plan, affordable housing would also be provided to front-line workers employed in pandemic-facing duties, and veterans experiencing or facing homelessness.
$200 million is also circled for the repair and revitalisation of housing in remote Indigenous Australian communities.
The Opposition's budget response also outlines a plan for Australia to "emerge as a renewable energy superpower," underwritten by a plan to provide $10,000 in support to 10,000 apprentices engaged in green energy generation, storage, and related activities.
"We mine and produce every element needed to build a lithium battery - the power storage technology of the future," Albanese said.
"I don't want us to miss out on jobs and investment by sending those materials overseas for another country to manufacture and then importing them back once value has been added."
Environmental groups have savaged the Federal Government's budget for outlining $10 billion in infrastructure spending and further spending on apprentice wage subsidies, without directing those funds towards explicitly green projects.
"We also welcome Labor's initiatives to tackle the climate crisis through investment in local renewable energy and create sustainable clean energy jobs," Goldie said.
But any plan to revolutionise Australia's workforce and energy generation should funnel the benefits to low- and middle-income Australians, not just the beneficiaries of profitable green industries, Goldie said.
"Funding should be prioritised to ensuring people experiencing social and economic disadvantage can access energy efficiency, solar and batteries, to ensure they are not left behind in the energy transition."
Other notable policy statements in Labor's response include a hope to criminalise wage theft, codify casual work, establish Australia's domestic mRNA vaccine production capacity, and bring the Uluru Statement from the Heart forward for a national referendum.
Yet the statement is also notable for what it missed.
Beyond the social housing commitment, Labor's statement held little reference to skyrocketing housing prices, and bore no mention of negative gearing or capital gain tax reform - policies which Labor held before losing the 2019 federal election campaign.
The statement also bore no mention of the JobSeeker rate, which the Morrison this year lifted by the narrowest of margins, and which draws the continual ire of groups including ACOSS.
And after the Coalition's big-spending 2020 and its ideologically-blurred budget, Albanese also circled "the biggest debt and deficit of all time" - a notable role reversal after a decade of bitter disputes over fiscal policy.
"I've never lost faith in our country's ability to compete and win in the world," Albanese said.
Whether that faith will be rewarded is another matter entirely.