Key events
Stephanie Convery
Young Australians are significantly more worried about their financial future in the wake of Covid than they used to be, a report from youth-oriented non-profits Orygen and Mission Australia suggests.
Some 55% of respondents to Mission Australia’s 2023 youth survey said they were concerned to some degree about their financial security and the current economy, the report found, while 31% rated it one of their most important issues – up from 22% in 2022 and 11% in 2021.
The survey canvassed the views of some 19,501 people aged 15-19 between March and August last year.
One in five respondents reported having experienced financial stress over the previous year, with those identifying as gender diverse, female, Indigenous, culturally and linguistically diverse or living with a disability more likely to have experienced financial distress.
Of those young people, half reported needing financial assistance from friends, family, or charities during that time, and two fifths said they had been unable to pay bills or car expenses.
They were also vastly more likely to live in poor quality housing, and to work longer hours than their peers.
Mission Australia and Orygen are calling for better systems and services to assist young people, including increasing jobseeker and youth allowance to $80 a day (currently $54 and $46 per day respectively), and a targeted, substantial increase of youth-specific social housing.
Albanese steps up criticism of Greens over housing bill
Josh Butler
Prime minister Anthony Albanese will amp up his criticism of the Greens and Coalition’s decision to block Labor’s latest housing bills, continuing to blast what he derided as the “No-alition” on a visit to a Queensland housing project on Thursday.
On his way to to the Quad leader’s meeting in the United States, the PM will stop off in Cairns today, to join premier Steven Miles at what the government says is QLD’s biggest ever social and affordable housing development – a 490-home project of modular buildings at Woree, scheduled to be completed in 2026.
In a double-pronged housing pitch, industrial relations minister Murray Watt today is also announcing $6 million in funding to building industry peak bodies to upskill more construction workers.
“In spite of the No-alition of the Liberals, Nationals, Greens and One Nation we are determined to increase housing supply,” Albanese said ahead of the visit.
Watt’s announcement will see the Housing Industry Association, Master Builders Australia and Australian Industry Group each get $2 million to Each organisation will be eligible to receive up to $2 million to help builders gain accreditation to build homes with through the government’s Housing Australia Future Fund and National Housing Accord.
Albanese and Labor continue to ramp up attacks on the Greens and Coalition after they teamed up in the Senate to defer the government’s Help To Buy shared equity scheme.
NSW government to accept recommendations of inquiry into gay hate crimes
Tamsin Rose
Forty years of unsolved murders in New South Wales will be reviewed and evidence that could be investigated with new technological advances will be forensically tested as part of the state government’s response to a landmark inquiry.
The NSW government will release its response to the gay hate crimes inquiry today, accepting all 19 recommendations made by commissioner John Sackar.
In its response, the government said that the number of “all unsolved homicides pertaining to the period 1970 and 2010 is significant” and a working group within the NSW Police had been established to audit the cases.
The police have set up Taskforce Atlas to implement the recommendations of the inquiry.
Police have also started a review of the practices, procedures, and resourcing of the unsolved homicide team, and a confidential volume of the inquiry’s report has been handed to the police and the state crime commission as part of current and possible future investigations.
NSW minister and leader of the government in the upper house, Penny Sharpe, said:
In previous decades, NSW Government institutions set a standard that not only stood by inequality and injustice, but fostered, and at times participated in it. We fundamentally failed the victims of these hate crimes and their families, and we can never let that occur again.
The inquiry found NSW police had failed to properly investigate potential gay hate crimes – including 32 suspected murders over 40 years.
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Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our rolling politics coverage. I’m Martin Farrer, bringing you the best of the overnight stories before Amy Remeikis takes control.
“Six decades of evidence” suggests that policies to boost housing demand have only benefited people who already owned a home, according to a report by independent economists. It says the Coalition’s plan to allow first home buyers access to their superannuation would heavily favour older and wealthier people.
Australia joined 42 other countries in abstaining in a vote at the United Nations overnight on a resolution demanding that Israel “brings to an end without delay to its unlawful presence” in the occupied Palestinian territories, and should do so within 12 months. The non-binding vote, which follows a historic advisory ruling in July by the international court of justice (ICJ) urging Israel to cease “its unlawful presence”, was backed by 124 countries with 14 against and 43 abstaining.
In more news from New York that is bound to have repercussions in Australia, the US Federal Reserve has cut its main interest rate by 50 basis points. After holding rates at a two-decade high in an attempt to cool inflation, the decision indicates that the Fed believes it has prices under control after they surged in the wake of Covid and the Russia-Ukraine war. With other major central banks such as the Bank of England also cutting rates in recent months, the Fed move could increase pressure on the Reserve Bank to follow suit.
And New South Wales is releasing its response to the landmark gay hate crimes inquiry, accepting all 19 recommendations made by commissioner John Sackar and saying a working group within the NSW police has been established to audit homicides from 1970 to 2010. More on this soon.
