Introduction by Croakey: South Australia’s recent state budget included some welcome measures, but was also a missed opportunity to make longer-term beneficial changes for those doing it toughest, according to the South Australian Council of Social Services.
Below, SACOSS highlights key measures in the budget that will provide short-term relief for South Australians, including a $500 energy bill relief for eligible households, and investment in public housing and tertiary healthcare.
While these measures are welcome, SACOSS write below that more could be done to focus on preventative health, community health and mental health services, as well as addressing energy efficiency for low-income households.
SACOSS writes:
The South Australian Labor Government’s second budget – one that promised to be all about cost of living, housing and health – represents a missed opportunity to make significant and meaningful changes for the State’s long-term benefit, particularly for South Australians doing it the toughest.
As they are for people across the nation, housing, health and cost of living are critical issues for South Australians and are causing great concern among our member organisations from the social and community sectors.
While we were pleased to see the Government acknowledge and make an effort towards redressing growing problems across all three issues, more can be done.
Cost of living
One of the centrepieces of the Government’s cost-of-living package was the Energy Bill Relief plan, which will see two-thirds of South Australian households receive $500 energy bill relief.
This is a welcome measure which will undoubtedly be well-received by eligible South Australians. At the same time, it’s also a one-off, short-term offering that doesn’t address long-term efficiency measures that would help low-income households reduce their energy demands – and therefore costs – over the longer term.
SACOSS also estimates that $30 million of this package will go to households with solar power which are unlikely to be experiencing energy cost stress, while many low-wage single-person households and share-houses will miss out on the payment altogether.
We were also pleased to see that the government will index its concession payments (for things like power, water, ambulance etc) at the rate of the CPI (8.64%) but only increase most government fees and charges (such as public transport fares, drivers licences and vehicle registrations) by 4.8 percent, well below the inflation rate.
Housing measures
The Budget delivers on a package of commitments it announced earlier this year (called A Better Housing Future) which offers, amongst a range of measures, a genuine investment and increase in public housing.
This is critically important and desperately needed.
However, even when coupled with the Federal Government’s recent announcement of its $2 billion Social Housing Accelerator program, these investments merely scratch the surface of a much larger problem.
The federal support delivers $136 million in the 2022-23 financial year to spend on additional social housing in the following two financial years, and the Government has said that they anticipate these combined measures will deliver around 900 new or refurbished houses over the next four years.
SACOSS has calculated that just to maintain public housing’s share of the market as the State’s expected population grows, we require at least 300 new dwellings per year. If we want to begin to rebuild the public housing estate (which has seen a loss of 17,000 public houses in the last 20 years) and impact on the wider rental market, we need 1,000 new dwellings per year.
One of the Budget’s other signature housing measures – removing the stamp duty concession for first-home buyers – also missed an opportunity to begin transitioning to a broader replacement of conveyance duties with an annual land tax (as recommended by almost every housing economist).
Furthermore, this Budget also fails to explore a range of other options which will also be needed to truly address the housing crisis, such as rent capping, shared equity schemes, modular housing and vacancy taxes.
The legislative review of the Residential Tenancies Act currently before SA Parliament also represents an opportunity to augment Budget measures to further tilt the playing field away from landlords and towards renters.
Focus on tertiary care
Health is a centrepiece of the 2023-24 Budget, with $1.8 billion of new expenditure promised over the next five years. Once again though, the lion’s share is directed towards tertiary care, infrastructure and the clinical workforce.
The health budget also directs considerable resources ($567 million) to the transition towards a ‘living with COVID framework’, seeing the pandemic response emphasis pivot from prevention to mitigation.
SACOSS is hopeful that this shift will maintain a focus on preventing the ongoing disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on disadvantaged communities. Social and economic inequities continue to be associated with more severe outcomes and death due to COVID-19, suggesting that addressing health inequities must be central to a post-pandemic response.
More broadly, the health budget emphasises investing in improving hospitals and measures that ensure more patients are able to leave the health system more quickly – but misses the opportunity to create and sustain a system that has fewer patients entering it in the first place.
Increased attention to preventative measures at the ‘front end’ of the health system would go a long way to reducing pressure on emergency departments. In this context, public health expenditure has decreased, and funding for community health services has been reduced in real terms.
SACOSS is also genuinely concerned by the absence of any clear investment in community-based supports for people with mental health issues.
Degree of relief
The 2023-24 SA Budget will clearly provide a degree of relief for hundreds of thousands of South Australians grappling with the rising cost of living and housing, much of it targeted for immediate, short-term impact.
Clearly, the Government needed to take this type of short-term action, but SACOSS believes that it may also have squandered an opportunity to think holistically for the longer term across the three key areas of health, cost-of-living and health.
For example, to tackle the intersecting inequities in housing and health, the Government could have addressed energy efficiency for low-income households so that they could better control their demand for energy. That would ensure they pay less for their energy, are better able to control heating and cooling, reduce financial stress, and have more household budget to direct to nutrition and other health benefits, thereby making people less likely to enter our health system.
The Budget acknowledges that many South Australians are doing it tough.
SACOSS commends the Government’s actions in providing redress for 2023-24, but also urges it to keep acting boldly, for the long term, for all South Australians.
Read SACOSS’ full 2023-24 State Budget Analysis here.
See Croakey’s extensive archive of articles on the social determinants of health.
