What are Labor’s Policies for Agriculture, Climate Change and other Pressing Issues?
2022-05-23 
2022-05-23 Article by: Hari Yellina
Labor will form the next parliament of Australia after winning the 2022 federal election. Led by Anthony Albanese, Labor has made pledges to deliver on several issues.
Some of the issues are:
Labor intends to replace the Coalition’s agriculture visa with a new agriculture stream inside the existing Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) system. The party has stated that it will cover the upfront travel expenses of Pacific employees visiting Australia. Moreover, it wants to make the live sheep exports completely illegal. Labor has pledged $500 million from its National Reconstruction Fund to assist the farm sector in diversifying and expanding into new markets. It also pledged to restore 450 gigalitres of water from the Murray Darling Basin to the environment, leaving less for agriculture and other uses. Additionally, Labor has promised to provide cash to improve Australia’s biosecurity system, but has not specified how much it will spend. They promised to invest $7.5 million over the next four years on 20 additional biosecurity dogs and trainers to combat illness.
Labor has pledged to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and a 43 percent reduction by 2030. Its strategy includes investing in green metal production (metals made from renewable energy), lowering the cost of electric vehicles, improving the electrical grid to handle more renewable energy, and deploying community batteries and solar banks across the country.
Labor’s main housing strategy was a new “shared-equity” system in which the party would buy 30 to 40% of a property with the owner. The home owner might then buy that percentage of the property from the government over time. Labor pledged to build a regional housing project with 10,000 new homes every year. It also implied that housing price caps were too low, promising to reassess them promptly if elected. Labor has pledged to establish a $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, with the proceeds going toward the construction of 30,000 new social and affordable homes, some of which will go to frontline workers and women fleeing domestic abuse. It said it would accept the Coalition’s proposal to decrease the age at which people may put money from property sales into super to encourage people to downsize.
Last year, Labor indicated that if it wins the election, it will support the final stage of the tax cuts, meaning that billions of dollars will go to rich Australians regardless of who wins. Labor stated that it would not impose any additional taxes on multinational firms, but it did promise to address loopholes for large foreign corporations, which it claims will generate about $2 billion in revenue over four years.