Premium Content
Amendments to the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility passed Federal Parliament on Thursday.
The $5 billion federal loans scheme was criticised for years for being slow to hand money to approved projects.
The recent amendments broaden the scope of projects eligible for funding; permit NAIF to provide loans to entities other than states and territories, and determine the terms of those loans; and allow a total of $500 million of investment in equity, capped at $50 million or 50 per cent of any particular project.
As the program was due to expire at the end of this financial year, it was extended it for another five years.
Not yet what it could become
The 2021-22 women’s statement identified A$3.4 billion of spending related to women and gender equity – a mere fraction of 1% of total budget expenditure.
Much of it was piecemeal, or too small to have much impact.
The $200,000 funding for working women’ centres, “to support the continued delivery of free information, advocacy, support and advice on work-related matters including workplace sexual harassment” is unlikely to be enough to keep open the doors of the current centres, let alone revive those that have been forced to shut down.
While such measures will help, they don’t address the root causes of labour market segregation and women’s partial exclusion from higher paid, male-dominated sectors such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Switzer Daily
Forget
about a possible Roaring 20s rerun in this 21
st century, all driven
by the government-created coincidence of huge stimulus spending worldwide and a
fast roll out of vaccines that experts said would take much longer to show up
than expected.
No, it
might not be a boom of a 1920s proportion but even a bigger one, akin to the
one after World War II, which I call the “Warring 40s boom”.
But
inside any beautiful silver cloud is a bit of dark lining that grows as the
‘cloud’/economy gets bigger, which ultimately rains on our economic and