The budget allocates $1.3 billion to establish the Household Energy Upgrades Fund to support home upgrades that improve energy performance and save energy. This funding includes $1billion in funding to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to provide low-cost finance and mortgages in partnership with private financial institutions for home upgrades that save energy and importantly $300.0 million over 4 years from 2023–24 to support upgrades to social housing, in collaboration with states and territories. It is estimated this will support improvement to 60,000 social housing dwellings.

CHIA was pleased to join ACOSS and the Energy Efficiency Council at a meeting with the Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Senator the Hon Jenny McAllister to speak about the need for government support to drive energy performance improvements to low income housing. We now look forward to working with the government to help design the new program.

Retrofitting the older and energy-inefficient housing community housing organisations manage is an obvious way to save residents money, make their homes more comfortable, and reduce emissions.

With assistance from the Lord Mayors Charitable Foundation, CHIA will also be leading a sector project to help the sector to respond to multiple challenges to ensure that both the new and existing homes they own and / or manage are progressively decarbonised, have high energy performance ratings and are resilient to extreme weather events.