The plan to increase all income support payments to a minimum of $88 a day is the first major economic proposal of the federal election campaign.
President Biden and Vice President Harris met on Feb. 12, 2021, with governors and mayors to discuss supporting them in the fight against COVID-19.
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People can die when the federal government doesn’t work well with state and local governments – the COVID-19 crisis showed that. But the Biden administration has signaled an openness to collaboration.
Grants were found to help improve the health, including mental health, of women.
EFE-EPA/Aaron Ufumeli
Findings show that income transfer programmes must operate in deliberate coordination with ancillary social service institutions to deliver the maximum benefits for women’s empowerment.
John Quiggin, The University of Queensland; Elise Klein, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, and Troy Henderson, University of Sydney
As debate grows over what should happen to JobSeeker Payment, a ‘liveable income guarantee’ turns the idea of an unemployment benefit on its head.
One of the recommendations by a welfare advisory group was to raise benefit levels by up top 47%, but the government has rejected it, for now.
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Michael Fletcher, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Ardern’s coalition government promised to overhaul New Zealand’s welfare system, but its response to a comprehensive report by an expert advisory group has been disappointing at best.
Volunteers prepare food parcels for vulnerable individuals and families at the Black Country Food Bank.
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Food banks should not be “normal” and yet they are rapidly becoming an accepted substitute for welfare in the UK.
Women of the Peppimenarti community, about 320 km south-west of Darwin. The statistics suggest Indigenous households in remote and very remote areas are more effective at managing money to avoid hardship.
AAP Image/Dan Peled
Robert Breunig, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University and Boyd Hunter, Australian National University
We decided to dig into the statistics and compare the experience of financial stress in Indigenous and non-Indigenous households.
Our findings surprised us.
The Department of Human Services approach to social security fraud prosecutions has become less punitive in recent years.
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Despite a public focus on punitive approaches to welfare fraud, the number of social security fraud prosecutions has fallen in recent years.
When an ageing person is forced to move out of their family home, that can trigger a host of problems that policy is doing little to prevent.
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Millions of older Australians live in houses that don’t safely meet their needs, but they’re not ready for a nursing home. Lack of suitable housing and the moving costs leave them with nowhere to go.
At present, 15% of Australians experience food insecurity while 40% of food is discarded before it reaches the market.
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Despite Australia being considered the ‘lucky country’, 15% of us still experience food insecurity. Meanwhile, 40% of edible food is thrown away before it even reaches the market.
The minimum wage may be adequate for some low-paid workers – but this is clearly not the case for the woefully inadequate Newstart Allowance.
When President Bill Cllinton officially ended welfare as we knew it, he was flanked by women who had received Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
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Christian Porter said Australia’s welfare system ‘was costing over 100% of all income tax raised’ under Labor after the GFC, and that it’s ‘around 80%’ under the Coalition. Is that true?
Social Services Minister Christian Porter, speaking on Q&A.
Q&A
Social Services Minister Christian Porter told Q&A that ‘rates of drug use amongst unemployed are 2.5 times higher than amongst employed people’. Is that correct?
40% of children in sole-parent households are living below the poverty line.
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Fewer than half a million people are currently receiving the new, simplified benefit according to newly released data.
To understand how households cope, we may need to look beneath broad patterns of affordability to the interplay of housing costs with other problems.
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Housing affordability is often not the only problem households face. More often the compounding effects of multiple problems leave people unable to cope, which is why one solution won’t work for all.
Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Deputy Dean Research at Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of Melbourne