Category: social welfare

Support Payments for Single Parents To Be Extended: PM

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed that the Australian government will spend $1.9 billion (US$1.3 billion) over the next three years to expand the support payments scheme that is offered to single parents. Currently, the Parenting Payment Single (PPS) can only be accessed by parents whose youngest children are up to 8-years-old, transfering onto JobSeeker…


Japan Posts Fewest Births in Record History, Amid an Increasingly Aged Society

New Analysis Japan saw the fewest number of births in its recorded history last year, health ministry data showed. The number of newborns in the country fell to 799,728 in 2022, down 5.1 percent from a year earlier, according to data released by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare on Feb. 28, marking a…


Christmas Strain Strangles Welfare Groups

Only a fraction of welfare organisations are able to meet soaring demand for help in the lead-in to Christmas. ‘Helping people in need during a cost-of-living crisis, a report from the University of NSW Social Policy Research Centre has found only three per cent of 1470 homelessness, mental health and family violence organisations are always…


‘Draining the Swamp’ Must Include Social Policy and Welfare

Commentary If Republicans are really seeking to drain the Washington so-called “swamp”—with immediate, tangible benefits for Americans’ prosperity and freedom—they could do no better than to begin with social policy. Long neglected the vast welfare machinery not only furnishes the greatest reservoir of superfluous functionaries, but it is also among the most destructive sectors of…


In Biden’s America, Everyone Is Entitled to Everything

Commentary Despite its liberal tendencies, The Washington Post editorial board once acknowledged that in a democracy, “everyone can’t be entitled to everyone else’s money.” Well, it may have had that wrong because President Joe Biden is supersizing the entitlement state of America at a pace that makes President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives seem…