Text: Lu abandoned
Hong Kong is often criticized, saying that the more the SAR government alleviates poverty, the more people will be helped. In the past, more than 1 million people were below the poverty line, but now there are more than 7 million people in Hong Kong, and the proportion of people living in poverty is very high.
Hong Kong is a society with a wide disparity between the rich and the poor, with the Gini coefficient data plus the definition of poverty in the past showing that there are more than 1 million people living in poverty. As a matter of fact, many Hong Kong people feel the disparity between the rich and the poor in Hong Kong society, and the Hong Kong government allocates a large amount of budget in its annual budget to poverty alleviation.
The year before last, the HKSAR Government set up care teams in 18 districts in Hong Kong to carry out poverty alleviation and care work. Because Hong Kong's social management system is different from that of the mainland, there are no residents' committees and neighborhood offices, so the establishment of these care teams can play the role of neighborhood committees and neighborhood offices in the mainland.
The care team is able to identify vulnerable people in need in the community in a timely manner, because the scope is relatively small, they can find it in time and reach out to help them. However, such an approach is obviously not enough, and the SAR Government believes that there is still a problem. There are more than 1 million poor people in Hong Kong, who have been criticized by public opinion that the more services they serve, the more poor people they have.
There is a problem with the definition of the poverty line in Hong Kong, which at that time was relative poverty, which was inconsistent with the United Nations definition of poverty. The overall level of social development is high, and there are still some relatively poor people, and the SAR government has introduced the argument that it will adjust the definition of poverty.
According to the new approach of the SAR Government, it is necessary to focus on three types of people: first, subdivided unit households. There are many rooms in a house, and a family of three or four people lives in a dozen square meters, and in China, 20 square meters may live for three or four people. The second is a single-parent family, where the children are very small, and the parents have to take care of the children and work to support the family. Of course, the government will subsidize these single-parent families, and they can rely on the government's CSSA to support their basic livelihood.
The third is the elderly, but Hong Kong has the highest life expectancy in the world, and many elderly people have children who have emigrated or are busy with their own families and work. These elders need someone to take care of them, especially some grassroots seniors, who are old and have no children around and no income themselves. They live in rent-free public housing, and the Hong Kong government has a living allowance, so it is probably no problem to maintain basic life, but the quality of life is very low, especially when they have unexpected problems, including mental and health problems.
Therefore, the SAR government has targeted these three categories of people, and Hong Kong has a population of 950,000. If Hong Kong's current population is about 7.5 million, the proportion of this 950,000 population is not low. Through the efforts of the SAR government to reduce the number of subdivided units in recent years, the leaders have made it clear that the Hong Kong SAR government should completely solve the problem of subdivided units, which is an important indicator to solve the problems of people's livelihood in Hong Kong. Therefore, there are fewer and fewer subdivided unit households, which can reflect Hong Kong's achievements in poverty alleviation.
Of course, it is difficult to say that single-parent families also need to take care of the elderly, so such an adjustment can objectively reflect the work and achievements of the HKSAR Government in poverty alleviation, and will not be misunderstood by superficial definitions. Objectively speaking, the SAR Government has invested quite a lot in poverty relief over the past few years and has done a great deal of work.
If we compare it with some neighboring countries and regions, the Hong Kong SAR Government's poverty alleviation work should definitely be recognized, and the results are quite good. It's a pity that the definition is not done well, which gives people a perception that it does not conform to reality. All in all, the HKSAR Government still needs to step up its efforts on poverty alleviation, so that the gap between the rich and the poor can be narrowed in society and the happiness of all Hong Kong people can be increased.
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