[WS:] Poor relief is a very narrow and rather old concept of public welfare. In modern usage, public welfare included health care, education, old age pensions, and unemployment insurance, while "poor relief" is a rather minor part of it. There is nothing humiliating about this modern sense of social welfare in Western Europe, and in fact these services plus some other collective arrangements such as public transit or cooperative housing, are the main reason why the working class in these countries are much better off that that in the US (I do not want to speak for Australia).
Western European countries spend between 20 and 30 % of their GDP on social welfare (these are public expenditures!) whereas in the US and other English speaking countries (except the UK, where the figure is within the EU range, although on the lower end) that figure is about 16-18 %. So clearly, there is a big difference!. Many studies tried to explain that difference, quoting the strength of organized labor (which does not quite work) or institutional factors (interaction between political parties, the executive branch of government, and the administration) - but at the very best these explanations are partial.
My hypothesis is that there is certain affinity between "stock knowledge" of the population and different political programmes proposed by vanguard parties, including those representing labor. If there is a disconnect, these programmes will not go very far. Welfare state is based on a collectivistic view of society, which has a lot of traction in the continental Europe but not in the English speaking countries (it must be in their genes;) That is why anything smacking of collectivism is an uphill battle in these countries. Case in point: New Zealand's Labour proposed collective ownership of land in the 1920s to combat land speculation (which was a major issue) and got burned in the elections. So they learned their lesson and went along with the pan-British liberalism favoring individual solutions. The same problem exists here in the US - various collectivist solutions were proposed and generally failed to get much traction (see for example the piece on the passage of Social Security in Theda Skocpol's book "Social policy in the United States in a historical perspective.") And this also explains the hostility that all government social programs encounter in the US - even among the population that benefits from them.
There is nothing subjective about - just as there is nothing subjective in that Americans hate soccer and the metric system - it is viewed as antithetical to the core American values (whatever that is).
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."