Reimagining Social Work in AotearoaA guest post by Luis Arevalo
In 2018 Steve Bannon, who was once Trump’s chief strategist, described the act of overwhelming the opposition political party, the media, and society in general with copious amounts of information and noise as ‘Flooding the Zone’. The simple act of overwhelming the online and print media sectors with an enormous amount of ‘stuff’ has left society so inundated that they have given up trying to digest and understand what is going on.
On this ANZAC Day we remember the fallen in all wars and affirm our commitment to peace, justice and a future without war.
We recognise the fallen in the nineteenth-century New Zealand Wars and the resistance of Māori to colonisation and seizure of land. In particular, we recognise the foundational non-violent resistance of Taranaki whānau at Parihaka. A form of resistance that later influenced both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
RSW 2015-2025
Imagination is a promising concept – it suggests the infinite, an absence of boundaries, something new. A future we haven’t yet experienced, or a newly imagined past. To reimagine acknowledges the need for growth in our imagination, for change. Judith Butler (amongst others) talks about counter-imagining – the act of opposing the harmful and misinformed imaginations of others (Who’s Afraid of Gender?, 2024).
The RSW collective blog began 10 years ago with this intent – to oppose a poorly imagined, uninformed government restructure of Oranga Tamariki (then Child Youth and Family). The blog offered a platform for resistance and dissent; a space to reimagine the future of contemporary social work in Aotearoa and to offer radical and critical analysis during times of increasingly conservative political narratives.
To all 15,000 of our readers in Aotearoa and overseas and all 1,000 of our loyal subscribers, we wish you and your whānau the happiest year ahead.
Since we know what makes you happy is to educate, agitate, and organise, we want to share some ideas about actions and invite your own thoughts in the reply section below.
Poverty, social work and social services
Mike O’Brien
As history shows, it never is a good time to be poor, but right now the climate is more hostile and dangerous than it has been for many years. There is quite a long list – attacks on beneficiaries, reductions in the calculation of benefits through changing the basis of adjustment, weakening of child poverty reduction targets, attacks on public housing, tightening of eligibility rules for assistance, dogmatic assertions about paid work as the route out of poverty despite the evidence to the contrary, funding cuts and contract cuts for the social services, cancelling of equity focus in health especially in relation to tangata whenua – and that is only a beginning of the list. Perhaps equally significantly is the fact that in the government’s quarterly list of targets, reducing poverty, especially child poverty, has never appeared, suggesting that this is not a priority and does not matter.