Reimagining Social Work in AotearoaTo 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.
A guest post by Bex Silver.
We are entering a dark period in the short history of our nation. There have been dark times before, and we have got through them. We will get through this too.
A guest post by Kerstin Hagena, Alina Hagena and Luis Arevalo
“The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences”
(Winston Churchill, 1936)
Kia ora koutou!
Here we are again, the trio of social service professionals and animal rights activists encouraging conversation within the social service sector about the imminent danger climate change poses to tamariki and whānau. We believe the ANZASW Code of Ethics gives us the responsibility to pay more attention to this threat and have written about this before (2024, 2023, 2022).
A guest post by Ai Sumihira
I wrote this because I wanted to see more positive stories of minority women in our community. I do not intend to support or critique any particular political party through my writing. I watched the former justice minister Kiri Allan’s interview the morning I began writing this. Kiri looked confident and radiant on the camera, at least to me. She looked a lot better than when she served as a minister. She looked authentic and charismatic, as ever. Then, she talked about the night that the police caught her.