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Have a dissenting New Year!

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.

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We shall overcome

The relative calm of the slow days between Christmas and New Year afford an opportuntity for reflection. 2024 has been a challenging year. We have endured a complex hard-right political blitzkrieg from the coalition government. Their focus is on legislative and policy frameworks which promote ‘business freedom’ by facilitating optimum conditions for private profit. This flowering of capitalist fundamentalism (neo-liberalism on steroids) is supported by a range of deceptive ideological tropes – shallow and false representations of equality, such as the idea that the interests of capital and labour are the same or the notion that we can all be capitalists. A raft of contradictions lies below the surface layer of political deceit:

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Child protection, abolition and radical hope

This post links to the most recent presentation in a series of on-line Seminars that have been organised by the Social Justice and Child Protection Research Network Aotearoa. This is a small group of academic researchers concerned with the question of social justice and the theory and practice of child protection social work, now and into the future. Current co-directors of this initiative are Emily Keddell, Kerri Cleaver, Shayne Walker and myself, Ian Hyslop. This Seminar begins to wrestle with some of the implications of abolitionist ideas for social work generally and child protection in particular. A video recording of this session is linked here and an outline of the material covered is described below.

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A politics of hope

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.

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Truth matters

I try to tell social work students that they need be aware of the relationship between the big picture of politics and power (the policy settings that influence the way that opportunites and resources are distributed) and the small picture of individual circumstances. We are slow to learn from our history; patterns repeat in slightly altered form and in Aotearoa New Zealand we are on a regressive course politically, with tax cuts and benefit sanctions designed to redistribute wealth upwards to the already wealthy and privileged. In this post I would like to explore some wider questions about the socio-political construction of ‘truth’.