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Organise Against Social and Environmental Suffering

A guest post from Michele Jarldorn – Flinders University, Adelaide.

Just a few days before Christmas when the temperature in Adelaide reached over 40 degrees for the fourth consecutive day, I watched with sadness as the Cuddlee Creek bushfires burned an area enmeshed in my childhood memories. It’s not just bushfires – unprecedented heatwaves are killing our wildlife.  I have lived my entire life in Adelaide and grew up knowing that this was the driest state in the driest continent. But, in my 56 years I have never seen Australia so dry; some towns have literally run out of water. This is not just one day or even one week of catastrophic fire danger though; Australia has been burning since September, yet Prime Minister Scott Morrison felt it was okay to go on holiday to Hawaii. This lack of leadership, according to Richard Flanagan “symbolised contempt for all Australians” (2019). For the First Nations Peoples of Australia, the utter disregard and resulting degradation of country is another in a long line of injustices of theft, lies, racism and dispossession (Pascoe, 2018).

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Social Work, Resistance and Solidarity

The Labour-led coalition government has provided some relative respite from the overt demonising of those who are excluded from what Simon Bridges describes as the “Kiwi way of life”. This way of life, it seems, is epitomised by tax-free speculation in the private rental property market. Is this our communal cultural lode-stone? Unfettered profits from investment in rental properties? Really? Do we really all hold a sacred place for what is a fundamentally exploitative, unequal and unfair practice? Give me strength! It has been pleasant to have a break from all that banality about “good” mum and dad “Kiwis”which John Key was so fond of.  The interests of the good Kiwis that Bridges has been talking about are in fact the interests of a privileged class of people. Conservative political parties have erroneously conflated the interests of private property owners with the well-being of us all since early colonial land grab times.  It is the cornerstone of political Liberalism after all (Duncan, 2007). It is high time to stop milking the politics of fear in the golf clubs of an imaginary middle New Zealand Simon.

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Where has my radicalism gone? Revisited

A guest post by Lauren Bartley.

Nine months ago I wrote a reflection on my first few months as a social worker, and the disillusionment I faced in realising social work practice was not necessarily social justice practice. Read it here! The following post is a down-the-track reflection on my thoughts from that time, and on my first year as a social worker in a child and family-focused NGO.

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Where has my radicalism gone?

This is a guest blog post by Lauren Bartley: a recent graduate and practising social worker.

I’ve spent the last four years at university banging on about social justice while doing the BSW at the University of Auckland. This was the very reason I began a career in social work, because I had deep sense of the injustice in the world and wanted to do something about it. I prided myself on being an activist, a radical. It became my passion, my defining feature.  Early into the degree, I realised that there was a major incongruence between what I thought social work was, or should be, and what it actually seemed to be. By the end of my second year, most of my assignments had the same running theme: that as much as social workers espouse the value of social justice, social workers aren’t actually doing it. I deeply connected with Ferguson and Woodward’s (2009) criticism that social workers tend to “play down the structural factors and to focus on individual and personal issues.” (p.8).  I was constantly frustrated and dismayed by how little attention seemed to be paid to the wider factors of colonisation, capitalism and neoliberalism, both in the degree and in the profession, and how little those structural inequalities and oppressions seemed to matter to everyone else. I challenged visiting social workers who presented in class, and was intensely critical of them when they said they had “no time” to address structural issues. Putting plasters on people was all social workers seemed to be doing, and this made me angry. A placement at Auckland Action Against Poverty served to fuel this cynicism, and I came to the point of having a crisis of faith, seriously reconsidering social work as a career.

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Practice Futures (we shall overcome)

It is not difficult to be pessimistic about the future of social work in Aotearoa New Zealand at the present point in time. However I want to convey a sense of genuine optimism. Read on and I’ll explain why.

Social work has always been a challenging and conflicted job – that is the beauty of doing it well. It is important to have a critical understanding of the relationship between our practice and its wider context, historically, and in the now. According to Featherstone, White, and Morris (2014, p.36), social work needs…