Ideological boundaries

I have argued that child protection is politically constructed in a broad sense – that deep, often opposing currents reflect tensions within the liberal capitalist project. These economic and political parameters have set the boundaries of child protection reform, even when apparently radical departures from past models have taken place. In an important sense, this space became no less contested after the neoliberal turn that has informed state policy in Aotearoa from the mid-1980s.

However, room for manoeuvre has narrowed as successive centre-left/centre-right administrations have attempted to grapple:

The final chapters of this book focus on this volatile period of change and the current trajectory of child protection reform. To background this discussion, it is necessary to devote some attention to the development of child and family practice during the welfare state era. Many of the issues that currently assail child protection are rooted in this history.

Despite significant local variations, the development of post-war state services followed a comparable path across anglophone jurisdictions, being a period of relative political consensus that Garrett (2018), following David Harvey, refers to as ‘embedded liberalism’ – as distinct from the neoliberalism of recent decades (Spolander et al, 2015). I have also suggested that these ‘new’ liberal reforms can be instructively compared with the political backdrop to the 19th-century wave of capitalist fundamentalism, that is, that political ideology generally serves economic interests and development imperatives: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (Engels et al, 1970: 64). This chapter broadly highlights developments in state-sponsored social work between the end of the Second World War and the early 1980s, exploring the ways in which practice developed in response to wider economic and societal influences.

The welfare state era

The progressive welfare state period in Aotearoa is generally charted from the election of the 1935 Labour government and the Social Security Act 1938.