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Social
Workers and Social Entrepreneurs
Can They Co-exist?
A
Paper for "Social Work in the Marketplace"
Australian Association of Social Workers (WA)
State
Conference, 21 August, 2001
Peter Botsman - Whitlam Institute
I
Over the past twenty years the market place has been everything for
governments, policy makers, and economists in the East and the West.
Before that time I don’t think we could envision a conference called
social work in the market
place. But today it seems like an almost natural , or at least, necessary
title. Why? Let me give a long winded answer to this question over the
next hour, but I will summarise the answer by saying immediately that social
workers have been the workers, even developers, of our social sphere, they
seem like a fish out of water in the economy or marketplace. But something
now is compelling us to consider this idea of social workers in
the marketplace seriously. After we reject the more violent
arguments of those who have
uncritically advocated privatisation of everything from roads
to schools, I think there is still something important now about
this idea of social work in
the marketplace. Today I want to argue that the failure of
the marketplace to live up to the expectations of those who
uncritically advocated market
solutions, deregulation and global free trade means that
there is no choice and that social workers have to move beyond
their traditional practices
into the marketplace and this involves a re-invention
and reskilling not as community development workers but as
community capacity and
economic development supporters. As this suggests, I think the
title of this conference ‘social work in the market place’ is
apposite although for perhaps the opposite reasons that might first come
to mind.
II
Jacques Donzelot’s book The Policing of Families and the distinguished
historian Michel Foucault’s successive books on medicine, prisons, and
governmentality plot the development of social work as being almost
synonomous with the rise of what they called “the social”. In other
words, with the rise of the social sphere as a space of civil, domestic
and familial relations and most importantly a space of power relations
between populations, states, governments and officials.. When work became
primarily industrial work, when villages turned into cities, when the
horizon became less dominated
by haystacks and more by chimney stacks, social work also emerged.
Social work was designed to civilise and manage populations which were
for the first time congregating together in factory towns and cities as the
grist for the mill of the industrial society. There are many things of
course that started to occur around the time of the transition from an
agricultural age to an industrial age.. Income became dislocated from the
rotation of crops, storage, the preservation of food, the
intensity of a labour process that involved the natural seasons and in which
there were indirect benefits of subsistence. For most of this period the
market place was more or less restricted as an engine of profitable
commercial and industrial activity. It had its own logic, structures and
most people participated in the market through their work which had its
own hours, structures and relationships. In the industrial age the market
and the social became more or
less separate spheres.
For two hundred years social space has been evolving and within it social
work as a means of helping families, individuals, institutions and
children to survive in a economy and a society dominated by industrial
work. Governments extracted taxes derived from industrial production and
commerce and invested them into the regulatory, cultural and institutional
development of the social sphere. Schools, hospitals, departments of
families and community services, prisons, mass universities, health
departments and social work all developed at a more or less methodical
pace. For the most part these institutions developed systematic ways of
working with large populations. Training and professionalisation created
systems andstrategies that could be copied, emulated and were effective in
supporting people within the social space.
Social workers were, as their name suggests, workers for the
development of the social. In a paper on the history of social work in
Western Australia Frances Crawford and Sabina Leitmann describe the
inter-relationship of 15 pioneering social workers with the imperatives of
reconstruction and nation building after the second world war. The role of
social workers was to promote the social sphere and to go about including
marginalised groups in to the social space. In WA, as in
Australia
, the lessons of say the German welfare state or modernist
France
came much later, social work in many parts of
Australia
has only consolidated itself as a profession in local government, state
government, communities, public institutions in the post war period. This
was not because of a backwardness in ideology but primarily because the
shape and demography of a state like WA meant that the conditions of
industrialisation that existed in many 19th century cities in
Europe
and
America
really only emerged in the 20th century. Before that, as A.B. Facey
reminds us, there were I think a series of relatively streamlined public
institutions which meant that professions like nursing, medicine,
engineering were the priorities. It was simply assumed that the population
had relatively homogenous needs that could be delivered, like the
telephone, through a well organised, centralised, bureaucracy that made
forays into the regions and centres of the State or which supervised from
afar a standardised series of practices in a remote or regional area.
And of course
Australia
’s greatest innovation was its industrial regulations, its industrial
awards were meant to provide each family with the means to live a
civilised life, and its union movement would safeguard these standards.
Australia
’s welfare state was, above all, a ‘wage earners welfare state’.
Until relatively late, the work of dealing with the marginalised groups
within
Western Australia
was done through a formal State legislative policy and through third
sector, church and religious groups who saw it as their mission to
retrieve the poor and the disposed and the indigenous members of our
community for god, and for society. The shadow of Daisy Bates and her
camel looms large over the regional landscape of
South Australia
,
Western Australia
, the
Northern Territory
and
Queensland
right up until the second world war.
The late “invention” of social work as an important profession is
probably synonomous with post war national building and later community
development in
Western Australia
. If you consider a social work textbook like, for example, Susan
Kenny’s Developing Communities for the Future then you can see how the
imperatives of nation building and community building and the old role of
the third sector collide in a new professional development of social work.
In the first case studies of the book Susan notes three classic instances
of community development work: the transformation of a vicarage into a
youth refuge, the creation of a Women’s Health Resource Centre, the role
of arts in a rural and remote town and the creation of a safe route to
school in a busy suburban area. I think what happens in this later period,
of which we are all a part, is that social workers become, not just
passive arms of the state in civilising society, they become inventors of
the social. They develop, explain, theorise, research, professionalise,
empower and, in many ways, create communities. The classic social work
figure of our time is the community development worker. “What makes a
good community development worker?”, asks Susan Kenny. She is someone
who “will prepare a submission, talk to a group of residents, write a
regular column in the newspaper, respond to referrals for emergency
accommodation, advise on the establishment of a food cooperative, address
an NESB community on the job opportunities at the local council, take
phone calls from agencies wanting up to date information about domestic
violence, cooperatives and action research.”
In other words this community development worker, that is now synonomous
with modern social work, is now a super pastoral care worker who invents,
researchs, regulates, employs, advocates, publicises, problem solves,
crisis manages, politicizes and finances the social space. She is at the
core and nerve-centre of the social space. And as such she is customarily
opposed and anti-thetical to the market place. The market is not either in
her mode of thinking, in her calculations, in her work or, if it is, it is
because it is directly hostile to what she is trying to do.
III
A shock. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher and later Ronald Reagan brought the
dynamism of the market place to the social space. The process began with
the take-over in
Britain
of the nationalised industries (coal, gas, car making, electricity, rail,
bus, water) that had remained in tact since the War. In the
US
it was the previously protected privately regulated monopolies of
telecommunications and aviation that were radically deregulated under
Reagan. These were the most remote institutions from the centre of the
social sphere and in many cases they were overdue for a management
revolution. The spheres of management that had evolved in these
government industries were bureaucratic, programmatic, one dimensional and
usually focused on one or two legislative goals to which all else was
subservient. Most of the time they delivered their product fairly
efficiently, but it was often the case that the product was standardised,
not-customised and inflexible.
Gradually, as the problems of changing public institutions were overcome
and the managerial benefits of private processes became more accepted, and
improvements were acknowledged, the revolution shifted from the periphery
of the social space to its centre. The revolution to take the processes of
the market to the public sector came to areas like health, education and
community services. The idea of for profit motives transforming the
programmatic and systems oriented spheres of the social space took hold.
The irony is that in Australia where we had no national industries per se
but only primarily government owned companies like Qantas, the Australian
National Line, Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank I would argue that
privatisation cut deeper into the social space than either in England or
the US. Perhaps the most radical exponent of privatisation and bringing
the forces of the market to the social space was Jeff Kennett. Hospitals
in
Victoria
were sold off and privatised and we now have one of the most privatised
hospital systems in the world. Roads and infrastructure was contracted out
to private companies instead of being delivered by public works
departments and we found out something through this process. Private
companies were invariably better at delivering services on time and
extracting efficiencies from resources. But they were also likely to be
more expensive, less oriented towards communities, riskier to build or
maintain and the reaction against Kennett from communities that had been
reliant on government monopolies and investments that were not determined
by the market place hit like a thunder bolt.
Perhaps the most significant example of privatisation failure in both the
United States
and
Australia
was of the institution that is perhaps the oldest institution of the
social space, the prison. The first modern prisons were the archetypal
social bureaucratic institutions and I think it is now accepted that the
market place simply cannot deliver a well regulated, safe, ethically
maintained prison that runs on budget and without security breaches.
At a State level, with its predominantly social focus on education, health
and infrastructure, I think you can argue that any government which
attempted to privatise was sooner or later thrown out in a more or less
violent fashion. The pattern has been Greiner, Borbidge, Kennett, Court
and now, the CLP in the
Northern Territory
, have been ejected for bringing market forces into the social space at a
vulnerable time. Olsen will probably be next. Although in both Howard and
Olsen you have a very instructive experience, with the dead bodies of
their colleagues stacked up outside their door, they seem to be learning
fast.
IV
So having said all this perhaps I should end my speech here with the
following conclusion. After a brief foray, the social eventually triumphed
over the market place, labor governments were elected over liberal and
conservative governments, the community development worker became queen of
the known universe and Australians lived happily ever investing more and
more into community development worker and empowering the social work
profession!
But we know that conclusion would be a false one.
I think we all know, deep in our hearts that the community development
worker as builder of cohesion with the social space is a mythic image.
What remains unsaid, also, is that the project of nation building and
community building in which all Australians are equal participants and
share in the wealth creation process, is also a rather mythic image. A
golden period of economic growth did exist for about twenty years in the
period from 1949-1972. There was, in that period, a narrowing gap between
rich and poor, a lessening of inequality due to full employment and a more
prosperous economy and society. We have had bursts of prosperity in the
mid1980s and the late1990s but for every move forward, there has been a
slump backwards. Achieving stable and sustainable economic growth is all
important because if growth falls below 3.5 per cent then the economy is
not growing as fast as the workforce and unemployment overall will
increase. In 1996 the Keating government’s White Paper argued that 4.5
to 5.0 per cent average growth was needed to reduce unemployment from its
1993 level of 10 per cent to 5 per cent by 2000. But average growth levels
above 4.5 per cent over a period of seven years have not been achieved
since the golden post war period. So the point is that to achieve
even temporary falls in unemployment requires a major national effort and
this does nothing to combat the problems of compounding unemployment in
disadvantaged regions and areas.
At the same time the social space in
Australia
has become a place of unprecedented public investment. During the period
of the Howard government the social wage has increased from 61% of total
Federal, State and Local Government spending to 63% of the total. In
1997/98 that represented $A123 billion out of a total combined government
budget of $A194 billion in current price terms. The majority of the social
wage is spent on social security, ($45 billion) or 23% of total government
spending, health ($A32 billion) or 16% of total government spending and
education ($25 billion) or 13 per cent of total government spending.
Combined together or taken individually these areas dwarf every other area
of spending, for example, the combined budget of defence and public order
is $A17 billion or around 9% of total government funding.
It is a mark of the combined efforts of the social professions, teachers,
health workers, social workers that they and their programs and
beneficiaries have by far the greatest public spending of any other sector
of our society. But it is also a mark of our times that inequality is
widening, the idea of community development is really a bit of a joke in
so many of our communities and regions around the countries and it might
be better to talk about community survival than community development.
So the irony is that the market is still important, perhaps more important
than any of those of us working in the social sphere could have ever
envisioned.
The first thing is that we need the market to do its share of the work.
Without a strong and growing market economy it is very clear to me that
our efforts in community development will be about helping people who have
become more and more marginalised from the real economy and the existing
tools of the community development worker and the social worker will
become more and more inadequate. So I think you will agree with me that we
need to argue for a macro-economic strategy that fosters growth and jobs.
But let us say that both John Howard, Peter Costello and Kim Beazley and
Simon Crean accept this argument completely tomorrow, and put into place
the most extraordinary neo-Keynesian growth strategy, and that within
seven years, we have reduced unemployment to below 5 per cent. Even
if this were so, and, by the way, I don’t think any of our leaders are
persuaded of this strategy, it would take us decades to restore the
communities and family damage and to repair the inequality that has
resulted from the above 5 per cent unemployment that has been with us
since 1975. It would take us decades.
So the second thing I think we have to start to do is to work out ways in
which we can help the market start to work again. And I think this is
starting to happen. The lessons again, in many instances, come from the
market not necessarily the social work training or community development
work that we traditionally envisioned. All over the world, in communities
that have been hard hit by globalisation, privatisation, deregulation and
have lost main stay industries like steel, ship building, agriculture we
are finding communities that are slowly but steadily re-inventing
themselves.
Often, as the case I heard from Bunbury the other day, it will come from a
person or group who thinks beyond their normal social work training, role
and occupation. A Centrelink worker who grows sick of unfairly breaching
people, sees private development intruding on previously cheap
accommodation for homeless people, spends lunchtimes with his co-workers,
establishing a housing cooperative that creates affordable accommodation,
and takes over one of the houses that was up for development.
The point I want to make is that these strategies and activities like that
of the Bunbury social entrepreneurs, that we have previously thought of as
being marginal to say the work of a social worker or an economic
development agency are now centre stage. The things that we did in our
lunch times, need to be what we need to be funded to be doing full time.
In Susan Kenny’s text book on community development the sort of
cooperatives she envisioned were peripheral to the market economy, for
example, food cooperatives which may supplement the choices from the local
supermarket with affordable, better quality produce, the Womens Refuge,
the Housing Coop. The challenge we have now is to go beyond these models
to create cooperatives and enterprises that are not a supplement to a
market economy but that create alternative economic opportunities, an
intermediate labour market and pathways from the marginal and
displaced economies and regions back into the real economy. We have to be
about using the large sums of money we have invested in social wage
institutions into the job of creating a social enterprise state. I am also
uncomfortable with this phrase community development worker because it can
never be the social worker that brings about community development it has
to be the collective power of the community that makes community
development possible.
If you imagine our million or more unemployed people we need to create
100,000 new enterprises each employing ten new people with a living wage.
To contemplate such a challenge we need to again embrace the processes and
lessons of the market, of business enterprise, of competent management, of
entrepreneurial behaviour. The other thing we need to do is look
with new eyes on social wage funds and institutions. We need to be looking
at every public institution with new entrepreneurial eyes. What can this
university do to create new enterprises in our community? How can we use
this school ground and building to create an opportunity or add value?
What can we do with this hospital budget to ensure more work in the local
community that will in turn create a virtuous cyle of more healthy living?
What can we do with the maintenance budget of a public housing department?
What role can TAFE play in directly supporting a community business with
skill development?
The surprising thing about this is that I think it is beginning to happen.
Moreover if you follow the George Negus discussion with Australia round
the country, the revolution is not being started by politicians, in fact
they still don’t get it, it is not being started by social workers who
often are carted off to hospital with heart attacks after persisting with
the text book role of community development officer or who have to be
treated with manic depression after working in Centre Link for too long,
nor is it being started by academics who still want to defend the public
system and want more and more funding even though they don’t in the
hearts know it is possible; it is not being started by professionals. The
ground swell is coming from the communities themselves. Furthermore what
they want is precisely to get their hands on the share of the $123 billion
that is currently being spent on the social wage in those communities.
They want to leverage the social wage, infrastructure and public
enterprise spending so that it can make a difference in their communities.
They want to spend it differently and use it more efficiently,
appropriately and directly to solve their problems.
V
In the final part of this talk I want to mention a number of examples of
the beginnings of the new social enterprise state that we need to build
together and which I hope that in your day to day work you will support
and become linked up with.
Linking Up
The first is the extraordinary Social Entrepreneurs Network (SEN). The
term social entrepreneur seems to capture the need for a new synergy
between our economy and our society. The very fact that this network has
been formed in six months with an interest group of over 600 spanning the
nation, a core membership of 100s, that we have just appointed a Chief
Executive Officer and that there are now links in every state, dinners
being held in cities and regions that meet to share lessons and ideas and
a website of case studies and tools is being developed is testament to the
fact that something new is going on. The idea of SEN is that it will teach
you how to set up a community bank, a jobs cooperative, a regional
economic recovery based on art, or festivals or it will create a mentoring
system that will help you develop your idea. Vern Hughes at Hotham City
Mission in
Melbourne
is currently the central point of contact. It is envisioned also that the
SEN network will link up with the
UK
’s Community Action Network which is better developed and networks over
1000 innovative community projects and people. So I hope you will keep
track and even consider being a part of the Social Entrepreneurs Network.
Town
Entrepreneurship
The second is a homegrown example of great hope and interest. The idea of
town enterpreneurship, small town renewal and learning cities and regions
often rely on the creation of enterprise, value and sustainability from in
Charles Ledbeater’s phrase ‘thin air’. On Saturday I had the good
fortune to attend Balingup’s Medieval Afayre. Some of you may have seen
it noted on the local television news or have heard about it on the
grapevine. In a town of 525 people 400 people are involved in the creation
of this festival which brings over 5000 people to the community. The
concept was developed by a passionate local Ros Benson who wanted to do
something that would bring out the creative spirit of the community and
would provide an economic base for the town. The Medieval Afayre has
transformed August, previously Balingup’s slowest economic month of the
year, into Balingup’s best month of the year in more ways than one. It
really is inspirational when you realise that from just one good idea a
transformative process can emerge that incorporates the social capital of
the community, the business and employment needs of the local economy and
a touch of creativity and entrepreneurship that benefits all and enables a
small town to survive and thrive into the future. In direct dollar terms
on Saturday I estimate that about $15,000 in direct income
went to the local community chest and about $200,000 of trading took
place.
All over the country local economies and towns are fighting back from the
effects of deregulation, privatisation and competition policy through the
development of farmers markets, new industries and creative approaches to
development, but it is important to note that Balingup’s initiative did
not emerge from a vacuum. Jane Manning coordinator of the Small Town Self
Help Program of the Department of Education and Training has been as much
a civil entrepreneur supporting creative development of small towns in the
South West as Ros Benson and her neighbours have been creative and
entrepreneurial in developing their festival. Similarly the work of social
workers such as Heather Walford and Kieran Merrit working out of
Edith
Cowan
University
on initiatives such as a South West Community Bank are important
contributors to these new initiatives and are also exemplary of the kind
of new role I am talking about for social workers. I note that Jim Ife,
who is to follow me at this conference, argues this way, and Jim’s book
on Community Development, is a theoretical and pedagogical support for
this type of work and strategy. There is also now an established set of
practices and ideas that have emerged, most notably through the public
intellectual efforts of
Western Australia
’s Peter Kenyon. I would highly recommend to you the Small Town Renewal
overview and case studies as well as the Manual for Small Town Renewal
developed by Peter Kenyon and his colleagues for the Rural Industries
Research and Development Corporation.
Kenyon and his colleagues document 14 case studies of town
entrepreneurship. In each case significant initiatives and enterprises
grow up as catalysts for development and the crucial ingredient is the
participation, imagination, energy and enthusiasm of the community. The
fact that all of these initiatives emerge in communities that were marked
for death after dairy deregulation, the closure of a timber mill, or meat
packing plant or one of our traditional Australian agricultural
industries, is all the more significant. In Balingup it is the Small Farm
Field Day and the Medieval Afayre, in Beechworth in Victoria it was Tom
O’Toole’s Beechworth Bakery, in Boonah, Qld it included the
hosting of the Tom Quilty Endurance Ride, best practice rural enterprises,
cooperatives and agricultural tourism, in Burra, South Australia it was
turning a unique architectural heritage into a creative tourist strategy,
in Coolah NSW it was street scaping, its Telecentre and a new sense of
civic pride; in Deloraine Tasmania it was a series of creative initiatives
including the inspirational Giant Steps Educational Centre which was
established by a committee of parents and community supporters who refused
to accept the lack of services for children with autism spectrum disorder,
in Donald, Victoria it was the development of a strong housing development
policy and business development policy; in Culargambone, NSW it was
the development of a Rural Transaction Centre which offers a range of
banking, postal, internet and shopping services, in Harrow, Victoria it
was the town’s nocturnal sound and light show which brought an extra
annual $200,000 into what locals described as a “two keg a week town”,
in Hyden, WA it was creating a synergy around the towns tourist attaction
Wave Rock; in Kulin WA it was the formation of a community bank, the
creation of the Tin Horse Highway and the Kulin Bush Race Event, in
Mitchell Queensland it was the development of an extended Caravan Park and
Great Artesian Spa, in Oatlands, Tasmania it was the creation of the
Central Tasmanian Community College as a skill development centre for
young people which goes beyond the traditional boundaries of training and
in the words of its principal has “a role to play in both the future
economic viability of the student and the society”., in Tunby Bay South
Australia it was town beautification, the creation of a telecentre and the
development of a marina.
The next steps to be made with town entrepreneurship is to try to
incorporate the lessons and ideas of individual initiatives into an
ongoing and growing strategy. The idea of learning towns and regions and
creative cities are the way in which we need to move forward with these
individual initiatives. How can we use, for example, a Festival as a
learning experience which leads to new festivals, education, enterprises,
values and knowledge? This is of course about turning one-off events into
industries and long term benefits. It is all about creating more
sophisticated networks of enterprises that can sustain greater numbers of
people and lead to wider community and social benefits. All these
challenges are now, in my opinion, the central businessof the social work
of the future.
When we cast our gaze at the social wage that fund of $195 billion we need
to be thinking creatively about how to use that money more creatively. So
let me now mention a number of social enterprises that point to the
future.
Health
Andrew Mawson and the Bromley by Bow community’s healthy living centre
in the East End of London is an example of how communities can take
back control of social services that are controlled through the
programmatic and non-community focused departments of government. The
death of a woman on a housing estate led residents to take back, the
equivalent of our social wage resources, back into their own control and
to create their own centre in which doctors and health workers pay the
community rent for conducting their business and which in turn enable an
enormous variety of truly healthy and community energizing activities to
take place. The whole way in which this model evolved is the antithesis of
the way in which say a hospital or community is established in many of our
urban and rural settings. In the Bromley by Bow case it was the community
that designed the health centre and it was health professionals and a
variety of other creative agencies that were consulted in its formation.
The community, and the very best of the private and public sector, were
combined in unique and creative ways, that create opportunities for
learning, earning, living and creativity.
Social Security,
Public Housing and Training
Alan Sinclair and the Wise Group of
Scotland
have created
Glasgow
’s 40th biggest company,
Europe
’s largest environmental training company and what they call an
intermediate labour market by turning passive social welfare dollars into
a dynamic value creating business. The Wise Group began with a 10,000
pound council grant and with the use of the maintenance budget for
Glasgow’s public housing estates they have basically created training
companies that give unemployed people work to fix up and insulate dank and
cold houses, fix up the backblocks of public housing by turning them into
gardens, they have created training companies to secure the safety of
houses in areas vulnerable to crime. Alan’s training is not in social
work, but as a master of business management.
Disabilities
Vic ki Meadows, Mandy Sheppard, Carmel Flavell founded the Families in
Partnership cooperative for children with an intellectual disabilities
because they wanted an agency that would work with professionals not just
for one or two years, but across the entire life of their children. FIP is
now three years into a 65 year long planning cycle which is about turning
their community into the most inclusive possible of children with and
intellectual disability and which will support them for the rest of their
lives.
Public Housing
Brian Murnane in Claymore turned
Sydney
’s supposed worst street into a place where there is now a queue to come
and live. Again he gave back control of the development of resources to
the community and he invested his energy into the creation of small and
modest infrastructure such as community gardens which created a sense of
spirit and ownership. Brian’s quest continues and he is now trying to
take over the Claymore shopping centre to make it a hub of new community
enterprise and initiatives. It is so necessary in the outer suburbs of our
cities to transform the passive shopping centres that are synonomous with
organisations like Coles-Myer and Woolworths and to turn them into
enterprise hubs and places of hope. At the moment in many of our cities
the dream cul de sacs and suburbs of the 1950s are like geographical
padded cells, dispensing just enough welfare dollars and infrastructure to
keep people passified but not enough to allow people to get back into the
real economy.
Indigenous
Communities
Noel Pearson’s Cape York Partnership is about creating relationships
between indigenous communities and private and public agencies to
invigorate indigenous communities that have been economically un-developed
by the impact of the Western social welfare state and socially devastated
by the impact of an epidemic of grog, drugs and violence. Pearson has
articulated a range of strategies including: an enterprise development
fund and start up group, a concerted campaign against grog and drugs in
indigenous communities, I want to conclude this talk with some of Noels
words. In a recent talk in
Sydney
he said: “..the challenge to transform the role of government in the
lives of aboriginal people is no small challenge. There are huge
ideological barriers and barriers of vested interest to reforming the role
of government. We need to transform the real valuable resources and role
of government into something that helps our people. We need a retreat of
the initiative of government but not the resources and we need a
transformation of resources … if we really want progressive change, and
if we want social progress then you’re going to have to face up to the
limitations of our previous thinking …We’re going to have to challenge
those ideologies that we’ve grown comfortably with and that appeased us
and made us feel good …. I urge those who favour social progress to
understand that the situation for indigenous people on
Cape York
has not improved. Huge opportunities have been wasted. Lots of young
people … have fallen by the wayside and so I hope that the ideas in the
“
Enabling
State
” provide some signposts for what government needs to do, what the
community needs to do in order to move towards
genuine social progress.
I think Noel’s challenge on Cape York is a profound one, but in the
communities of mainstream suburban, and other parts of rural and regional
Australia it is no less a challenge. I hope that these words today will at
least cause you to begin a critical questioning of the grant tenets of
social work and that we will see more social workers intervening,
creating, altering and supporting communities in the marketplace.
Background Reading
Jane Manning, “
Small
Town
Development Two Case Studies”, South West Development Authority,
Bunbury, W.A., Jan 1994
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