Political location

We are at a critical juncture in relation to the trajectory of the child protection project. The outlook is contested, in the same way that the function of state-sponsored child and family welfare practice has always been disputed. In my view, the future design and development of policy and practice requires a critical analysis of the relationship between child protection and the wider system of liberal capitalism in the settler state of Aotearoa. To some degree, this process is unfolding as this concluding chapter is being penned. There is, as there seemed to be in 1989, an opportunity to construct a world-leading and socially just child protection system. There is a great deal of work to be done but recent developments signpost a possible pathway to this objective.

The foregoing chapters have demonstrated the way in which responses to child and family welfare have been politically configured over time. The ideological rubric of liberal capitalism has tended to set the discursive parameters within which the problem of child maltreatment is defined (Duncan, 2004). Child protection is enmeshed with the relations of power inherent to this economic and political system. It is also connected with related socio-economic disparities that intersect with class, gender and ethnicity. Common-sense understandings about the genesis of social inequality and the relationship between poverty and child protection have shifted as liberal political orthodoxy has moved across the liberal spectrum, from laissez fare capitalism, to the welfare state, and back again. Themes are persistent and recurrent: ‘Since its earliest incarnations, social work has been inextricably bound up with poverty and with the complex and contradictory attitudes towards people living in poverty that have characterised social policy since the late 19th century’ (Warner, 2015: 46).

The fact that damaging structural inequalities are systemically reproduced within the capitalist model of development is an uncomfortable truth for governments across the liberal spectrum. The children and families who come to the attention of the child protection system are drawn predominantly from the frayed and precarious edges of the working class. This insecurity is a function of the economic system, and it is perennially reframed as a problem of individual failing and family morality. It is time, in my opinion, to move beyond this illusion.