Limits of the efficient production state

Weaknesses in the Aotearoa model of state sector reform became widely apparent from the mid-1990s. A narrow focus on the core business of separate government departments undermined intersectoral cooperation. It also tended to obscure the public ownership interest in state services. These issues were highlighted in an influential report prepared for the State Services Commission and Treasury by American public economist Allen Schick (1996). While politically sympathetic to the aims and intentions of market-driven reform, this report highlighted the way in which a preoccupation with short-term efficiency had undermined strategic capacity (Schick, 1996: 53). Efficient ‘output’ delivery needed to be tempered with a focus on desired ‘outcomes’.

The Strengthening Families (SF) programme from 1997 was a response to the silo effect of the efficiency paradigm. It aimed to promote client-centred dialogue and service integration for families with needs spread across a range of services. Independent coordinators were charged with convening SF meetings to facilitate inter-agency dialogue and cooperation. There are echoes here with the more recent children's teams approach envisaged by the ‘White Paper’ on vulnerable children's reforms discussed later in this chapter.

Organisational capacity was a barrier to implementing the SF project at the practice level. The scheme relied on the assumption of intersectoral cooperation without any allocation of personnel resource (beyond the coordinator positions) or any increase in local agency funding. State agencies were all stretched to capacity and, as with the child protection team initiatives of the 1980s, any serious exercise of coercive authority in situations of risk fell, by default, to statutory social workers.

Labour's social development agenda

It is important to contextualise the developing saga of ‘crisis, review and reorganisation’ within the broader economic and political milieu. The late 1990s were witness to something of a turning point in the doctrinaire ‘more market/less government’ agenda associated with the first decade of the neoliberal turn. However, neoliberalism was adapted and modified rather than abandoned in the three-term period of Labour-led government from 2000 to 2009. The political notion of a ‘Third Way’ transitioned mainstream anglophone ‘Labour’ parties into a stance closer to the traditional ‘centre’ of liberal politics (Chatterjee, 1999). It was accepted that the working-class population needed to adapt to the new disciplines that flowed from economic globalisation and that the state had a role in supporting and encouraging this accommodation.