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DSW split into three business units

Government welfare reforms separated the Department of Social Welfare into three standalone units.

The New Zealand Community Funding Agency was established as one of the key ‘operating businesses’ of the Department of Social Welfare and helped ensure that voluntary welfare services funded by the government were ‘accessible and appropriate to the needs of their client groups and complement services provided by the state’.[i] The newly-created CFA came to the view that, for the purposes of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act 1989 at least, only traditional kin-based groupings of Māori were in Treaty partnership with the Crown.[ii] In 1992, the Maatua Whangai programme then operating within the Children and Young Persons Service finished and the money used in that programme was transferred to the CFA for Māori service provision.[iii]

The welfare of youth was the focus of the New Zealand Children and Young Persons Service whose first general manager was Robin Wilson.[iv] This agency had 90 family homes compared to 150 in 1982.[v] In 1992 there were almost 11,000 child abuse cases and investigations, compared to 2,131 in 1987/8 and more than 6500 the following year.[vi]Robin Wilson told the Minister of Social Welfare that ‘the state cannot be a family for a child’.[vii]

The New Zealand Income Support Service was the business unit of the Department of Social Welfare responsible for the delivery of income support.[viii]

Related links

Client consultation - social services competencies project DSW bicultural approach Maatua Whangai - a new direction The cost of welfare options and cost containment

Footnotes

  1. [i] go to main content Margaret Tennant, The Fabric of Welfare: Voluntary Organisations, Government, and Welfare in New Zealand, 1840–2005, 2007, p. 195.
  2. [ii] go to main content Wai 414, p. 5.
  3. [iii] go to main content Wai 414, p. 59.; Wai 2417, p. 170.
  4. [iv] go to main content Bronwyn Dalley, Family Matters, Wellington, 1998, p. 263.
  5. [v] go to main content Dalley, 1998, p. 336.
  6. [vi] go to main content Lindsay Mitchell, ‘Child Abuse and Family Structure: What is the Evidence Telling Us?’, Auckland, 2016, p.14.
  7. [vii] go to main content Labrum, Bronwyn, ‘Negotiating an Increasing Range of Functions: Families and the Welfare State’, in Bronwyn Dalley and Margaret Tennant, eds., Past Judgement, Dunedin, 2004, p. 157.
  8. [viii] go to main content Department of Social Welfare, 1993, p. 101.
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