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Revisioning the community as provider: restructuring New Zealand's social services

New Zealand, Aotearoa the land of the long white cloud to its Maori people, is known for its spectacular scenery, rugged terrain and its history of progressive social legislation. However, during the Fourth Labour government’s term of office from 1984-90, New Zealand’s social policy was dramatically altered through the rejection of long-held assumptions governing the role of the state in the provision of social welfare services. These services traced their beginnings to New Zealand’s welfare provisions of the late nineteenth century. They were expanded by provisions initiated under the First Labour government during the depression years of the 1930s and subsequently translated into law in a series of noteworthy legislation. The legislation, based on a strong sense of collective responsibility, was aborted by the Fourth Labour government’s massive restructuring of New Zealand’s social policy. The restructuring was based on welfare society principles which emphasized the community as provider of social welfare services. Initial formulations of a ’welfare society’ denoted industrial societies with highly developed universal services with few ’distinctions between welfare and other types of social institutions’ (Wilensky and Lebeaux, 1965: 14). The welfare society Wilensky and Lebeaux envisioned was the culmination of extensive development of institutionalized welfare programmes. More recent conceptualizations (for example, George and Wilding, 1987; Johnson, 1987) stand in direct contrast to this early formulation. Currently, the term ’welfare society’ denotes a high degree of individual responsibility and rejects extensive collective responsibility, particularly as