Partnership Oz: 'Managing Out' Public Essay

OZChild's Board of Directors is actively involved in support of the organization through stewardship of a network of professional contacts as potential donors, and in liaison with the Australian Government in support of the agency's mission and programs. Operations expenses are of course included in the OZChild Strategic Plan designed toward sustainable growth and maintenance of the agency's position within the national and international social services community as a leader in service provision and policy advocacy.

One could effectively argue that where Ife's Australian Government and its utilitarian reductions left off, the growth sector of NPO social services, and especially social work advanced its role in management of a critical national public sector formerly dictated by traditional constraints of the social welfare state. If the overall aim is to interpret the outcomes to the transformation of public administration by way of the "managing out" phenomenon, then OZChild and other agencies in consortium of service to the Australian national community are evidence of the direction of this shift.

Capacity building discussion in the NPO area is substantive to this reconfiguration of oversight, and it is probably safe to say that common directive within both funding and policy mandates is proof that this tendency will continue as macro and micro economic channels converge based on strictures to tax-based control over public projects. Conversely, partnered inclusion of NPO and NGO organizations into a network of funding, legal advocacy, and knowledge sharing, not to mention evidence-based expansion of service delivery points to the truth in Payne's perspective, where these trends are also attributed to "the wider development of localities, areas, regions and countries."

At the outset, the discussion of the field of social work practice as a political vehicle of complicity with market forces is but one theoretical consideration contributory to a range of thought on the role and effect that social work policy is having on the shape of public administration in Australia. Tacit consent by state employees when jobs were eliminated as a result to "managing out" of seeming replication in oversight has yet to be measured as in aggregate representation. It would be truly interesting to review statistical reporting on the transformation of the Australian public welfare system, as those "extra" hands were removed from the day-to-day operations of social service administration. This is not to say that new models of applied practice did not supplant some of those structural factors, but much of the emphases on social and community development and on empowerment and advocacy is perhaps most relevant to developments in the NPO sector.This is keen insight into the brilliance of social workers no matter where they might practice; in their coherent response to legislative social policy and family law transformations on behalf of clients rather than a feat of political praxis (Payne, 2005).

Merely calling attention to state fiscal policy in relation to the social welfare state, hides other forces taking place in Australia, as the national economy continues to flex options as a result of globalization and its capital and labor flows into and out of the country. Countering what Ife (1997) warned was the 'wrath of the market,' impinging upon adequacy in public administration of social work, the articulation of dissent by former government managers in constructive service to Australia's new system of NPO partnerships came a time when citizens wanted alternatives to state control; express compact with a 'duty to a reasonable standard of care' through public-private partnership.

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