Dealing with an Impoverished Discourse: ‘Front Door’ Social Work in Tasmania, Australia

This paper is based on a Government of Tasmania report which deals with an evaluation of the first year of a new measure that was introduced as part of a government programme concerned with the ‘redesign’ of the child and family welfare service. This redesign represented the culmination of almost two decades of unsuccessful attempts at resolving the difficulties associated with the ‘Wicked Problem’ posed by the Anglosphere ‘child protection’ services. The new measure consisted of the implementation of new conversational procedures in a reorganised ‘Front Door’ as a more efficient and effective means of diverting families away from family audit/inspection/regulation procedures into Family Support programmes. The conversational methodology was originally developed from observational and video ethnographic research in Western Australia, Europe and Scandinavia by the author of this paper. This evaluation of the new measure compares selected aspects of Departmental performance during the year before and the year after its implementation. It omits any reference to Indigenous people since the data supplied by the Tasmanian Government for this evaluation did not include any items on Indigenous status.