Child Welfare in Victoria

The purpose of this paper has two major aspects. First, it provides an opportunity of presenting an overview of some of the innovations and recent developments in the field of Child Welfare in Victoria. Second, it poses a challenge to make some comment on what these developments might actually add up to; in other words, it begs the question of whether one can make some sort of sense of what is going on. When you are working “in the field”, or as we would say with equally telling imagery in the U.K., “at the coal face”, you cannot always be aware of the implications and ramifications of what you are doing. True, the managers and the planners of your operations must, and do, give thought to this, but for the majority of us, beset by the problems of everyday work routines, it is hard to lift one's glance beyond the eye-level plane; what is more, one is too exhausted to read the unabating volume of reports and articles and statements that are around.