KEY POINTS:
Full funding for non-government agencies to provide "essential" social services is the logical end point of a long-term trend towards socialising what were once family responsibilities.
It used to be so simple. When parents, grandparents, siblings and cousins all lived within easy reach of each other, the extended family was able to step in if any member of the family wasn't coping.
As society became urbanised, the extended family became stretched and what used to be called the child welfare division of the Social Welfare Department increasingly had to step into the breach when families needed help.
Massey University's Professor Mike O'Brien remembers that when he started as a child welfare officer 30 years ago, the division was "not just a care and protection and youth offending agency" as Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS) is today.
"We did a whole lot of other things as well," he says.
Broadly, they did preventive work to stop families falling over the cliff, not just picking up the children who fell into abuse, severe neglect or offending.
Things have got a lot more difficult in these past 30 years, for several reasons.
First, the fragmentation of the extended family that started with urbanisation has become much greater.
Relatives may now live not just in different towns but in different countries. Jobs are much less stable and families often can't put roots down anywhere for long.
Nuclear families themselves have been fractured by the contraceptive pill and the shift of women into the paid workforce, freeing women from unhappy marriages. By the age of 20, a third of Pakeha kids and more than half of all Maori kids have lived in sole-parent households.
Second, what security remained through full employment, national wage awards and a generous welfare state was shattered in the 1980s and early 90s, when import protection and wage awards were abolished and welfare benefits were cut.
Third, partly because of these social and economic pressures, antisocial and criminal behaviour really have got worse. The crime rate jumped from about two crimes per 100 people per year in the first 70 years of the 20th century to peak at about 11 crimes a year in the early 1990s, before falling back a bit in the past decade.
Crime and antisocial behaviour have always been primarily a phenomenon of youth, so many of the offenders have landed up at the door of CYFS.
And fourth, the liberation of women has made society much less tolerant of family violence and neglect.
Notifications to CYFS of children needing care and protection have trebled in the past decade alone, from 23,246 in 1996-97 to 75,326 in the year to last June.
The state agency simply hasn't been able to cope. In the past three years it has responded by developing a policy called "differential response", which formally came into force nationally last October.
Its aim now is for CYFS itself to take on only the most urgent cases, while it refers other families with less urgent needs to non-government agencies.
Although the churches and a few other agencies such as IHC have always been there, the number of such agencies has risen in the past 20 years as the state has increasingly looked to the community for help.
The extra funding Helen Clark announced this week will be shared out among 700 of them. But until now, the money has lagged behind the extra workloads the agencies have taken up.
Many have not had significant funding increases for 10 years.
At last, the new policy means that society, through the Government, has accepted that it needs to pay collectively for the services that have been devolved to non-state agencies.
Surprisingly, it appears they will be paid directly by the Government, instead of contracted to local CYFS offices.
The details of who gets what are still to be sorted out, but this is a historic change.
Henceforth, all taxpayers will have an interest in how these community-based agencies spend our money.
