There is a lot of rhetoric circulating, suggesting that we, yes we, can identify solutions as citizens of the nation, to the pending...its getting scary allegedly....crisi in funding of the services that matter to people who want a quality of life lipping at the plimsol line of decency. The issue is about the sincerity of the offer...based on a rather childish "see if you can solve it then!!" attitude by power brokers. That offer made without any information, data, resource information, pending policy development and so on...so hence its not a real offer. And then each succesive scream through the written media about "dont cut my service, funding etc" falls short of challenging the author to identify what they would cut instead of their, granted, precious project, product etc. So what does sincere and committed dialogue, consultation and consequent action actually look like? The Standards Council has a small role in reminding community and youth workers that we need to avoid this rhetoric, getting trapped in a symbolic gesture approach to engagement asking what people think about this and that policy, idea and so on - "you have 5 minutes to respond - it took us 2 years to develop...and we have published it in a nice document by the way!" So is anyone listening to your, our, responses when they ask for your ideas? Never mind "you cant handle the truth..you cant even handle the question".We need to reflect where we are at with this in our daily work because with or with out knowing this we could be part opf the issue and not the beginnings of shaking up a solution.
