States confront grave credibility challenges when designing and delivering redress programmes. These programmes involve the state judging if, and how, it will redress its own offences. The resulting lack of independence makes it difficult for states to be credible providers. Reflecting on lessons drawn from practical experience, this chapter thematises survivor participation and choice as it explores how flexible and survivor-focussed strategies can address the emergent challenges.

Australia’s system of human services early in the twenty-first century has built on the long-standing combination of service delivery by government departments and NGOs, although over time it has become an increasingly complex and multi-layered system, as described in Chapter 3. This complexity is evident in the way funding and contractual relationships between the state and NGOs have changed, and continue to change, impacting human services professionals, the agencies in which they work and ultimately the end users of services. This chapter covers funding models underpinning social policy implementation and the implication of these for NGOs and their workers, the impermanence of many government priorities and consequent funding for policy delivery and the ways in which this impacts NGOs, the implications for NGOs of governments’ adoption of new public management principles, contractual relationships between the state and NGOs as a precursor to more effective negotiation of contracts when working as a practitioner, and the ways in which the client–worker connection is affected by the terms of the state–NGO contractual funding relationship.