Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

When I left off previously I was articulating the Greens’ concern about the combined impact of Welfare to Work with potential reduction in payments of child support and the lack of modelling of the interaction between these two. The Greens are also concerned about unpaid child care and how this has been accounted for in the proposed new formula. The proposed new child support formula does not adequately recognise the costs of unpaid child care. The cost is overwhelmingly borne by resident parents who are typically, but of course not exclusively, single mothers. The formula recognises that the financial costs of older children are higher but does not recognise that the unpaid care responsibilities of younger children are greater. It is argued that ignoring unpaid care creates a bias in the system, predominantly against women who provide the majority of unpaid care.

The opportunity costs of providing care include forgone earnings, super and career advancement, loss of access to training and professional development, and reduced social networks. Unpaid care is accounted for, in part, under the existing child support formula by the different self-support component for resident and non-resident parents. This no longer exists under the new formula, supposedly as part of the move from a one-home to a two-home model.

The argument put forward by Professor Parkinson when further questioned on this issue was that financial provision for unpaid care was mainly made in the way that the Family Court assigned assets on separation. He effectively implied that this dealt with the issue, and hence it was of lesser or no concern in the child support calculation. However, this provision in effect only applied where there were significant assets to divide—meaning that this only benefited divided families who had significant assets prior to separation. Therefore, the proposed arrangements will impact more unfairly on those on low incomes who have few or no assets.

In addition, it assumes that settlement happens as soon as couples separate. It may take years to come to court and arrange a settlement. In the meantime people do not have access to resources; sometimes they do not even have access to the family home. We acknowledge that measuring the monetary value of unpaid care has always been a problem for policy makers. We believe that more work needs to be done in this area.

Unpaid care is emerging as an important policy issue in other areas. I refer for example to aged care, where pressures are growing via an ageing population. There is a wealth of contemporary analysis around these issues which we believe could have better informed the task force’s deliberations. We need to balance the opportunity costs of unpaid care against the ongoing and future benefits of caring for children and, through them, the future wellbeing and productivity of the nation. We believe that ongoing monitoring and evaluation of this process is absolutely critical if we are to ensure that this new formula and Child Support Scheme are successfully implemented.

I would like to touch now on enforcing compliance. We welcome the long overdue enhancement of the Child Support Agency’s compliance capabilities, which will better enable the agency to pursue non-resident parents who fail to provide any support for their children. The fact that only half of all non-resident parents meet their child support obligations in full and on time is a longstanding problem. We welcome the introduction of a minimum payment for parents who deliberately minimise their income to avoid paying child support. In his submission the task force chair, Professor Parkinson, expressed concern that these provisions of the bill may need to be strengthened to remove doubt. To this end we will put forward some amendments, which have been circulated, following suggestions made by Professor Parkinson.

We also support some of the proposed changes to deal with the current problems with defaulters. The proposed changes will allow parents to pursue unpaid child support through the courts. We believe this is a significant improvement, provided there are sufficient resources for legal support and that there is equity of access. However, we believe there is an emerging problem now that the agency has started to provide some resources to pursue nonpayment, and is serving notices on non-resident parents—in this case, mostly fathers—for large amounts of unpaid child support. Sometimes this is extending over a lengthy period of time. But there are occasions when this is starting to generate conflict, and I think this needs to be adequately addressed. That is not to say that we do not believe that these defaulting parents do not need to be chased, but we need to recognise that it can cause conflict when people are starting to be pursued after many years.

We also have some concerns about shared care agreements. While the shared care provisions are in some ways an improvement on the existing system, we believe there are some potential problems. It was identified in the evidence presented to the committee that some of the shared care arrangements are tenuous and that the most likely outcome over time is for slippage to take place, whereby the child often ends up living with one parent—usually the mother. Some of the shared care agreements end up enforcing a particular set of financial arrangements while at the same time the percentage of care with the non-resident parent often drops off considerably. The current arrangements seem to lock that in. We will propose an amendment to the bill that addresses this matter, so that arrangements can be reviewed and they are not locked in permanently. Again, that amendment has been circulated in the chamber.

In conclusion, I still have some reservations about the government’s decision to proceed with this bill without proper provision to protect low-income families who may lose income as a result of these changes. I am disappointed that the government failed to model and to qualify the likely impacts of the bill on existing child support recipients. Some significant issues were raised in the report by the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs which, disappointingly, were not put forward explicitly as recommendations and subsequently have not been addressed by the government as amendments.

As I said, we have developed some amendments which we have circulated in the chamber. These relate to issues identified by Professor Parkinson, the task force chair, and discussed by the committee. I understand there is a willingness on the part of government to consider these recommendations. As I said at the beginning of my speech some weeks ago, we do support the need for reform of the child support system, so we will be supporting this bill with the amendments that I have circulated. I believe they address some of the concerns that were expressed to the community affairs committee inquiry. I believe the amendments will strengthen the bill. However, as I said, the Greens will be supporting this bill because we believe that there is a need for change in the child support area. We believe that the bill represents a step ahead, even though we have articulated some concerns with some aspects of the approach that has been taken.