Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I beg your pardon. It is a privilege to follow the honourable member for Fowler, who is the Deputy Chair of the Standing Committee on Family and Human Services. I have recorded in the Hansard on a number of occasions my praise for the tremendous job and for the bipartisan way that its predecessor, the Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs, developed Every picture tells a story, because that is where the genesis of these changes lie. I would like to say two things about the honourable member for Fowler: firstly, she was so conscientious that she insisted on reading every one of those 6,000 submissions. How she did it, I will never know. On every issue that she takes up, she is always a champion of that cause and I thank her for it, as I do other colleagues who served on that bipartisan committee.

I have had a bit of a history in this area, and I particularly welcome this first tranche of changes. It has been difficult to get effective reviews in the areas of family law and child support—and counselling, for that matter. I need to repeat at the outset one of the most important principles that we all subscribe to: that parents must have the children as their first priority, and they would be ours. We need to develop systems, and family relationship centres are one of the outcomes, that will encourage parents to have a productive and constructive dialogue about their children if they cannot have a constructive and productive dialogue in any other area after the dissolution of their relationship or marriage.

It is important for people to see these things moving forward step by step. We cannot solve the problems just by changes to family law and we cannot solve the problems just by changes to child support. There was tremendous time pressure put on that committee, and the area that I thought we did least well in was child support—not because of any lack of motivation or intent. I therefore acknowledge the good work of Professor Parkinson in his report and also the ministerial task force. I want to repeat that the Australian Labor Party supports the changes in this bill and wants a constructive dialogue with the government about further changes that to be implemented.

The honourable member for Fowler referred to non-agency payments. It has been possible for a non-resident parent to pay up to 25 per cent of their child support by way of worthwhile expenditure in favour of their children. This is an extension of five per cent. If you believe that the changes being put in place by this bill and other measures will increase the likelihood of constructive dialogue between separating parents about the needs of their children, this is a very good measure. It first came from a report I was associated with in the mid-1990s. We always had the view that, by agreement, additional amounts of money could be spent directly by the non-residential parent. It is not a means of attacking the authority or undermining the expenditure of the residential parent; it is about reflecting good dialogue and the mutual responsibility that two parents have to their children.

One of the most common requests any committee or member of parliament receives is for some super accounting mechanism that fully accounts for and audits every dollar of expenditure received in child support. Such a system is completely impossible. But I hope that those who are not directly involved in divorce can understand that it is frustrating for a parent to be paying significant amounts of money towards the wellbeing of their children and having absolutely no say in how that money may be spent. I fully support the increase in the non-agency payments to 30 per cent.

I also support the lower cap on child support. In the explanatory memorandum, there is a justification for the change from average weekly earnings to all employees’ average weekly total earnings. This actually results in a lower figure. My disappointment is that, when the cap was originally set at 2.5 per cent of average weekly earnings, there was no capacity for anyone to appeal a decision on the amount of child support, so you then had to take the appeal directly to the Family Court—a superior court more costly for litigants. That is why that original figure was derived. Here I again place on the record my admiration for the former member for Bowman, Con Sciacca, who got that internal review mechanism going in the child support scheme. As flawed as it is, I welcomed it. It was a big change and made a big difference to a lot of people but, once that happened, there was no adjustment to that cap. There is a fair amount of argument and some evidence to suggest that, with very high income earners, not all the child support money goes to the best interests of children. I repeat again something that I am on record as saying: one of the flaws underpinning the initial scheme, and even the scheme today, is the belief that somehow when parents separate they can maintain the same standard of living that the children had. That is just a mathematical nonsense. It can never happen. I support lowering the cap.

There is another measure in this bill that I have long sought regarding the review process that currently exists in the Child Support Agency. As I said, I welcomed it and it was a welcome change. The only thing I disagreed very strongly with was the review not being a proper external review. It has never been a proper external review; it has always been an internal review process. We have lacked a proper external review. If we think that giving citizens the right without the means to challenge these things in the Family Court is a privilege, we are mistaken. That is no right or privilege whatsoever. This legislation sets up the opportunity for matters to be referred to the Social Security Appeals Tribunal. I strongly endorse that. I strongly endorse mechanisms that do not involve parents in outlaying hundreds and thousands of dollars in exercising their appeal rights, and I believe that agencies benefit from proper external review. By the way, I think citizens should have a right to have decisions by those who work diligently in the bureaucracy subject to proper external review. For me, this is a long sought, very welcome change. I hope in the future we will see that it works very efficiently.

Another matter I wish to raise concerns the indexation of the $5 a week in child support that is required of all parents. This originally arose from what I think is a very sound principle—that no parent, no matter what their circumstances, should be free of the obligation to pay child support. Clearly, that presents some problems for those receiving welfare payments, but it is a very important principle which, again, was first articulated back in 1994. There is a lot of criticism of it on the not unreasonable ground that it probably costs more to be collected than the amount of child support received. I am not sure about that—certainly the cost-benefit ratio in such a small amount of child support would not be great, but the principle is worth hanging on to.

To those non-resident parents who have opted to leave work and go onto social welfare as a means of evading their child support obligations, you may feel that you have good grounds for doing that. There may be difficult relations between you and your former spouse or partner, but I, for one, cannot accept, nor do I support, such action. That the amount is being indexed is all to the good, and again I say it should be supported.

I suppose I could say more, but let me just say that the most difficult task that we face in developing formulas for child support is applying it uniformly to everyone. A formula will not suit every case, so we do need some greater flexibility. If we do not have greater flexibility, then as legislators—as members of parliament and as an executive government—we should be prepared from time to time to go out there to voter land, where resident and non-resident parents are, and test how the formula is working. What are its impacts? Are we achieving what we actually set out to achieve or are we creating unintended consequences or hardship? We can all agree about principles, but at the end of the day we have an obligation to ensure that what we have intended is actually happening or, alternatively, we must be prepared from time to time to amend and change. If there is one thing that has been absent—particularly in the area of child support but also, I suspect, in family law—it is a willingness of legislators, members of parliament, to not so much accept that change is needed but to demonstrate the willpower and determination to undertake that change.

Labor will support much of the government’s package in all of this particular legislation, and we will approach the proposed changes in a constructive manner—and I think we have seen that in the debate today. We certainly support encouraging shared parenting and a fair balance in meeting the costs of children’s care and upbringing. As I understand it, there are two more packages that have yet to be presented to the parliament. I look forward to those, but in the end I do hope that lots of people who for a long time have given up hope of any changes will be heartened by this initial package of change. As I say, it is a twin approach. We have to get the family relationship centres up and running—as yet they are not—and there is a whole host of issues around their development, not in a negative sense but in the sense of dealing with problems, gaining accreditation et cetera.

Last but not least, I said that we are taking a bipartisan approach. It came out of a bipartisan committee. But I must say in question time yesterday, when asked a legitimate question about a relationship centre, the Acting Prime Minister could not help but escape from bipartisanship on this issue and give a very partisan response. I hope that members opposite will observe the tradition of a bipartisan approach to this difficult issue that affects so many parents but, even more importantly, so many children.

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