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

I rise as a member of the Labor Party, a party which is supporting the Child Support Legislation Amendment (Reform of the Child Support Scheme—New Formula and Other Measures) Bill 2006. I concur with the comments of my colleague the Chief Government Whip in his contribution to this debate. I also acknowledge that sitting in the gallery we have Barry Williams, who has devoted more than a decade to trying to establish changes to child support and who in fact served on the very first advisory committee under Justice Fogarty when the legislation was first introduced. It must be a pleasing moment for him. I acknowledge the personal contribution that he has made to the legislation on behalf of his members.

Let me be a little ungenerous and talk about the member for Herbert. His contribution was juvenile. He suggested that the opposition were making carping amendments. The reality is that we are not assured of what the impacts of these significant and major changes are going to be. It is quite reasonable for an opposition to want to place on record its concern about the fact that it has not been possible to get all the modelling information and ascertain what the impacts of these changes are going to be. Let me reiterate that I and my colleagues on this side of the House are supporting this bill.

I would like to acknowledge the role that the Chief National Party Whip, Kay Hull, played when she chaired the Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs that delivered the report Every picture tells a story. The committee demonstrated the best traditions of this parliament: government and opposition members on a parliamentary committee working to a crushing deadline to bring down a very decent report. In particular, on my side I would like to acknowledge the roles that the deputy chair, the honourable member for Fowler, and the honourable member for Throsby played on that committee. It was a very powerful report and it has led to a number of changes.

I want to make the point that we can be at risk of crowing that we have things totally right. In this area, there are always three pillars that you have to operate under. The first is family law, the second is child support and the third is counselling. These days, it is very hard to provide pre-relationship counselling, basically because so many of our fellow Australians are choosing not to have either a religious or a civil marriage ceremony and thus the logical intervention point for counselling does not exist for all of us. But I cannot stress enough how important it is—not only at the beginning of a relationship or marriage but during it, in the middle of it and at the end of it—for people to feel comfortable about seeking counselling and advice. The men of Australia never doubt the value of getting a second opinion about their car or changing a builder, a carpenter or whatever, but it is so hard for so many to talk about difficulties in relationships.

Without going to the detail of the bill, my party’s position is that we support the legislation but are committed to a Senate review to see how it goes. Personally, I am of the view that we should do more than that. Twelve months after the operation of not only stage 2 and stage 3 but the whole package we should have an independent review to see how it is working and to see whether it is achieving the things that we all hope it will. Notwithstanding the fabulous work that Professor Parkinson has done, it should not be Professor Parkinson who does that independent review.

I say to the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough: I think that this is really worth while. If I look back at the history of the introduction of the Child Support Scheme, I think it was a major mistake to have Justice Fogarty—good man that he was—who played such a key role in the design of the scheme, overseeing how it was implemented. Not unexpectedly in such a radical shake-up, he felt, and the review indicated, that all was working well. And we know from history that, sadly, all was not working well.

Let me also put it on the record that in the mid-1990s there was a House of Representatives review of child support, and one of the key recommendations was to try to move away from the overseas formulas that were inherent in the Australian scheme and to try to establish an Australian cost of living study. I am not saying that the Howard government did not do it; I think that the Howard government would be as disappointed as I was that that review has really not stood the test of time. The Parkinson-NATSEM studies really now, for the first time, give us something solid in Australia to work off, but I express my disappointment that we have lost a decade through not having had that proper and vital bit of information.

This bill introduces not stage 2 of the changes but stage 2 and stage 3. Stage 2 introduces an independent review of the Child Support Agency decisions by the Social Security Appeals Tribunal. I have said in this place on a number of occasions that we need a proper independent review. Under administrative law, the internal review established by the Child Support Agency—which was a welcome change from what had operated previously—was not a proper independent review under administrative law. This change actually recognises it. I might remind honourable members that, prior to the initiative that was started by my good friend Con Sciacca, when he was parliamentary secretary, if you wanted a review you had to go to the Family Court. So, as flawed as that internal review was, it was a huge improvement. But this now sets the record straight, and those people who are subject to the Child Support Agency now have a proper internal review.

Stage 2 broadens the powers of the court to ensure that child support obligations are met. One of the great difficulties of the scheme has been that often, in certain situations, there are people who can drive a horse and buggy through their obligations. I have always suggested that, when you are introducing fairness on one side, you have to make sure that you have got some draconian legislation so that solicitors and accountants who are advising their clients will not want to run the risk of being found to be trying to avoid their obligations. I particularly welcome the provision in stage 2 that allows separating parents more time to work out parenting arrangements before their family tax benefit is affected—or maybe perhaps even reconciling. I do not see that as a failure, should that occur.

Stage 3 is the one with the ‘big bang’ changes. What is particularly significant about these changes is that it is not only a change of the formula but a proper work-through of the formula plus family benefits and their interaction, and it is very welcome. I welcome the changes about income and overtime from secondary employment. I also welcome the changes to the treatment of parents with stepchildren when calculating the liability. I often remember the brother of a resident in St Clair, Mr Forno. He was happily married, but his wife had five children by a first marriage, and they were not getting a zack in terms of child support. There was no way that the support he was giving his stepchildren was being taken into account under the formula. That was particularly absurd.

Another absurdity occurs where children are treated differently—that is, children are valued differently depending on the primacy of the relationship they come from. Under the old formula, more money would go to support children of the first family than to a new child in the second family. That absurd situation has now been rectified with more than an attempt to treat each child fairly. The honourable member for Macquarie talked about pressure on second families. I always remember that, when it was publicly announced that I was chairing the review into child support in the 1990s, a woman came to see me from Merrylands, of all places. She really quizzed me about whether this was going to be a serious attempt to deal with the difficulties of child support, and I tried very hard to assure her that that was the case.

By and large, the report was a very good one. My particular tragedy was that it was not implemented by the Labor Party government at the time. The easiest elements of administration were implemented, but the real guts of the report were not. Sadly, before we had completed the report, the financial pressures on that second family were such that the man committed suicide. The lady did not argue that that was the only reason why he committed suicide, but certainly it was a contributing one. The point I am trying to make, I guess, is that it is traumatic enough for people to have a relationship bust-up and go through all the tragedy and trauma of that, but when they repartner it is actually even harder. The rate of failure for second families or second relationships is higher, and we do not want government constructed schemes adding even more pressure on them.

There is another point that I have often observed. I can relay any number of accounts of men who have not wanted to accept their responsibilities properly but when they divorce they tend not to do it in a sort of clinical, lawyer-oriented way. They say, ‘Yes, you can have the car; you should stay in the house,’ et cetera. They often give away some elements of their right to consideration of some property decisions they make in terms of lump-sum payments.

Let me make a couple of other points. The best sorts of agreements are those that parents make between themselves in the best interests of their children—not lawyer imposed, not made in any other way. Part of the pressure that a parliament needs to impose is to try to encourage that to happen. I certainly believe that there is great value in trying to have some intervention in a relationship before it collapses, before it is dead and buried. Ironically, all too often the Commonwealth dollars flow when the last breath has been breathed in the life of a relationship. But there is value in intervention, in trying to get parents to set up good communication as they then tackle their mutual responsibilities with children.

The pre-existing Child Support Scheme was a radical scheme. It was a necessary scheme, but in my view and in that of a number of others it was actually never about the best interests of children. Although that was an objective of the scheme, in its administration it was always more about clawback of Commonwealth dollars than about dollars going to children. It is true that children benefited from the scheme—I am not trying to suggest otherwise, nor that the families the children resided in were not better off absolutely as a result of the scheme. But the pre-existing arrangements were an absolute disgrace. I note that the task force report is called In the best interests of children. I think that always ought to be our focus, not clawback.

In child support there are always three players: both parents and the government. If you make changes, there are always going to be winners and losers; some people are going to pay more and some are going to pay less. I acknowledge that the government, when this is fully implemented, is going to be paying an extra $130 million for the scheme. I welcome that and I support it. It is not possible for us to have a perfect scheme. It is not possible for us to have a scheme and make changes in which there are no losers. So I again make this plea. The Labor Party is committed to having a Senate review of these changes shortly after they come into operation, but it is vital in my opinion to have an independent review 12 months after the operation of stage 3 so we can see what we have got right, we can see who the winners and losers are and, in particular, we can assess whether or not we need to make some adjustments. We should never be afraid of having further independent reviews, because out there in voter land, out there in families, change is a constant. It is always changing. This is about people, it is about children, and we will always need to adjust.

In conclusion, let me make this point. I have been privileged to serve on the Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs, chaired by Kay Hull, the member for Riverina, with the member for Throsby and the member for Fowler. I was also privileged to be added onto the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs when they looked at the family law changes. There is one element that still stands out, begging for us to have a look at it—and that is in no way to diminish what has gone before. It is the amount of money parents still pay on the legal profession. I thought it was—I will not say disgraceful—unhelpful in the extreme when the Attorney-General floated the idea that having a tribunal would cost some $600 million, probably three or four times the current cost of the Family Court. That was absurd. But we can never be satisfied until we see dollars going to children or dollars going to parents re-establishing their lives, rather than dollars going to the legal profession.

As I stand here today, after more than a decade of interest in this, I cannot tell the House or honourable members the quantum that Australian parents have paid, are paying or are likely to pay the legal profession in family law. It is an outrage. There have got to be better ways of doing it. I certainly hope the relationship centres work. I hope they exceed our expectations. But they have not eliminated, in my view, the burden of the huge harvest the legal profession takes from disputing parents. We need to look at a no-frills approach. I have always argued that. Hopefully that will be the subject for legislation on another day. The Labor Party unambiguously supports this legislation and will be voting for it. We have expressed some concerns in the second reading amendment, and I think it was proper that we did so. I hope we will all be able to look back and say that, since the implementation of this legislation, the children of separating families are much better off, as are their parents. (Time expired)

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