Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll just make a few remarks on a couple of aspects of the Family Assistance and Child Support Legislation Amendment (Protecting Children) Bill 2017 and related matters. And I compliment my friend the member for Lindsay on her remarks and the way she so often manages to weave her personal story in a respectful and insightful way and share that while commenting on matters of public policy.

Firstly, in relation to schedule 1, part 1, which makes changes to the length of interim care periods: in one respect this change is, in my view, a step in the right direction, and I want to talk about it a little bit. I'm speaking in particular because a number of constituents in my electorate have over the past 12 to 18 months approached me with their view about the unfair impacts of this current arrangement, limited to 14 to 26 weeks. The current rules provide that where parents are not undertaking care in accordance with the approved care plan they can apply, or the registrar can issue an order, to provide for different amounts of payments for a period of time.

However, I'll quote from some of the correspondence from a constituent. I won't name the constituent. It was said to me that it was agreed that she be named the primary carer of her two children and share that caring responsibility with their father. It was determined that, for one child, living arrangements would be shared between both parents, and the other child would be free to live with either parent as per that child's wishes. Unfortunately, despite the care arrangements being agreed to, the other parent consistently demonstrated a refusal to comply with these court orders from the outset. That necessitated, after attempts to informally resolve the matter, my constituent resorting to taking out contravention proceedings as a 'final resort', in her words. At those proceedings the non-custodial parent was formally warned by the court and agreed to abide by the orders. Actually, I shouldn't say 'non-custodial', as it was a case of shared custody—it was the parent on the other side of the dispute. In return, my constituent agreed to halt proceedings because they were simply seeking an agreement to the orders.

However, putting that aside, a different policy issue that hopefully can be taken up through some of the inquiries kicking off this year is the inability or difficulty of having court orders actually enforced by anyone but the Family Court and the expense. I'll quote my constituent, who said their distress was: 'further compounded through an administrative policy of the Child Support Agency, which calculates support payments based on actual care. While the intention of this policy is well meaning and designed to correct the payments of non-primary-care parents who consistently fail to take up their care obligations, the policy also catches parents that are victims to the other parent taking the child or the children against the court orders and then have the temerity to seek financial support to do so. So, in effect, there's a perverse financial incentive which some non-primary-care parents seem to take advantage of to actually keep the children for more and then seek money for that.' The only avenue presently available to my constituent to have the parenting arrangement enforced is to litigate matters before the Family Court, which, as everyone knows, is an expensive, time-consuming and emotionally distressing process in itself.

The assistant minister, Senator Seselja, eventually wrote back and acknowledged all the facts of the case. There were a number of paragraphs that really repeated my letter back to me, but that was good. He then acknowledged that the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs made a recommendation regarding interim care determinations in its report From conflict to cooperation: inquiry into the Child Support Program. The dates are important: that was tabled in the parliament, here in the House of Representatives, on 20 July 2015. He then provided my constituent with a link to a very long report which probably wasn't that helpful, anyway. The guts of it was that the 14-week period the committee considered does not provide sufficient time for mediation or for prior agreed arrangements to be enforced by a court, which makes sense. It's kind of difficult at the moment to get a hearing in the Family Court and get a matter resolved within 14 weeks.

Somewhat to my surprise, though, when I corresponded back and said, 'It's all very well that you say you've agreed with this, but when might this actually happen?' I got a further letter from Senator Seselja, who said: 'Don't you worry about that. We'll be doing this and there'll be a start date of 1 January 2018.' To the government's credit, the legislation was introduced in September last year. However, this bill has been yet another victim of the badly managed legislative program and has not gotten through in time. I've got a number of letters from ministers saying that this legislation would be in effect on 1 January, but it's not.

Of course, as the member for Griffith would remember, the Prime Minister, when he was at risk of losing control of the House last year, decided to just cancel a week of parliament. It was intimated to the Australian people that there was nothing to do up here except the marriage legislation. Remember, there was nothing to do last year—the House really had no business! The 53 or so bills on the Notice Paper apparently weren't reason enough for us all to come to Canberra and do our jobs.

Ms Butler interjecting—

Yes, indeed. Instead, this is yet another one of those bills that we could have been here debating last year and it could have come into effect by 1 January, helping my constituent and many other non-primary-care parents—or primary-care parents, as the case might be—who are in this situation. Shame on the government for taking the weak option of not negotiating a legislative program for that week that could have cleared out some of the work of the parliament.

I acknowledge in commenting on this clause that these matters are always subject to compromise. It's a very difficult area of life, law and policy. We're balancing competing rights and intense emotions in setting rules to regulate these disputes. Often there are reasonable people with different perspectives on what is right for their family or children. But there are not always reasonable people. There are people who take advantage of loopholes in legislation—in this case, keeping kids for longer than the care order purely for the purpose of them being able to demand extra money. I hope that the revised periods set out in this bill will address the situation and provide a fairer balance, but time will tell. I suppose if they don't then we may need to revisit the matter again.

The second thing I want to raise is the slightly obscure or confusing parts of the bill in relation to changes to the tax assessment and repayment arrangements. I want to put on record to the House one of the more bizarre constituent cases—a different constituent—that I again received late last year, which has been the subject of an unreasonably large amount of correspondence between your predecessor, Minister for Social Services, and the Minister for Human Services and the Assistant Minister for Social Services and myself. It was about a Mr McColl of Wheelers Hill. I can name him here because it was the subject of some quite curious media reports last year. He received a letter from the Department of Human Services' child support agency regarding the recalculation of a historical child support amount. The letter, somewhat to Mr McColl's surprise, advised him that he owed his former wife $2.62 in child support payments for the period between 1 and 30 June 2008. Almost 10 years later, his former wife must have made some minor adjustment to her tax return—nothing to do with him—and out spits a letter saying he owes $2.62. He was particularly surprised to receive this letter considering his son is now 24 years old and is well out of the child support system.

I, of course, was concerned that the Department of Human Services was wasting their time and wasting all the paperwork that no doubt goes on in actively recovering small, near-negligible amounts of money from people who've been out the system—$2.62! Goodness knows how much it cost to produce and post that letter. I thought, 'He wants me to take this up.' I said, 'We could let it go,' but he said: 'No, I want you to pursue it. This is completely ridiculous. It's a complete waste of government money.' So I wrote to the then-Minister for Human Services, the member for Aston, and he responded, 'Yes, it's a bit silly'—that's paraphrasing as he really repeated my letter back to me in very bureaucratic tones—'but my department is required by legislation to collect even small amounts of the assessed rate of child support if the receiving parent has elected for it to be collected on their behalf.' I thought, '$2.62—there are no thresholds, no discretion. That sounds a bit silly.' So I wrote back again and said, 'Well, that's all very nice, Minister, but why is there no administrative threshold or decision-maker discretion in regard to the recovery of negligible debts in such circumstances?' It really does seem to be a highly questionable use of public money and resources to pursue such insignificant sums, even nearly a decade after the fact.'

They must have scratched their collective heads in their ministerial offices, and I got a letter from a different minister this time—Minister Tudge had said it was a matter for Minister Porter, as the then Minister for Social Services, so we had to write to someone else. This letter contradicted what Minister Tudge had said, and said, 'Well, there is no legislated minimum amount regarding the requirement to pay outstanding child support.' So what Minister Tudge had told me was wrong. He said that he was required to collect it; yet the policy minister for social services, his assistant minister, said that you're actually not, because in limited circumstances the Department of Human Services does have discretion not to pursue recovery of a debt. Then the letter went on to talk about some of the changes which are set out in this bill in relation to care disputes and amended tax assessments.

Again, magically, we're back here again—that we're going to have a start date of 1 January this year. That's clearly not going to be met, and changes relating to child support agreements and overpayments will have a start date of 1 July. So I would hope that the legislation does come into effect in a reasonably foreseeable time and that in the department, whether through changes to the legislation or its own policy discretion—which clearly is there, as one minister contradicted the other minister—some common sense will prevail and that there will be some system to stop this nonsense of sending people letters asking for $2.62 of debt incurred 10 years ago.

The final set of comments I would make are in relation to No Jab, No Pay. I applaud this measure set out in schedule 2. It ensures there's integrity in the rules to withhold family tax benefit part A from parents who don't keep their child's immunisations up to date. We are so lucky to live in Australia where, because of many decades now of national immunisation, we've forgotten or never known the impact of mass death or disability by vaccine-preventable communicable diseases. Of course, there are enormous public health benefits, and the case is proven. I, for one, have no hesitation in recording loudly and clearly that I accept the scientific evidence that overall vaccinations save lives. As one of the doctors who was quoted last time this came up in the media said unambiguously, 'Babies will die if not vaccinated.' Shame on the government for not rebuking their good friend Senator Hanson for her stupid, dumb, conspiracy driven nonsense last year.

As has been said in comments on related bills, vaccinations only work at a population level if you get to about 95 per cent. So you've got to get about 95 per cent of people in the community vaccinated to get what the scientists call herd immunity. Any amount below that and you start seeing outbreaks of the disease again. It's just how the population levels work. Disturbingly, we've seen in recent years in some parts of Australia rates of vaccination fall to around 90 per cent, and we've started to see diseases re-emerge. That is shocking, and it can be stopped.

I want to praise Victoria and put on record my gratitude and admiration for the efforts of the Victorian government who in the last week have said that 95.3 per cent of five-year-olds are now fully immunised in Victoria, hitting that herd immunity—the best result in their history. We should praise the Andrews Labor government for getting there. They've taken a strong approach on vaccination. They've brought back the free whooping cough vaccination program for mums and dads in 2015, after it was axed by the former state Liberal government, to protect the youngest Victorians from this deadly disease. I pick that as just one example. So it is important to note that this integrity measure is important. By removing about $28 a fortnight of their family tax benefit, it sends an important signal to parents that they do have to do their vaccinations and there are sanctions through the No Jab, No Pay policy. That complements the Victorian government's No Jab, No Play policies, which are being seen to have such a positive impact and could be recommended to other states that are courageous enough to go down that route.

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