Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Family Assistance and Child Support Legislation Amendment (Protecting Children) Bill 2017. This bill does two things, and I'll speak to them in turn. It amends the child support program and strengthens the No Jab, No Pay policy. Both of the measures in this bill were announced in the 2017 budget.

I'll talk first about the amendments to the child support program. The Child Support Scheme was introduced by the Hawke government in 1988 and was designed to address the difficulties a parent could face when attempting to collect maintenance from the other parent. There were concerns at the time that women and children, particularly, were increasingly facing poverty after family separation. The government was increasingly bearing the cost of raising children when one parent was refusing to contribute to their own child's upkeep. The Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs conducted an inquiry in 2015 to report on the child support program. It was chaired by the member for Dawson and the deputy chair was the member for Newcastle. I was also a member of that committee. At the time of the inquiry, the Department of Social Services said 1.3 million parents were in the program and about 1.1 million children were covered by the scheme.

Child support is an emotive topic, as any member of the lower house would attest. This is understandable when the amount of support paid or received is directly linked to the amount of time spent with your children. It is also a gendered issue—90 per cent of receiving parents are female and 90 per cent of paying parents are male, perhaps bespeaking some other cultural barriers and prejudices in our society. The scheme was designed to make it simpler for the caring parent to receive child support from the other parent by giving the responsibility for collection and enforcement to the Australian Taxation Office. The tax office was also given responsibility for assessing the amount of child support to be paid. The responsibility for the administration of the Child Support Scheme has now been shifted to the Department of Social Services and delivery of the scheme to the Department of Human Services.

The social policy and legal affairs inquiry found that the Child Support Scheme works well in the majority of cases. I know that, as an MP, we often see people when it is not working. I understand that. The scheme supports the principle that both parents should contribute to raising their children through care and financial support. Assessments should reflect the realistic cost of raising children and a parent's actual capacity to pay. However, the committee made 25 recommendations to strengthen the scheme. This bill implements three of the recommendations of the committee report. Three out of 25 ain't good but, I guess it is better than nothing. As I've said, the amount of child support paid by a parent is calculated with regard to the amount of time the child spends with each parent. The nature of modern work means that parenting arrangements can change and can change quickly and, when they do, they are often contentious.

The first of these amendments provides for a greater period of time before a child support assessment is recalculated when there is a dispute about the care of the child. There is currently a 14-week limit imposed on interim determinations. The Family Court, sadly, is bogged down, with most matters taking much longer than 14 weeks to be finalised. Currently, the 14-week limit can mean that a parent's child support assessment may be increased just at the time they are trying to reach an agreement on their parenting arrangements. This amendment increases the interim period while one parent is actively trying to enforce their rights under a parenting order and is participating in dispute resolution processes.

The second of these amendments concerns child support agreements entered into between the parents. A binding child support agreement can be made pursuant to the Child Support (Assessment) Act 1989. These agreements are similar in nature to a binding financial agreement made under the Family Law Act. Some might say the binding financial agreements are former Attorney-General George Brandis's only legacy to the Australian legal community—but I wouldn't be that unkind. These agreements require independent legal advice before a party can enter into such an agreement. In turn, they are difficult to set aside. Exceptional circumstances or a significant change in circumstances which have arisen since the agreement was made must be present before an agreement will be set aside.

However, there is an anomaly with binding child support agreements made before 1 July 2008. Those agreements were made without independent legal advice. The amendment that provided for independent legal advice was only implemented on 1 July 2008. Those agreements are currently still binding in the same way as binding child support agreements that were made after 1 July 2008 and have the benefit of independent legal advice. It is easy to see how this could disadvantage a party who has entered into a binding child support agreement between 1 July 2008 without having the benefit of legal advice and they now want to have that agreement set aside or amended. This bill will make it easier for parties to binding child support agreements made before July 2008 to have their agreements varied or set aside.

The third amendment in this bill that concerns child support is slightly more contentious. The amount of child support paid by a parent is assessed on a formula that uses the income of both parents—that is, each parent's income tax assessments. If a person's tax assessment has been amended, the child support assessment will have been calculated using the income from the original tax assessment but the child support assessment will actually not be varied until the next financial year—quite a time lag. This can lead to the actual child support being paid to the other parent being too high and causing distress to the payer or being too low and causing the parent in receipt of the child support to be under unnecessary financial stress and then obviously children can consequently suffer. This bill will allow a new assessment to be applied retrospectively so that the correct amount would have been paid for the previous year. Labor are concerned that this will lead to very large and unexpected debts for parents. We know the harm financial stress can cause to families. We know how important it is for parents to have some level of budget certainty so they can plan ahead for their families. Labor have raised these concerns about this part of the bill with the Turnbull-Joyce government and we will reserve on this final position on this part of the bill until this is addressed.

Having been a member of the committee that inquired into child support in 2015, I am pleased to see some of our recommendations being implemented. I heard in that committee the raw emotion those issues around child support evince in parents. When love turns to hate, sometimes logic and common sense fly out the window. Families who are in the child support assessment scheme often have issues with payments not being made, assessments being too high or assessments being too low. Those families feel the fallout of these problems every day—each time they go to the supermarket, each time they pay the school fees or buy school supplies and each time they get their pay cheque. Australia's Child Support Scheme is good, but it can be strengthened. That is what the committee reported and why we made 25 recommendations. Without carping too much, it is a little disappointing that it has taken over two years for the Turnbull-Joyce government to take any action on the report.

The second part of this bill amends and strengthens the No Jab, No Pay policy. I want to say up-front and loudly that I wholeheartedly believe in the importance of childhood immunisation. My mother was a nurse and she made sure that all 10 of her children were fully immunised against preventable diseases. My wife Lea, as an adult and despite being vaccinated as a child, contracted whooping cough when she had young children to cope with as well as a husband that went off to Canberra regularly. Having seen the impact that whooping cough had on Lea, an adult who had some level of immunisation, I can't imagine what it would be like watching your own baby suffering from whooping cough. You wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy. It is important that we do all we can to improve the immunisation levels of all our children. Children are our hopes distilled. We know that vaccination works. It has eradicated diseases already in our own lifetime—polio and smallpox.

It might be hard to imagine now, for younger Australians, but Australia faced an epidemic in the middle of the 20th century, recording the highest incidence of poliomyelitis—commonly called polio. Poliomyelitis is an ancient disease, first described in Britain in 1789, that has no cure and can leave its victims with devastating nerve damage, causing paralysis of the arms, legs and diaphragms. Ten thousand mainly young Australians and many children were contracting polio each year. In 1966, which is not that long ago—the year of my birth, in fact—the oral polio vaccine was introduced into Australia. And in 2000 Australia was declared polio free by the World Health Organization. The number of polio cases worldwide has decreased by more than 99 per cent, from 350,000 cases in 1988 to fewer than 420 in 2013.

Do not listen to the antivaxxers. We know vaccination works. Measles was claiming 2.6 million deaths each year before there was widespread vaccination available. The World Health Organization announced in 2014 that measles elimination had effectively been achieved by Australia. There is now no local strain of measles circulating in our community. Obviously we still get individual measles cases in the community that have been brought in by people travelling from countries where the disease is still prevalent. But by keeping a high level of vaccination coverage—protecting the herd—we can prevent measles outbreaks from occurring.

We know vaccination works. All sensible people who believe in empirical evidence know this for a fact. And we know that the way it works is through herd immunity. High levels of immunity in the Australian community make it difficult for disease to spread from person to person. It is the collective community of our population that is important. And it is the responsibility of all of us to make sure we continue to have that high level of immunity. The No Jab, No Pay policy was supported by Labor. This policy has bipartisan support. We know it works. Since the program commenced in 2015, about 200,000 families have initiated or updated their immunisation coverage. That is great news, but we must maintain our vigilance. The amendments in this bill will strengthen this policy. The current policy provides that parents whose child does not have their immunisation up to date will not be eligible to receive the family tax benefit part A end-of-year supplement. This policy holds no incentive for families whose income is above $80,000, as they don't receive the family tax benefit part A supplement.

So, this amendment will be fairer. All families whose child is not fully immunised in accordance with immunisation requirements will have approximately $28 a fortnight withheld from their family tax benefit part A. This new measure will come into effect from 1 July 2018. The new provisions will ensure that families are notified if their child's vaccinations are overdue, and there will be a 63-day grace period. That will ensure that the family is given time to update the child's immunisation. If the vaccinations are not updated within that 63-day grace period the reductions to the fortnightly family tax benefit part A will be imposed from the beginning of the 63-day grace period. This amendment will make the policy fairer. Families who do not keep their child's immunisation up to date will face a financial penalty regardless of whether they earn above or below $80,000. It is hoped that this amendment will also encourage those families who earn over $80,000 and who've so far not updated their child's immunisation to do so.

The larger the percentage of immunisation coverage in the community the greater our herd immunity, the fewer disease outbreaks we will have and the more lives that will be saved. Labor believes that all children deserve the opportunity to have the best start in life. Strengthening the immunity of our population so that unprotected babies will not be inflicted with whooping cough or other life-threatening and preventable diseases is just the right thing to do. I would not want my children to become ill because other families did not immunise their children. And I'd hate to think that I had contributed to a baby becoming ill or even, heaven forbid, dying because I did not keep the immunisations of my own children up to date.

These are good policy measures, and I support this bill, with the caveat that Labor has concerns about the provisions regarding child support and amended tax assessments. Labor is hopeful that a compromise on that measure can be reached in the Senate. Labor will always support measures that protect our children. I commend the legislation to the House.

See this speech in context