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

There are a number of issues there. Firstly, at the moment there may be 1.5 per cent; the fact is that the law comes into effect this year. The law now requires that the starting point when determining shared care arrangements is fifty-fifty shared equal parenting. If that is now the basis for negotiation that the court is required to do, one would expect to see a significant increase—if the law is being effective—in the number of parents who are sharing care. That is the first point. So one law was changed last year but the other laws are not being updated to take account of the law about shared equal parenting of children, despite the fact that 1.5 per cent still means that a lot of children are affected by these unfair provisions.

The sorts of provisions we are talking about are the continuation of pharmaceutical benefits, concession cards, telephone allowance, education entry payments, limited activity tests, less earnings per week, less access to suitable child care and not being subject to the provisions about travelling to work for more than 60 minutes. All these issues are very important when you are looking after children. The reality of this is that one week a child will be living with the parent who has principal carer status and will therefore get the benefit of that parent not being subject to the more intense participation requirements in looking for work; the next week the child will go to the parent who does not have that support—who is on the provisions of Newstart, for example, and has more intense work requirements, may not have the capacity to be able to access the provisions around suitable child care, may be forced to travel further for work requirements, may not have access to pharmaceutical benefits and may not have the same access to concession cards.

The children are being substantially disadvantaged in those situations. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the government does not understand this. Children are being disadvantaged by this provision. On the one hand, the bottom line is now shared equal parenting, but, on the other, that does not come down to how the government provides income support for the parents of these children. I cannot understand why such a simple fact cannot be understood by the government. Children are being materially and emotionally disadvantaged by this provision. It is fairly simple.