Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

On the face of it, what Senator Siewert has been raising I think is a relevant and serious issue. The difficulty, as I pointed out before, is that the only way to look at this is either that both parents are part time or they are both principal carers. If they are both part time, there is clearly a financial disadvantage to the now separated unit, if I can call it that, of the two parents and the child. If you were to deem them both principal carers, there would be a financial benefit to the unit and a disadvantage to the taxpayer.

This is something that we as a government, in fairness, I think, need to consider further. What I would say to Senator Siewert and to the committee is that I think that is a real issue for us to give further consideration to. But at this stage of the proceedings I am unable to take the matter any further.

It is the consequence of potential double payment by making both parents the principal carers that would be potentially a growing burden on the taxpayer. I am not the portfolio minister, but what Senator Siewert said—that this 1.5 per cent cohort is likely to grow because of the changes to the Family Law Act—on the face of it makes sense. This might be a naive hope—having practised in the area of family law in the dark, distant past, the idea of separating couples cooperating is sometimes something which one would hope for but which does not actually occur—but, if the court presumes and the parents are happy to have a fifty-fifty shared parenting arrangement, one would hope that there was a fair degree of cooperation between the separating couple. One would also hope that our family relationship centres, for example, might be able to provide some counselling and assistance to them in sharing the financial income and burdens in relation to that.

On the face of it, I think the senator has raised a public policy issue which I cannot answer on behalf of the government at the moment, but I do undertake to give the portfolio minister the benefit of Senator Siewert’s contribution. There may well be some cut-through answers in relation to the matters that she has raised that have not raised themselves in my mind at the moment. I do not want to raise any false expectations in any way, shape or form, but what I do say is that, on the face of it, to me, at this stage there does seem to be some cogency in what the senator says. I am happy to take that back to the portfolio minister and see what might develop from there.