Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition will be supporting the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Child Support and Family Assistance Technical Amendments) Bill 2024. This bill is a technical amendment seeking to ensure the child support scheme operates as intended. The coalition supports this urgent change because it provides legislative certainty to participants in the child support scheme by ensuring the legislation clearly outlines where interim periods can apply and how the child support scheme operates as intended. This bill amends the Child Support (Assessment) Act 1989, the child support act, and A New Tax System (Family Assistance Act) 1999, or the family assistance act, to restore the intended operation of interim period provisions for determining a person's percentage of care for a child.

The bill proposes technical amendments to support the administration of the child support and family assistance schemes as intended under the legislation. The bill will restore interim period arrangements to address the unintended consequence of the protecting children act. It will provide that interim periods are available as they are intended to be, consistent with the longstanding policy in the child support and family assistance schemes to encourage carers for a child to comply with a written carer arrangement where one is in place. The bill will also protect the validity of certain interim period determinations that were made between the commencement of the protecting children act amendment and the commencement of the amendments to be made by this bill. The bill includes retrospective provisions to ensure past decisions made since 2018 and in line with the intended policy are valid. This is important to minimise the impact on parents and carers who may otherwise be financially disadvantaged by having those decisions disrupted.

The bill is a technical amendment to ensure that the child support and family assistance schemes operate as intended under the legislation.