Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2026
Ms STEGGALL (Warringah) (12:43): The Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Technical Changes No. 2) Bill 2026 is described as technical, and in many respects it is. Across nine schedules, it amends social security, family assistance, paid parental leave, administrative review and child support laws, and I welcome the practical reforms that will make the system easier to access, more accurate and more accountable.
Whilst this bill presents a positive step forward when it comes to child support, it doesn't, unfortunately, achieve the systemic reform that is urgently required. Child support is money owed to children. Having been a family law barrister, I have too often seen firsthand the impact of a dispute between parents and how that overflows and impacts the lives of children.
It is often weaponised and used by either or both parties, and that is simply wrong. We must remember what the purpose of child support is. It's to ensure children are financially supported for all of their essential needs.
It pays for rent, for groceries, for school costs, for clothes and for the everyday costs of raising a child. As a former family law barrister, I've seen firsthand how financial disputes after separation can be used to maintain control. Separation does not always end abuse.
Sometimes the abuse simply changes form. A payment becomes a bargaining tool, a tax return is delayed, income is minimised, a parent is pressured into private collect because they fear conflict, and the parent caring for the children is left trying to fill the gap—the financial gap, the real reality of meeting those needs of children. This is why I have repeatedly raised child support reform with the government.
The child support system is broken if money owed to children can be used as a threat, a bargaining tool or a way to maintain control. There are systemic issues and they require significant reform. Schedule 1 in this bill amends the Family Assistance Act.
It allows greater automation of social security and family tax benefit advances, including online applications and more flexibility around repayments for people experiencing financial hardship. That's a welcome step, although automation must never remove a human oversight pathway where a decision is complex or risks causing harm. Schedule 2 changes the review process for some social services decisions.
This allows certain decisions to be altered while a second review is before the Administrative Review Tribunal so new information can be reflected sooner. Schedules 3 and 4 clarify the use of pre-issued income data from the ATO for family tax benefit and child care subsidy reconciliations. This would allow Services Australia to use more up-to-date income information before a final tax assessment is issued.
That should mean earlier, more accurate calculations and potentially fewer large debts later. But it's really important that provisional information must remain provisional. Final information should replace it promptly with clear review rights.
Schedule 5 is my key focus when I look at this bill because it expands the use of pre-issued income data in child support assessments. It allows the child support registrar to use more current information to determine or vary a parent's adjusted taxable income where a tax return has not yet been formally assessed. One way the child support system can be manipulated quite frequently is a party will delay lodging tax returns.
By delaying tax returns or withholding accurate income information, it essentially distorts what the assessment for child support payable is. We need to address that issue because at the moment, if the system is waiting for a final tax assessment while a paying parent delays, the reality is children are waiting too. But it also creates irregularity and ultimately unfairness to the payee parent.
Further delay in lodging tax returns and minimisation of income leads much too often to mothers being found to be liable to the ATO and then the Commonwealth for family support overpayment. This is wrong, and the government really needs to pursue the monies owed for any overpayment in relation to the Commonwealth family support payment against the parent owing child support.
It should not be pursuing those payments against the payee parent. It's simply wrong. It is an extension of financial abuse.
It is essentially systems abuse perpetrated by, ironically, the ATO and the Commonwealth. We know the scale of the problem. Around $2 billion in child support is unpaid across Australia, owed by around 229,000 parents.
Around 83 per cent of recipient parents are women, so unpaid child support overwhelmingly affects women and, ultimately, it's the children who go without. The government's own survey of separated parents should be a wake-up call. Around half of the families in the child support system, including a approximately 500,000 children, rely on private collect, and almost one in five recipients using private collect agreed to that arrangement to avoid conflict with or violence from a former partner.
For people to understand, the alternative is automatic garnishee of the wage of the parent that's assessed as owing child support. So before they get their payslip, the amount has been taken off for child support payments automatically. Parents sometimes get angry and abusive as a result of that process, so private collect is essentially a good faith arrangement of assuming that's going to be done directly.
What happens? Child support is not paid. More than half of those that responded to the government survey were underpaid by an average of around $2,000 a year.
One in four received no child support in a year, and one in three reported never, sometimes or rarely receiving the child support they were owed. It's a significant structural failure, and the consequences are largely felt by women and children. Nearly 300,000 families lose around $810 million each year in family payments because the system will then treat child support as though it has been received, even though it has not.
Again, it's coming back to understanding. The Commonwealth family support payments are done after taking into account what the system assumes has been received in child support payments on the basis of either lodged tax returns—reported incomes—or assessments. What happens when a party withholds an assessment, say, for a couple of years?
A preliminary assessment has been done. The income is then lodged at a later date and is different, and it will often result in there being an overpayment in that Commonwealth family support payment. What it means is that often the mother is then found to be in debt to the Commonwealth for overpayment of that family support payment.
It means it impacts their credit ratings and it impacts their ability to get rental accommodations. It has really significant impacts. It puts additional stress on parents that are already struggling to make ends meet.
The system is wrong. The recovery of that Commonwealth family support payment should absolutely be pursued against the parent who owes the child support payment, not the other way around. What happens is the mother is left without the child support owed to her by the former partner but then also has her family tax benefit reduced or faces that Commonwealth debt based on money she's never received.
And the government knows this; the system knows this, but nonetheless has, I believe, an internal assessment that it's easier to recover that debt against those single parents, usually the mothers, than it is to do it against the parent owing the child support. It's deeply unfair. In the context of family and domestic violence, this is just a continuation of financial abuse.
It could be changed. It is within the government's power to change. I've raised it with the minister, but, of course, it has a budgetary bottom line, because it's easier to recover from the parent to who it is owed.
Schedule 6 is therefore particularly important. It allows a merit review for decisions to offset tax refunds or family assistance to top up amounts against family tax benefit debts. I welcome those review rights, but the government should go further.
Victims-survivors of family and domestic violence and people whose family tax benefit debts arise specifically because child support was not actually paid or because a change of a provisional income assessment has resulted in an overpayment of that family tax benefit should be explicitly protected. If a parent is owed child support, they should not then be pursued by the Commonwealth for a debt created on the assumption that it has been received.
Where a debt arises because the liable parent failed to pay child support or has delayed their disclosure or manipulated the system, the government should focus their recovery on the person responsible. It should not compound the harm to the parent already carrying the burden of care without the owed child support for them to then carry the burden of a debt to the Commonwealth.
Scheduled 7, 8 and 9 make further technical changes. Schedule 7 ensures paid parental leave and superannuation contributions which reflect a person's actual entitlement. Schedule 8 creates a limit of 10 payments on urgent social security payments is triggered, and schedule 9 corrects cross-referencing errors and clarifies review arrangements.
So there are a lot of technicalities in this legislation, but it is not grappling with the fundamental unfairness and wrongness of this system. The government has committed $182.6 million over four years, with ongoing funding to improve compliance in the Child Support Scheme. I welcome that investment because it's long overdue, but let's get real: it's like a drop in the bucket of what's really needed.
Better compliance requires much more than better data. We need to change the laws. We need stronger enforcement of unpaid child support.
We need safer pathways out of Private Collect where coercion or violence is present. The Family Tax Benefit system needs to be fixed. It needs to be decoupled from child support, or the government has to pursue debts against the parent owing the child support debt, so parents are not penalised for child support they have never received.
And we need Services Australia to be properly resourced to identify abuse and support parents without pushing them back into an unsafe contact. The bill can make assessments faster, some decisions more accurate and review rights clearer. They're all worthwhile reforms, but the child support system is decades old.
It was not designed for the modern environment, in particular with the recognition of coercive control and financial abuse. When that is front of mind, this system is antiquated and dangerous. So the reform challenge for the government is that it really needs to overhaul the child support system.
Child support can't be treated as a leverage in a dispute. I acknowledge I've been a member of inquiries where many parents owing child support, often fathers, feel that it is used as leverage against time for care of children. It is a really complex calculation, as to how we arrive at that child support, the cost owed to children.
In many circumstances, you have parents going on to have additional families, and that results in a complete distortion of how child support is then owed for parents from an earlier relationship. Yet we shouldn't have a situation where the adequate amount to sustain and support a child through their upbringing and schooling is somehow reduced or mitigated by parents' decisions to have further children.
The needs of those first children remain the same. They have not changed. So child support really does need an overall review and assessment.
The government must not mistake technical repair for systemic reform. It now has its own evidence showing where the system is failing. The next step must be a child support system that prevents coercion, enforces payment and ensures children receive the support that they are entitled to.
I really urge the government and the minister to address this area of financial control, which is put overwhelmingly on women. Often the Commonwealth is culprit in this situation, in a system that pursues single parents for a debt that they have not created.