Child Support and Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Ending Financial Abuse in the Child Support Scheme No. 1) Bill 2026

Ms CHANEY (Curtin) (11:18): I rise to support the Child Support and Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Ending Financial Abuse in the Child Support Scheme No. 1) Bill 2026 and to second the amendment move by the member for Warringah. The idea behind child support is pretty simple. When parents separate, they both keep paying towards the cost of raising their kids.

Nearly a million Australian children are in the child support scheme, which is close to one in five kids in the country. When it works, it does a lot to keep children out of poverty. Research cited by Single Mother Families Australia found poverty in single mother families could fall by about a fifth if child support was paid in full and on time.

But too often it isn't. Parents can choose agency collect, where the agency, Services Australia, collects the money from the paying parent and passes it on. Or they can choose private collect, where they sort out payment between themselves.

Around $2 billion is owed through agency collect and almost 230,000 paying parents are behind. We really don't know what's owed in private collect, which is about half the scheme, because nobody tracks it. When the Department of Social Services surveyed receiving parents in private collect, only one in three said they got their child support in full and on time every time.

For people who've left a violent relationship, child support can become another way for the abuse to continue. The scheme keeps separated parents financially tied to each other for years, and a former partner who wants to keep control has plenty of ways to do so. They can stop lodging tax returns so their income can't be properly assessed.

They can underestimate their income or pay late or not at all, or lodge application after application so the other parent is always having to respond. Swinburne university surveyed single mothers and found that 80 per cent of those who'd experienced family violence saw child support as a continuation of that violence. So I'm glad this bill has 'financial abuse' in its title.

It's taken a long time to get here. Victims, advocates and researchers have spent years building the evidence. The Commonwealth Ombudsman's 2025 report Weaponising child support showed where the law was failing families.

And many women have told their stories over and over to get this on the agenda, and today I want to acknowledge their courage and their persistence. This bill gives the Child Support Registrar power to refuse applications that could cause harm and to dismiss objections that have little chance of success or wouldn't actually change anything. It also ends the rule that parents must swap documents once one of them applies for a change of assessment.

At the moment, a mother's application and supporting papers go straight to her former partner. The minister says that 30 to 40 per cent of applicants pull out, and it's partly because of this. The bill makes it easier to move into agency collect and harder to be pushed back out of it.

It also fixes the problem with the family tax benefit. Right now, when child support in private collect is reassessed upwards for a past year, the system assumes that the money was actually paid. Often it wasn't, and the receiving parent ends up with a debt for money they never got.

The bill removes that assumption. The bill also allows parents living in some overseas jurisdictions to make child support applications directly to Services Australia instead of going through an authority in their own country. The groups that have so far made submissions to the Senate inquiry that is currently underway broadly support this bill.

One common theme is that how these reforms are implemented will determine whether they're effective, and also that there is so much more to do. The amendment moved by the member for Warringah, which I'm seconding, identifies priority issues for the government to action. Just over 100,000 parents and carers in the system are recorded as having experienced or being at risk of family and domestic violence.

For them, it's important that the remaining loopholes are addressed. The amendment points to two loopholes that perpetrators exploit and one gap that affects families more broadly. The first is tax returns.

Child support is based on income, so a parent who doesn't lodge a tax return can keep their real income hidden for years. Single Mother Families Australia reports that more than 80,000 paying parents have failed to lodge tax returns in recent years. When those returns are finally lodged, the receiving parent can be hit with a recalculation going back years.

The Australian Taxation Office needs to do more to detect nonlodgement and enforce lodgement. The second loophole is collection. When child support comes straight out of a paying parent's wages, it's much harder to withhold.

More agency-collect cases should have access to automatic deduction from wages so the money is taken out and passed on promptly. The minister has said that the next bill will do this, and I urge the government to bring it on as soon as possible. There's also a gap for young people finishing school.

Child support can end when a young person turns 18, even if they're still in year 12. The amendment calls for the assessment to continue for young people in full-time secondary school whose 18th birthday falls before the end of the school year. No family should be losing support halfway through a child's final year.

Closing these loopholes would make it much harder for one parent to use the system to keep wearing the other one down. But there's a second way people are being worn down, and neither this bill nor the amendment addresses it. It's the system itself.

Decisions arrive in piles of letters that are impossible to understand. People wait an hour on hold, and no-one can explain the calculations. I've been contacted regularly by both mothers and fathers in my electorate who are battling the system.

After I spoke in this place last about systems abuse, a woman in my electorate wrote to me. She works full time and has full-time care of her two children. She said she was exhausted having to fight the system to obtain a reasonable amount of child support, but her reason for writing was the paperwork.

This year she's received 24 letters from the agency, and 16 of those arrived in a rush at the end of the financial year and came to more than 60 pages in total. Two of them told her there were debts. Her former partner owed more than $5,000, and she owed more than $2,000.

But nowhere in those 60 pages did it clearly explain why or which of those 16 letters went with which decision. If she contacts the agency, she generally spends up to an hour on hold just to speak to someone. The last time she called, she was cut off after half an hour of waiting.

This is ridiculous. Another woman living in Curtin received 49 letters from the agency in a fortnight. Each one covered a different period and a different amount.

Some seemed to use her income from two years ago and her ex-husband's current estimate, which was much lower. None of it matched what she saw when she logged into the system, and no-one from the agency was able to explain it to her. How incredibly infuriating would that be?

A teacher in my electorate asked the agency to collect her child support for her. Her former partner was told to stop paying her directly, and the money started coming out of his pay, but the agency didn't pass it on. Six weeks later, she still hadn't received a cent.

Each time she called the agency, it took over an hour, and calls could only be made between 8.30 and 4.45, which is pretty hard when you're in front of a classroom. The agency couldn't tell her whether it had the money. It said that even if it did, it would take 28 days to process.

If it didn't have the money, it would investigate, and that would take at least another 28 days. Add on the time for her former partner's employer to send the money through, and she was looking at four months without any child support. Again, this is ridiculous.

One father told me that he'd raised concerns about his former partner's income with the agencies again and again, by phone and by email over several years. He never saw any meaningful outcome and, in the end, he didn't know where else to turn. A mother who cares full-time for her son, who has additional needs, spoke to me.

She lives on the minimum wage. Her former partner earns more than $200,000 a year. She was told she'd been overpaid $236 in child support.

She agreed to pay it back at $5 a month, and the agency confirmed the plan in writing. Then, without warning, the system took the full $236 from her next payment. When she rang, she was told the system recovers money as fast as it can, and the decision couldn't be reversed.

That month, she couldn't pay her bills. She put it to me that it seems insane that the person who has almost full care of a child has to be the one jumping through hoops constantly. For most people, this is frustrating and exhausting.

For someone who has left a controlling relationship, it's worse because the two kinds of wearing down feed each other. The other parent often doesn't actually have to do much; the process does the rest. The letters, phone calls and deadlines all land on the parent who's already doing most of the caring.

One woman told me she'd left a violent relationship with her two boys after police and support workers told her to get out fast. Since then, her former partner has moved between jobs, and his child support has gone up and down. After his last change of assessment, it dropped to $44 a month.

It took her two full days to put her own change of assessment application together. She was then told she needed yet more documents and later advised to withdraw her application altogether because her former partner didn't have a job. That's how people end up among the 30 to 40 per cent who withdraw their change of assessment applications.

Another mother has full care of her son and works full time. Her English isn't strong enough to understand the complicated information the agency sends her. Her former partner claimed he was caring for their son when he wasn't, so she lodged an objection.

She later found out her objection only covered one decision, each decision covered a different period and each needed its own objection within 28 days. This bill will help some of these women. Removing the document swap should mean fewer people give up on a change of assessment.

But none of them will get fewer letters, shorter waits or clearer explanations because of it. The system is designed to serve the system, not to support the people who need it. So, alongside this legislation, I'd ask the government to fix the way the system treats people.

Start by measuring the load we put on parents as well as the outstanding debts. That means how many letters they get, how long they wait on the phone, how long it takes for a first payment to arrive and how many people withdraw applications and why. Publish it so that we can see whether things are improving.

One decision should come with one letter that explains what changed and what you can do about it. If a payment plan is going to be overridden, people should be told before the money is deducted. Parents with jobs need to be able to get through to Services Australia.

Callbacks would help, and so would some contact hours outside the working day. Where family violence has been flagged, there should be one contact person at Services Australia so that parents don't have to explain everything from the start each time. This is a good bill.

It accepts that a government system can be used to hurt people, and it closes some of the gaps. But there are still loopholes to close, and the way the system treats people needs to be fixed alongside them. The next tranche of reforms needs to come quickly.

Families can't afford to wait. I commend the amendment and the bill to the House.