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

Ms SPENDER (Wentworth) (11:44): I rise to speak in support of the Child Support and Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Ending Financial Abuse in the Child Support Scheme No. 1) Bill 2026. For too long, our child support system has allowed money owed to children to slip through the cracks, and too often that has been by design rather than by accident. This bill is an excellent step in addressing the systems abuse that I know is experienced by many victim-survivors of domestic and family violence across the country.

In my time representing Wentworth I've met with countless parents who are at their wits' ends—parents, mostly mothers, who feel powerless against a system that seems rigged against them, whether through the Family Court or through the weaponisation of child support. These parents, more often than not, recognise this as systems abuse. It is often a continuation of the abuse experienced within a relationship or family long past the point of separation or divorce.

I don't want to share these stories publicly here today, out of respect for the individuals and their children, but I know they reflect the findings of countless inquiries, studies and reports that the child support system is one of many used to facilitate such systems based abuse. In a 2023 Swinburne University study of 540 separated mothers, 80 per cent said that their former partner had used the child support program to commit financial abuse, with the main tactics being deliberately not paying child support, at 81 per cent, and minimising how much needed to be paid, at 80 per cent.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services found that the child support program is being widely manipulated and weaponised by perpetrators to carry out financial abuse, and the main victims are often women. Finally, the Commonwealth Ombudsman's data from June 2025 reflects the same story. Of 279 complaints received about the child support program between November 2024 and February 2025, 32 per cent said they were affected by the weaponisation of child support, and 73 per cent of these were separated mothers—nearly all of them the receiving parent.

The Ombudsman further found that the agency's approach allowed some paying parents to manipulate the system to avoid their financial responsibility, and this bill is important work in stopping this. I commend the government for its intent in this bill and for its dedication in examining the ways that systems, from taxation to super and child support, can be manipulated and abused.

I acknowledge that the bill has been referred to a Senate inquiry, with a public hearing due this week and the report due in November. I do hope that the bill will not pass the House until that report has been received, and I wish, frankly, that the House wasn't being asked to debate the bill while we are still awaiting those hearings and recommendations. Regardless, it is time to turn to what the bill will do.

It closes longstanding loopholes in the child support scheme. It is aimed especially at improving debt recovery, thereby minimising the exposure of parents and children to ongoing domestic and family violence. We know that debt recovery is one of the most significant issues facing child support in Australia.

Unpaid debt totals roughly $2 billion owed by more than 150,000 parents. That is $2 billion spread out into families who need this money now, particularly in times of high inflation, and cannot get it. Schedule 1 recognises the way in which the child support scheme can be used by perpetrators of systems abuse to continue to harass victim-survivors.

It gives the registrar discretionary powers to refuse applications for a new child support assessment where the application could cause harm to the payee and where the registrar is satisfied that the payee does not want the application to proceed. I note that, in its submission, the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission pointed to the absence of a definition of 'harm'.

I understand the intention is to rely on the definitions commonly used in family law settings, but I urge the minister and committee to consider whether a specific definition of 'harm' is needed. It should adequately capture the forms of domestic and family violence, as well as systems abuse, that could be assessed incorrectly by someone unfamiliar with the tactics that perpetrators commonly use.

Schedule 1 also makes another important change. It removes the current mandatory requirement for documents to be exchanged between parties in change-of-assessment and objection processes. This was a recommendation of the Commonwealth Ombudsman in its 2025 report.

As that report noted last year, and as the ABC coverage that followed made clear, procedures at Services Australia can unintentionally disclose sensitive information to ex-partners. As the Ombudsman, Iain Anderson, noted, the fear of sharing information like a home address or workplace can lead people pursuing unpaid child support to withdraw from the process altogether.

A case featured in the Gold Coast Bulletin in 2021 showed this clearly. A mother was told that she would have to hand over all of her bank statements to her ex-partner if she wanted to challenge the payments, and she was worried that this might reveal her location. When she raised this fear with Services Australia, she was sent a letter referring her to domestic violence helplines.

That is not helpful. The Law Council goes one step further in its recommendation to the committee: it recommends that a party should be able to redact any details that would disclose their location from material provided to the registrar, whether through these processes or otherwise. This seems sensible.

We should be taking every step to ensure that victim-survivors who are still required to interact with their ex-partners through the Child Support Scheme have minimal contact and, most importantly, minimal risk of being identified and located. Schedules 2 and 3 close further loopholes. Schedule 2 closes a gap that has left many parents out of pocket after a period of private collect, and follows another recommendation from the Ombudsman.

Sometimes a child support assessment is retrospectively increased for a period when the payee was collecting privately—that is, directly rather than through the agency. In those cases, the payee will have a greater ability to ask the registrar to collect the additional child support or debt. This includes debts that fall outside the usual three-month timeframe—or nine months in exceptional circumstances.

It also allows the recovery of certain Family Tax Benefit debts to be paused for three months where the debt was caused by increased child support for a past private collect period. That way, parents aren't hit with an FTB debt before they've received the child support themselves. Schedule 3 amends the act so that parents living overseas in reciprocating jurisdictions can apply directly to Services Australia to collect child support for their children, rather than going through the authority in their own country.

These are sensible, targeted changes. They recognise that child support is not a private bargaining chip, nor is it another tool for those who seek to systematically abuse a co-parent through protracted contact or refusal to pay what is owed to their child. It is money that belongs to children, and the system should make sure they receive it.

There is much more in this space, as the member for Warringah's second reading amendment notes, and I look forward to further reform. But I do commend this bill to the House. I just want to note that, when speaking to people who have come to my office about this issue, I was incredulous that there are people in our community who are owed money by their former partners for looking after their children but who just can't get it and that the system has not been able to delivery a fix for that.

It seems like a basic right, but we have $2 billion worth of outstanding child support that is not going to the children who need it. That is a problem. The bill I commend goes some way to addressing this, but we need to continue to pursue this issue, because, until children and families are receiving the child support they need, this is just being used as a way to shirk responsibilities and abuse partners and families in a continual way.