Child Support and Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Ending Financial Abuse in the Child Support Scheme No. 1) Bill 2026
Mr FARLEY (Farrer) (12:06): We cannot support the Child Support and Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Ending Financial Abuse in the Child Support Scheme No. 1) Bill 2026 in its current form. Its stated purpose is to prevent financial abuse within the child support system. We support that purpose, but the legislation before us gives the registrar broad discretion to refuse application, weakens guaranteed access to source documents and leaves important details to regulation and rules that we have not seen.
Those are substantial concerns. They go to whether a parent can obtain a fair assessment, challenge false information and understand why decisions have been made against them. Children deserve financial support.
They also deserve the opportunity to have a safe and loving relationship with both parents. This bill must protect both. Parents are more than willing to pay child support and take responsibility for their children.
They want to contribute financially but they also want to attend the school concerts, help with homework and have a relationship with their children. They want to be a parent, a mother, a father. Where there is no justified reason or safety concern, one parent should not be reduced to a source of financial support while being deliberately excluded from their child's life.
Their obligation to support their child remains, and so does the importance of protecting that child's relationship with their parent. Where a parent deliberately prevents another parent from exercising agreed parenting time for control or financial gain, that conduct must be recognised as harmful. The child loses a relationship.
The parent loses time they cannot recover. They may then face increased child support liability because the actual care has been reduced alongside the expense of trying to restore that care. The same standard must apply where a parent engages in that conduct against another parent.
This bill does not create the existing link between care percentages and child support but it risks making manipulation of those arrangements harder to expose and challenge. The reform intended to prevent the weaponisation of child support must address abuse by receiving parents, as well as by paying parents. One of our central objections is the proposed discretionary powers to refuse application.
The proposed section 98FA would allow the registrar to refuse to proceed with a change of assessment application where the registrar reasonably believes that proceedings would cause harm to the party, the child or any other person. 'Harm' is not defined in the bill. The reasonable belief requirement matters, but it does not answer the practical questions: What evidence will be required?
How will competing accounts be assessed? How will a genuine attempt to correct an inaccurate assessment be distinguished from an abusive application? And why does the bill not expressly require the registrar to consider whether the application could proceed safely through redaction, protected communications or another less-restrictive process?
A parent seeking to expose hidden income, incomplete financial information or an adjust assessment should not have a legitimate application stopped without clear findings and adequate reasoning. Refusing to examine an application can leave an inaccurate assessment in place. That can cause harm too.
Proposed section 30C also creates a power to refuse certain initial assessment applications where the prospective recipient does not want the assessment and the statutory harm conditions are met. That power has a particular protective purpose. Nevertheless, both refusal powers require clear safeguards on an evidentiary basis and meaningful review.
We cannot support board discretion without sufficient accountability. Our second objection concerns access to evidence. The bill removes mandatory exchange of source documents in relevant change-of-assessment and objection processes.
The information may instead be communicated through oral summaries, written summaries or selected redacted documents. Protecting confidential addresses and sensitive personal details is appropriate, but parents must still be able to examine and answer the substance of a case against them. Consider a mother who provides selected messages suggesting that the father failed to collect his child while leaving out the messaging that she cancelled the arrangement.
Consider an account of a missed parenting time that omits the father's repeated requests to see his children, or consider financial information that presents selected transactions while leaving out records that would materially change the assessment. Information can be misleading because of what has been omitted. If one parent receives only a summary, they may have no way of identifying the missing context.
The agency may not know what is missing. The other parent may know, but he cannot properly challenge it, because he has not seen the evidence being relied upon. This creates an obvious risk for unfair decisions.
Relevant source documents or sufficient redacted—extracted must be available where necessary to resolve disputed facts. Materially disputed evidence must be checked. Both parents must have a meaningful opportunity to respond.
Our third objection concerns the dismissal of objections. Proposed section 84A allows objections to be dismissed where they have little or no prospect of success or would have no more than a marginal impact. A matter that appears marginal to an administrator may have consequences for future assessments, care thresholds or family assistance payments.
The legislation must require that those consequences be considered. It especially requires reasons for summary dismissals, yet it also says that failing to provide those reasons does not invalidate the dismissal. That in itself is an inadequate safeguard.
A parent should not have to pursue a review simply to obtain a proper explanation of why their objection was rejected. Our fourth objection is that important details remain outside the bill. Regulations may prescribe kinds of information excluded from disclosure.
We do not have those proposed exclusions before us. Proposed section 39AE also leaves substantial details of the retrospective recovery scheme to a legislative instrument including criteria calculations affecting arrears and recoverable overpayments. These provisions affect what parents owe, what they can recover and what evidence they can challenge.
Parliament should see those proposed regulations and rules before being asked to approve this scheme. Core protections belong within the act. Finally, the legislation needs to express safeguards addressing the deliberate obstruction of a child's safe relationship with a parent.
Where there is no credible evidence of family violence, abuse or other legitimate reason to restrict contact, control and financial gain must never justify that obstruction. Genuine safety concerns must be taken seriously. Protections must not depend on a criminal conviction, but disputed allegations must be assessed through fair process, with evidence, reason and timely review.
The Family Law Act recognises the benefit of a child's relationships with their parents where safe. Child support reform should also support that principle. In closing, this bill needs substantial further work.
We need clear limits on the refusal power. We need proper written reasons, access to relevant evidence, safeguards against materially misleading omissions and scrutiny of the proposed record regulations. We also need recognition that abuse of the system can be committed by either parent.
Until those deficiencies are addressed, we cannot support this bill in its current form. Children deserve a system that protects their financial wellbeing, their safety and their relationship. Parents should insist on legislation that does all three.