Child Support and Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Ending Financial Abuse in the Child Support Scheme No. 1) Bill 2026
Mr NG (Menzies) (12:44): I rise today 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. This is the next step in our government's ongoing fight to end the scourge of family violence. We know and I think everybody in this parliament knows that family violence is all too common in Australia.
We know the statistics. A woman is killed every 11 days by an intimate partner, and a man is killed every 26 days by an intimate partner. These are not acceptable numbers.
These are most serious consequences of the family and domestic violence epidemic. It's just the tip of the iceberg. We know that there's far more violence that occurs in a home that might not result in a fatality but could result still in serious injury and lifelong trauma.
We know too that children exposed to family violence can have issues throughout their lives and are more likely to enter into a relationship where they might suffer family violence. It causes intergenerational trauma. We know as well that physical violence is not the only form of family violence.
There's also coercive control and financial abuse and systems abuse, and that's what this bill seeks to address. The Prime Minister has shown leadership in this area and has shown a deep commitment to addressing family violence and systems abuse and financial abuse. The Minister for Social Services and the Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence have also led this really important work.
It's shared by every member of this government, and I know it's shared by almost every member of this parliament, knowing, as we do, that in our electorate offices we and our staff deal regularly with people who are suffering family violence and a range of issues that that raises. They are issues that our offices and that our staff work really hard to help them overcome—legal issues, issues with their property, financial issues and issues with government services.
This bill would ensure that we're closing some of the loopholes. My friend the member for Sturt put it so eloquently. We're closing some of those loopholes that are exploited by abusers and also exploited by people who seek to avoid their responsibility towards their children.
Financial abuse is controlling or limiting access to household money. It can be your own or it can be somebody else's money, but it is making sure that, perhaps, your partner isn't able to access their bank account to do the weekly shopping or to get things that they need for themselves or for the kids. It's more controlling behaviour and, we know, part of that pattern of coercive control that can be an indicator for more serious forms of family violence.
It is also, in and of itself, a form of family violence. It doesn't require that somebody is financially dependent on their partner. It can also be a risk if you're financially independent.
For example, you can force or coerce someone to take out loans in your name or to form a business in your name. In the case of formal relationships, it can also take the form of refusing to pay child support. The systems abuse aspect is the manipulation of government services or legal systems to exert control and to threaten or harass a partner.
It could be using the courts. I've worked in the courts and have seen regularly that abusers might make multiple appeals against, say, family violence orders to make sure that their partners are continually dragged back into the legal system and that they're able to exert control over them in that way. They're able to continue to cause them stress and they're able to continue to cause them pain by forcing them to go through vexatious legal proceedings.
It can also be through the abuse of Centrelink, and it can be through the abuse of the child support system. That is what this bill seeks to address. The child support system exists to ensure that both parents contribute appropriate levels of financial support to raising their own child.
It's like an independent facilitator. When a relationship has broken down, or perhaps when a relationship didn't exist in the first place, both parents still have a responsibility to their child. It supports around one million Australian children and it ensures that the significant cost of raising a child is shared appropriately by both parents.
As the members for Sturt and Griffith have covered, it's essentials like food and clothes, school uniforms, school costs, health care—things that no parent should deny their child. The child support system should make sure that any disagreement or animosity between separated parents doesn't mean that their children miss out, and the child support system should also be never used to perpetrate systems abuse.
Nonetheless, we know from the hearings and the inquiries that have been held that this is happening. We thank those that have contributed to those inquiries so that we can move this bill today and end the loophole in these laws. Evidence provided to the financial abuse inquiry, to the Commonwealth Ombudsman and to a range of family organisations has highlighted the circumstances where the Child Support Scheme has been manipulated to cause harm.
As I said, this is something that people in our office hear about regularly. People contact us about child support debts that have been raised, about Centrelink debts that have been raised, and our staff very skilfully, very kindly and very empathically help them. We know that there is almost $2 billion in unpaid child support across Australia, and that more than 100,000 parents and carers in the child support system are recorded as having experienced or are at risk of experiencing family and domestic violence.
That is why we are acting. In the 2026 2027 budget, our government announced a $182.6 million investment to make sure the child support system is safer, fairer and more effective. This bill represents the first stage of these reforms.
It delivers on our election commitments to address financial abuse in Commonwealth systems, because child support should never be weaponised. It should be used as support and never to facilitate harm. In the 2020 627 budget, the government announced the most significant reforms in the Child Support Scheme in many decades.
The bill contains three measures: the first will better protect parents in the systems from harm; the second will remove harms that can arise from the link between child support and the family tax benefit; and the third is to improve support for children overseas born to an Australian parent. The first schedule of this bill reduces the harmful use of the Child Support Scheme.
One of the more concerning findings from the recent reviews is that some individuals are using processes within the scheme to harass or intimidate an intimate partner. It might occur when one partner uses repeated or vexatious applications or objections which the other partner is forced to respond to, making them go through more stressful bureaucratic processes.
Imagine you've left a violent relationship, you've broken off contact with your partner or you're limiting contact with your partner, and they use the child support system to send you repeated messages and drag you through repeated bureaucratic processes just to continue to exert control upon you. This bill provides Services Australia with the power to refuse an application where there's evidence that it's being abused.
Where an objection has no or little reasonable prospect of success or would only have a marginal impact on the outcome of a case, it may be dismissed without unnecessarily involving the other parent. This schedule also addresses concerns about the sharing of sensitive information. Currently, parents, when they are seeking a change of assessment, require that detailed personal documents like financial records—Imagine your bank records, which would show all of your transactions, personal information or contact details—must be exchanged between the parties.
For some individuals, particularly victim-survivors of family violence, I'm sure you can understand that those personal contact details can create real safety concerns. Under this bill, Services Australia will be able to redact or summarise documents to prevent that sensitive information being released. Disclosure can occur in ways that not only protect privacy but also maintain procedural fairness.
The second schedule strengthens child support collection arrangements. It addresses a problem that many Australians would consider to be fundamentally unfair. Under current arrangements, when a paying parent fails to lodge tax returns for multiple years and subsequently lodges them all at once, child support liabilities can be recalculated retrospectively.
This might reveal significant underpayments in child support, but it also means that family tax benefit entitlements can be reassessed. As a result, a receiving parent might accumulate a family tax benefit debt not through any fault of their own but because their former partner or the parent of their child has failed to lodge their tax returns in a timely way.
For families under financial pressure, having a debt arise suddenly can be devastating. So this bill introduces a three-month pause on the recovery of certain family tax benefit debts that arise in these circumstances and gives families time to consider their options and pursue outstanding supports in a manner of their choosing. The third schedule improves access to child support across international borders.
It recognises that families can span countries and continents, especially in our increasingly multicultural society where people can be from different countries and where relationships can be across borders. Parents who live in Australia might have a child overseas or might have had a relationship break down where the parents are from different countries of origin, or maybe they've had a holiday romance or another situation arise where there's a child as a result of that.
This ensures that that Australian parent is meeting their responsibilities to provide child support and to provide for essentials a child needs, like food and clothing and medical care. These reforms will also be supported through practical assistance for vulnerable families, including single mothers in the Philippines who are seeking child support from Australian fathers who have failed to meet their responsibilities.
These are just part of wider actions taken by the Albanese Labor government on family violence. We've invested more than $4.4 billion in addressing this. We know that there's still more to do, but it demonstrates our real commitment to ending the scourge of family and domestic violence and ending harm against women and children within a generation.
One of our first acts in government was legislating 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave for every worker, including casuals. People shouldn't have to choose between having to give up their job or annual leave—especially for single-parent families, where they might have to do things like cover school holidays—and escaping a violent relationship or seeking a better, safer situation for their families.
We've also got the $5,000 leaving violence payment. That's been made permanent, and it means that people will receive that assistance to set up a new household and that there are not going to be financial barriers stopping somebody from leaving a violent situation with their children. We also know that the biggest reason that women and children may stay in a violent relationship or stay in a violent home is that they have nowhere safe to go.
That's why we've also invested $100 million in crisis and transitional accommodation, funding 42 projects across the country, including in my community in Menzies. There are also a further $1 billion through the National Housing Infrastructure Facility and $300 million announced to expand the Housing Australia Future Fund to make sure that people who want to leave a violent relationship have somewhere to go.
I'd like to acknowledge some of the workers in the family and domestic violence space. As the Minister for Social Services has said, they're some of the best people in our society. We had a delegation from the Australian Services Union visit my office recently, through their 'Skilled, Respected, Equal' campaign.
We know that people who work in the social and community sector are often on the front line of the family violence epidemic. We spoke with financial counsellors and people who worked at community legal centres and disability support workers. We know that they love their jobs.
They're passionate about their jobs, but the pay they receive doesn't always reflect the complexity or the difficulty of the work that they do. So we're supporting them with an investment of $630 million to deliver a fairer pay, and we will continue to work with them to make sure that they get fairer pay.