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Senator SPINDLER (Victoria) (5.16 p.m.) --I rise to comment on the report by the Joint Select Committee on Certain Family Law Issues entitled Child support scheme: An examination of the operation and effectiveness of the scheme, to quote in full the reference that was given to the committee. In dealing with that reference, the committee had the quite major task of assessing whether an adequate balance has been achieved between the often competing interests of separated and intact families, children of first and subsequent families, custodial and non-custodial parents, and parents and taxpayers generally.

The importance of these issues in the community can be gauged from the fact that the committee received 6,197 submissions, which is the largest number of submissions ever received by any parliamentary committee. In assessing that volume of concerns, the committee had to bear in mind one principle which is enshrined in the Family Law Act--that is, the child's welfare must be the major concern.

The committee addressed its collective mind to the order of priorities that should be used in the child support scheme. I believe that it is a useful guideline in this area. According to the committee, the order of priority should be, firstly, that adequate support is available to all children not living with both parents; secondly, that non-custodial parents contribute to the child support payments according to their capacity to pay; and, thirdly, that Commonwealth expenditure is limited to the minimum necessary to ensure adequate support for children. The committee was conscious of the fact that, sometimes in the past, there seems to have been a concern to protect the Commonwealth's purse--particularly on the part of the Taxation Office--perhaps at the expense of some of the families and children who had to rely on the child support scheme to obtain reasonable contributions to their cost of living.

The committee has made 163 recommendations concerning the operations of the Child Support Agency and the child support formula. The issues are obviously complex and it would be foolhardy to claim that we have arrived at the best possible solutions. It is an area which will require continual monitoring and, I suspect, numerous amendments in the future. I think it is fair to say that, in many ways, the committee was hampered in its work by inadequate information and research available in many areas, quite apart from the value judgments that have to be made. We need to be conscious, therefore, that formulae do not solve all the real and often traumatic rearrangements which follow a divorce. But the overriding duty, of course, is to provide security of income to custodial parents and the children they look after. In that sense, I support what has been said by others--that the principle of the child support scheme has been unanimously found to be valid by the committee and that we must persevere in achieving its best possible operation.

I note in passing that the child support scheme was one of the original terms of reference for the family law inquiry, but was considered then to have been outside the terms of that inquiry. However, I am very pleased that it has now become the subject of a separate inquiry.

I wish to record my appreciation of the valuable work and effort that every member of the secretariat gave unstintingly to this inquiry. I know it has taken many nights, quite apart from weekends and normal working hours, to provide the material on which the committee could base its decisions, and credit is due to a team which has worked extremely well.

When we look at the prime responsibility of the Child Support Agency--that is, to collect and pass on the child support payments according to a formula--we must conclude that the record is not brilliant. The agency claims a collection rate of 75 per cent. However, this rate is not supported by the facts. It excludes $202 million of child support due under default assessments and includes private collection cases which involve no action by the agency. If these were taken into account, the proportion of successful collections would be of the order of 38 per cent--not a particularly brilliant performance. I will return to that point in a moment.

The committee also received considerable evidence from non-custodial parents claiming bias against them. In particular, it was charged that the scheme refers to the capacity of only non-custodial parents to pay and that it should place greater emphasis on the capacity of both parent to pay. It is an area that the committee has dealt with in considerable detail. Some of its recommendations are addressed to this area and will alleviate some of the concerns, at least in part.

The agency was established in 1988 as a division of the tax office. The problems the agency faced can be gauged by the rapid growth in case load from 23,380 in 1988-89 to 275,218 in May 1994. This is a case load that is growing at the rate of 7,000 per month and the staff employed by the agency is expected to reach 1,600 at the end of 1994-95. Clearly, the resources of the agency are stretched in coping with this rapidly growing case load. So much so that we have had reports--quite apart from evidence to the committee from users of the scheme who have found difficulties with it--from other agencies, in particular the Ombudsman, that the complaints against the agency tend to be repeated year after year.

Amongst the complaints that have been lodged and the reasons identified by the committee for the judgment that the management of the agency is not all it could be are, firstly, the failure to appreciate that the agency must supply a service both to custodial and to non-custodial parents; and, secondly, there is an over-reliance on the financial culture of the Taxation Office. It was very clear to the committee that there needs to be a much stronger service orientation and that this must be reflected in the staff training of the agency. There was also quite obviously a lack of corporate support from the Taxation Office to the agency--for instance, in the location of non-payers--and generally a poor level of coordination and cooperation between the Child Support Agency, the Taxation Office and the Department of Social Security.

The inaction and lack of service to clients, which is reflected in the way in which clients are dealt with by this agency, is really quite appalling and it is inexcusable that this has been allowed to go on for some considerable length of time. Many of the areas that need rectification lie in the methods employed by the agency. But, I repeat: most could be rectified to a very large extent by the agency adopting a different attitude--an attitude that sees the people serviced by the agency as clients who require support in a period of their lives which is quite traumatic, rather than as people to be got rid of as quickly as possible.

We heard evidence of many delays in application, registration and collection procedures, both at agency level and at the initial application stage. It has been established that there is a delay of approximately 142 days between the start date of liability and the day upon which the Department of Social Security pays the custodian the first child support payment, and that is really quite appalling. Another statistic which is evidence of the inadequacy of the management and performance of the agency is that there is a build-up of 65 days of child support arrears before the non-custodial parent is informed of the amount of the child support liability. The committee has made a number of recommendations in this area. We estimate that the delay of 142 days can be reduced by approximately 63 days.

The changes that the committee has recommended will, I trust, encourage a more positive relationship between the Child Support Agency and non-custodial parents. They should improve the level of voluntary compliance under the scheme; they should reduce the current reliance on collection by the agency; and, overall, they will reduce the cost of administering the scheme. All of these changes are in the area of giving non-custodial parents the option of paying voluntarily rather than being automatically placed in the withholding category. It is certainly a development that should be pursued by the agency and I trust that the recommendations of the committee will lead to that. It is quite clear that many parents would have opted for this method but for the arrangements under the agency's operations which mitigate against this development.

Mr Acting Deputy President, the committee believes that the recommendations that have been made by the committee will lead to an overhaul. However, as I have said before, no matter how many amendments and changes are made as a result of these recommendations, we cannot expect to have heard the final word on the operation of the Child Support Agency. It is necessary to comment briefly on the recommendations made in the area of the child support formula. Two recommendations stand out in dealing with what has been seen as a somewhat unfair distribution of load. In particular, the joint committee has recommended that the custodial parents disregarded income level be reduced to the applicable pension cut-off point, currently $19,723. Similarly, to shift the load between custodial and non-custodial parents a little further, the committee has also recommended that the non-custodial parent basic formula support component be increased by 20 per cent, from $8,221 to $9,865.

I believe that these changes, while certainly not very far-reaching, indicate the complexity of the situation. The committee found itself constrained both by the amount of information available to it and by the quite significant changes in liability which result from even minimal changes to the formula. It is an area that will need to be monitored on a continuing basis and I suspect that this chamber will again be considering the Child Support Agency and the way it operates in the not too distant future.