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Mr WAKELIN (Grey) (10.15 a.m.) --Mr Deputy Speaker, I will touch on a range of subjects this morning concerning Australia generally, but particularly regional Australia......

The next subject I will touch on this morning is the Child Support Agency. I want to highlight three simple propositions. The adversarial nature of this business when we are seeing a rise in marriage breakdown highlights the problem in a very dramatic way. I know the parliamentary inquiry and the report highlighted this in many ways, and the response from the community was unprecedented.

Firstly, I believe there needs to be far greater incentive in the system, free of government interference--free, if you like, of the Child Support Agency approach--which gives incentives to both parties to negotiate with a much stronger sense of good faith rather than at times with a sense of vindictiveness at a time when a relationship is at its most fragile.

I also wish to highlight this morning that I believe there needs to be far greater recognition of the income of the custodial parent along with that of the non-custodial parent. The fact that people can have between 18 per cent and 40 per cent of their gross income taken from them in a summary fashion seems to me inappropriate.

The third point I wish to make about the Child Support Agency is that it is ironically the harshest, it seems, on those, particularly women, who are part of a second relationship. As a marriage breaks down and the pain of that is dealt with and people move on to a second relationship, that relationship should not be penalised by, I suppose, historical legislation, and certainly not by historical baggage. No-one who has visited my office has denied their responsibility to care for children, but they do believe it should be much fairer, much more balanced, and able to be dealt with in a spirit of reconciliation, particularly for the children.