Lee Melissa: Child Support Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Lee Melissa: Child Support Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 08 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2027. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MELISSA LEE (National) 
: 
 It is a disappointment that the Green Party does not actually support the Child Support Amendment Bill because I thought that party was actually concerned about the welfare of children. However I am very glad that the Labour Party supports this because we will actually debate this issue in the Social Services Committee and hear from submitters and that will be a good opportunity to see where the country is actually at.  
It is a great pleasure to rise in support of the first reading of the Child Support Amendment Bill introduced by Minister Dunne into the House. The New Zealand child support scheme provides financial support for more than 210000 children in this country. Many parents do reach private agreement on how they are going to split their financial and care responsibility for their children and I am one of those people. I am a sole mother I am a divorcee and I have come to an agreement with my ex-husband on how we were looking after my child and how we were going to be taking responsibility both financially and in terms of the care of my son.  
There are many who cannot come to this kind of agreement and that is when the child support scheme kicks in. The scheme was created back in 1992 to provide a backup. A lot of people have talked about this as a backup for those who cannot agree on how the financial and care responsibilities are shared among the parents and how to support their children in the best possible way. It also applies when the recipient of that support is on a benefit which is a Government payment and so it should be—rightly so. This is because the primary assumption is that the paying parent is in fact the sole income earner—and in the past it has been so—and that the receiving parent is the main care provider for the child.  
As you know society has actually changed and the main care provider is not necessarily just the mother. Often it is the father who actually stays at home with the child so we need to hear from the men who are the sole carers for the children as well. I think it would be a very very interesting select committee to hear from the people who are in that particular situation. It is really wrong to assume as well because there will be a lot of fathers out there who are in fact in that situation and they will want to make sure that the system is fair to them as well.  
For the majority of parents the current scheme actually works as it is a straightforward way of calculating liability. But there are concerns that the scheme is out of date as other speakers have mentioned earlier. Many parents have an agreement to share the care as I said and the cost for their children but often the arrangements do not qualify as shared care for the purposes of the current child support formula. The current payment liabilities do not accurately reflect the true expenditure involved in raising children in New Zealand. The changes in this amendment bill are to allay these concerns to make the system fairer and more transparent. The calculation for child support payments will take a wider range of individual circumstances into consideration.  
Perhaps I should have actually considered that my child was going to grow up and was going to eat me out of home and house when we agreed on a financial agreement between my husband and me. Teenagers’ needs are quite different to those of a child who is in nappies. I am very pleased that the new amendment takes into account that the costs for a young child are quite different to the amounts needed for teenagers who are in our home who actually eat you out of home and house. The bill also includes changes to rules on payments for child support penalties and writing off of penalties.  
I would like to talk about some of the changes. The basic summary of the changes in this amendment will be based on the following three factors. First there is a wider recognition of shared care. Because both parents are often working I think it is unfair to assume that only one parent is solely in charge. Shared care needs to be recognised. Sometimes parents do know what is best and they do care for their children. When we talk about the 28 percent threshold that is 2 nights a week and those parents who do care for children 2 nights a week should be recognised as well instead of only those who reach the 40 percent threshold. The income of both parents will be considered and the estimated average expenditure for raising children in New Zealand will be taken into consideration. The thing that I would like to talk about is the current formula. It recognises the threshold of 40 percent of nights where if my child was to stay with his father for 40 percent of nights that is recognised. But what if he was staying there for 2 nights a week? His father is taking responsibility and he is actually paying towards my son so I think it would be unfair to assume that he is not. I think having that tiered threshold is very very important and I think it goes towards the fairness of this amendment bill.  
The income component of the amendment takes into consideration whether a paying parent has other dependent children. Would it not be fantastic if we could pay as much as we could to every single child in our household? But often when you actually look at a parent who is liable and who might—as I think Holly Walker said—go into a different relationship then that person has a responsibility to the new partner and perhaps also to another child that that relationship creates. What kind of responsibility does that father or mother have? I would have hoped it was equal responsibility but the thing is that person has only one income. I think we need to be fair and decide what is in fact the fair amount that the liable parent should pay towards the child they are liable for.  
This is a good bill and I look forward to the debates that we are going to have in the select committee. I look forward to the submissions from the public especially from the parents who actually have the personal experience that they can bring to the select committee for us to consider. I commend this bill to the House.