Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. I just want to say before I go into the details of the bill that every child no matter their family situation should have the means and should be unconditionally supported to thrive. It should not be a matter of whether they're in a traditional Western-style Victorian-era family or should be raised by a staunch sole parent or by a whole village. It does not matter. We should be enabling children to have what they need in order to lead healthy and thriving lives. And the Child Support (Pass On) Acts Amendment Bill will go some way towards that.It will within this slightly problematic child support system ensure that caregivers are receiving child support payments. And this will affect tens of thousands of sole parents and lift a significant amount of children out of poverty. On average children will be about $20 better off as a result of this bill. And I think it's great that we're seeing broad support across the House for this bill.But I do want to push back on the repeated assertions particularly from the National Party on benefit dependency and children growing up in benefit-dependent households. I could have run a tally on how many times that has been said because then the member who keeps speaking about poor outcomes coming from growing up in a benefit-dependent household actually goes to the fact that it may be that benefits are too low to live on. Maybe has the member questioned the fact that these families have poor outcomes because we have created and designed a system to keep them in poverty—a political choice that the member's party has upheld; a political choice that for far too many successive Governments we've created. So I don't want to be hearing from that side of the House about benefit-dependent households having all these poor outcomes when these are the decisions that these members have taken in order to create a system that keeps calling our caregivers the most demeaning things when actually we should all be rallying behind our caregivers to support them.This bill as I say will go some way towards that. But from the Green Party perspective there are things that we would have liked to go further because ultimately children should just be getting—in my view and in the Greens' view—a universal child payment. An unconditional payment that is not tied to the family structure; one that allows people to thrive. We also through the select committee process saw that because of the way that the child support pass on will be treated as income it will have complex interactions with things like the income-related rent subsidy and with your benefit entitlements. And we do acknowledge that the benefit system is already complicated to navigate and to understand your full and correct entitlements. So we do have concerns about this creating additional complexities while acknowledging the benefits that it will bring to households. In an ideal world with a longer select committee process this could have been hashed through but submitters who presented to this bill were overwhelmingly in favour of this. And having worked at the front line supporting people to access their entitlements at Work and Income $20 may not seem like heaps but it is cumulative and it is about the end goal that we're working towards which is not just to mildly alleviate poverty but to hopefully end it. That should be the goal.I take that the members to my right were also talking about hoping that we can all come together to not support any child growing up in poverty but when those statements are coupled with political decisions that have historically sanctioned sole parents and have created punitive conditions for sole parents for say in the past not naming the other parent of the child in the birth certificate it's hard to take those comments seriously because ultimately if we're not putting all of our efforts to ensure that all caregivers have level incomes and the means to preference children that's just rhetoric; it's not action.So the Green Party will be supporting this bill. We look forward to unpacking those complex interactions. But things like income-related rent subsidies for benefit entitlements and as the previous speaker from ACT mentioned the sort of distinction we've made for the unsupported child's benefit for the purposes of treating it as income. So we're looking forward to those exchanges with the Minister and the Green Party supports this bill.