Walker Holly: Child Support Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Walker Holly: Child Support Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 08 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2025. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
HOLLY WALKER (Green) 
: 
 It has not been easy for the Green Party to decide whether or not to support this bill the Child Support Amendment Bill. This bill in our view is somewhat like the proverbial curate’s egg: parts of it are good and parts of it are bad. The Green Party has on balance decided to oppose this bill although we acknowledge that some of the changes it makes to the child support regime have merit. I want to first address the things that we do like about the Child Support Amendment Bill.  
It has long been a concern of the Green Party that it is all too easy for non-custodial parents to minimise their child support obligations particularly if they are wealthy and they are therefore those who should in fact be paying the most to provide financial support for their children. The current child support arrangements permit such wealthy parents—and almost invariably we are talking about fathers in this category who engage in this type of activity—to use complex arrangements involving companies and trusts to minimise their nominal income and therefore their child support obligations. This bill will allow the child support agency to go behind many of these rorts and ensure that wealthy parents pay their true child support obligations rather than using artificial devices to avoid them. To that extent we commend this bill.  
I also want to commend the bill for taking a more sensible approach to the penalty regime for the late payment of child support or non-payment of child support. The harsh penalty regime that currently operates when non-custodial parents do not meet their obligations ironically actually provides a strong disincentive for those who fall behind with their payments to re-engage with the system and the child support agency and resume making their payments. So the Green Party is pleased that this bill introduces greater flexibility to the penalty regime. This will make it more likely that those who are in default actually re-engage and re-engage earlier with the child support system.  
I turn now to the aspects of the bill that the Green Party has concerns about and the reasons on balance why we have decided not to support this bill. The bill will reduce the child support liability of parents who are not the primary caregivers. This includes both those who have their children living with them for 2 or more days a week and those who have started new families. Currently non-custodial parents must have the child or children 40 percent of the nights in a year in order to qualify for a reduction in the amount of support they must pay. Under this bill that will drop to just 28 percent of the nights in a year. This means for example that a father with two children who currently contributes $7400 a year to the mother’s expenses in caring for the children and who has his children for on average 2 nights a week which is a fairly standard example under this bill would have to pay only $2600 a year. That is a massive reduction of 64 percent in his child support liability.  
There seems to be an assumption in this bill that shared care is always a good thing and that the child support regime should be geared towards encouraging such arrangements. I wish to challenge that assumption. Shared care is clearly not always in the best interest of the children and it is the best interest of the children that we should have in mind at all times. Where one parent is violent or otherwise abusive shared care is not in the interest of those children. Nor is shared care in the best interest of children if it impacts negatively on the financial stability of their family. I fear that this bill will incentivise separated parents to enter into shared-care arrangements not because it is in the best interest of the children but because one parent—and this will usually be the father—sees the arrangement as a means of minimising child support liability.  
I do wonder to what extent some aspects of this bill that appear to be really designed to placate non-custodial parents have been influenced by the very vocal and grumpy fathers groups out there on the fringes. I think they are epitomised by the notorious self-styled dad4justice in the blogosphere whom members may be familiar with. These are the fathers who view their children effectively as their chattels and they have made it very clear through their actions that their motivations are not what is in the best interest of their children but their own self-perceived rights including the minimising of their child support obligations.  
The Green Party also has concerns that this bill appears to assume that if a non-custodial parent re-partners or moves in with a new partner that new partner is a dependant for the purposes of child support and a reduction in the non-custodial parent’s child support liability consequently occurs. That seems to provide another loophole in a child support regime that is already riddled with loopholes that allow non-custodial parents to minimise their financial responsibility for their children.  
I acknowledge that no formula-based child support system is ever going to be totally fair and the Green Party’s response to this bill has very much been one of balancing up the competing priorities. However we believe that the test in this instance and we have heard this from other speakers should be what is in the best interest of the children. On balance this bill because it opens as many loopholes as it closes in terms of ensuring that non-custodial parents take the appropriate level of financial responsibility for their children appears to fail that test. The Green Party had hoped that the Government’s review of child support would look afresh at the whole basis for the child support regime afresh. The fundamental principles for a child support regime should be the primacy of the well-being of our nation’s children and New Zealand’s commitment to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Instead this bill has resulted from a review that has involved little more I fear than tinkering around the edges of the child support regime and I fear listening most closely to those who have made the most noise. Although it has some elements that the Green Party supports we cannot support this bill as a whole and we will not be voting to send it to the select committee.