Menéndez March Ricardo; Russell DeborahRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. So in the second reading I alluded to the issue of the child support pass-on being treated as income for the purposes of benefit entitlements and eligibility for the income-related rent subsidy. Hopefully she can hear me better. And one of the things I was interested in in terms of the bill's potential for child poverty reduction was—it's my understanding that there was no analysis being done around the sort of distributional impacts—well mostly child reduction impacts—there would have been if the child support pass-on hadn't been treated as income for the purposes of benefit eligibility. And I guess I want to get the Minister's reflection about whether this could have been a missed opportunity in terms of—because I've heard the arguments right? But if we didn't treat it as income you could then have people in theory double-dipping into a benefit and receiving child support none the less. But I guess the trade-off is that the gains for those families on a benefit would have been considerably higher and therefore the number of children that we could have lifted out of poverty would have also been significantly higher. And ultimately because the child support payment is supposed to go to the child and the benefit in and of itself is just supposed to go to the household I'm curious to get some analysis as to whether the Minister at any point had considered exploring something different. And in terms of the income-related rent subsidy eligibility while I understand that there will be very few people who fully lose it I guess I'm just interested in her reflections on how that will impact housing affordability. Lastly when it comes to the impact this will have in terms of people's placement in the public housing waiting list I was curious to also get a sense of how this may impact in the long term people's placement in the public housing waiting list in terms of those people who would have otherwise been high priority. We don't expect many if any people—basically we expect an insignificant amount of people dropping from the public housing waiting list. But inevitably in terms of their priority numbers there will be some people who will be affected and so I wanted to get the Minister's reflections around whether any work could go on to ensure that people who hadn't been considered adequately housed are now considered to be adequately housed.Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Minister of Statistics): I thank the member for his questions. I'll answer them as best I can. In terms of why child support that is passed on to the receiving parent will be treated as income for benefit purposes it's important to remember that it doesn't mean that people won't get the benefit; it just means that the income that is taken into account for when the benefit starts to abate will include the child support received. What it does is it places people who receive child support payments in the same sort of place as people who perhaps earn some extra income through wages and the like. It treats it in the same way. But of course there is actually just straightforwardly a parity issue within the law there anyway. For other beneficiaries who received child support payments already and have received them in full because they're perhaps partnered or something like that already those payments are taken into account as income for calculating eligibility for benefit or how much they might receive in terms of benefit. So couple of reasons there. One is it ends up treating sole parents in the same way as partnered parents are treated for the purposes of child support pass-on. So that's a straightforward parity reason there. And the other one is just that that does count as income and it also treats that income in a similar way to wage income that sole parents might receive.In terms of what impact it might have on accommodation assistance and housing allowances and the like of course the major constraint on when people can access public housing is simply the number of public houses available. So rather than the particular income they might have if they are on the list they are on the list and their eligibility criteria are taken into account as best possible. That includes how much income they receive and of course typically a whole variety of other circumstances. So I don't think this particular measure in and of itself would have had a dramatic effect on that.