Ngaro Alfred: Child Support Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Ngaro Alfred: Child Support Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 08 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2030. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
ALFRED NGARO (National) 
: 
 I am happy to take a call in support of the Child Support Amendment Bill going to the Social Services Committee where it will receive equitable debate as is the convention for fair just and robust discussion. Family breakups can be difficult and traumatic and often it is the children who suffer the most. Financial instability following a breakup is all too common in our communities.  
I firstly want to commend the Minister for ensuring that this bill has been strongly shaped by intensive consultation. Discussion on the Government’s  
Supporting children 
 discussion document ran through September and October last year and there were nearly 2300 submissions. There was a huge range of strongly held views with submission themes including arguments for both the adequacy and the excessiveness of child support payments about how they were calculated and recognising shared care and the impact that a child support formula based on the income of both parents would have on the incentive for parents to work or increase their earnings. The strong views served only to confirm the view that the current child support regime is both outdated and sometimes unfair. The system focused too heavily on penalties and people were not coming forward to the Inland Revenue Department to make payments. So the debt sat at $2 billion and 60 percent of that debt was from overdue penalty payments.  
These proposed changes would see more flexibility in situations of hardship and payments would and could be made through instalments. So what are the changes that are being introduced? There are changes to payment penalties and the write-off rules. The rules relating to payment penalties and write-off play an important role in encouraging parents to meet their child support obligations on time. Debt from unpaid child support is $2 billion and 60 percent of the debt is from unpaid penalty payments. What happens is people get behind in their payments and they incur interest and penalties. The figures get to be very huge and they drop out of the system because it becomes just much too difficult.  
The changes in the bill are aimed at better encouraging the facilitating parents to make timely payments of child support. The bill firstly allows for compulsory deductions of child support from the employment income of paying parents. It introduces a two-stage initial penalty with the current full 10 percent being charged only if the debt remains unpaid after 7 days. It reduces the incremental monthly payment from 2 percent to 1 percent after a year of non-compliance complemented by intensive case management by the Inland Revenue Department. It relaxes the circumstances in which penalties can be written off including where a paying parent enters into an instalment arrangement or is in such serious hardship that debt recovery is a demonstrably inefficient use of the department’s resources or where only a low level of penalty debt is outstanding. Lastly it allows the department to write off on serious hardship grounds assessed debt owed to the Crown in relation to a receiving carer who is a beneficiary.  
These changes bring New Zealand into line with Australian policy. New Zealand has a mutual agreement with Australia for child support payment cases and the law will make it easier to deal with unpaid child support. I stand in support of this amendment bill for its support for the children who are most at need. Thank you.