Goodhew Jo: Child Support Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
Goodhew Jo: Child Support Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
[Volume:633;Page:5147] 
JO GOODHEW (National—Aoraki) 
: 
 Well it is interesting. The Minister has said that this issue is about kids in trauma and that it is a hard issue and he has admitted that he does not think this solution is a perfect one. Well that really says it all does it not? The Child Support Amendment Bill (No 4) which I rise to oppose brings me to wonder what the main message here is. The purpose is apparently—I think it is perplexing—to “increase the compliance of parents who are not currently meeting their child support obligations”. I believe that the obligations of a parent should be heartfelt. Personally I do not believe that this bill will encourage any heartfelt obligations to be met. 
How big is the problem? We have half a billion dollars in penalties and nearly as much again in original debt so it is a big problem. But what message will the bill send? Well the message being sent to liable parents is to hold off paying long enough and the Government will reward the people who have not paid and if they ignore their obligations for long enough the Government will feel sorry for them when they do not pay and send along a reward—a reduction in what those people owe. The message is being heard loud and clear. Retrospectively wiping debt—the liable parents’ debt—seems to be the flavour of the moment. That is how we could describe this bill. 
What would happen I might ask if I was late in paying my tax and incurred a penalty? What would happen if I was late in paying my GST? Let me tell members that I know what would happen. One day I sent off in the same envelope two cheques for GST. I must have been in a dream when I filled them out because I filled them out for the right amount but I put one date on one cheque and another date on the next. I was wrong by 1 day—and I received a penalty. The cheques were in the same envelope and I received a penalty. Maybe I should have waited around a while in the hope that someone would bring in a bill that would mean the debt would be wiped in order to encourage me to pay properly the next time. Really the encouragement that I needed was just to pay up what I owed which was that GST on the correct date. I learnt that lesson the hard way. 
Liable parents visit my office not to ask me how to avoid paying what they owe but mostly to tell me about how hard they are working to pay what they owe. They often talk about the fact that they feel they are paying much more than what they owe and that it is not being credited to them. They are the very responsible liable parents who are forgotten about. They are not the ones who have almost a billion dollars’ worth of debt—half of that in actual debt and half in penalties. We have heard from my esteemed colleague Judith Collins about that $281 million worth of debt owed by overseas-based liable parents and it is important that that money be recovered. We have heard from Paula Bennett that there are agreeable elements in the bill and the Minister has praised her for bringing those forward. 
But what evidence does this Government have that wiping the half billion dollars’ worth of penalties will in fact send any message other than “Get out of jail free”? That is the message this bill will send. If people doubt my use of the “Get out of jail free” phrase I refer them to the fact that our jails are increasingly becoming more full of fine defaulters. That is what we do with other fine defaulters yet these people will escape the responsibility of their debt. If they had paid their debt from day one or whenever they could have arranged to pay it in the early days it would not have become so insurmountable. 
This bill was an election year creation and the cynic in me says that it was to show that the Government was willing to tackle the enormous debt that had been identified by organisations other than the Government. I note that my colleagues have expressed some disappointment in the mechanism of this bill. I was not present in the select committee to hear the submissions but I have heard disappointingly that the bill does not address many of the concerns that were raised by submitters to the Social Services Committee. I agree that supporting children is a parent’s primary responsibility but I do not believe that this bill will necessarily bring that about.