Senator WOODLEY (12:32 PM) —I am happy to speak first on the Child Support Legislation Amendment Bill 1998 . The bill we are considering today introduces a number of changes to the Child Support Scheme, most of which the Democrats welcome. I have found this bill to be one of the most difficult and most controversial pieces of legislation that I have had to deal with in my time as a senator. That is because there is personal involvement of so many people. In a sense, everyone has a personal involvement or experience to relate in relation to child support, divorce or issues to do with the custody and support of children.

The subject matter is highly emotive, and I have had a great many very distressing phone calls from both custodial and non-custodial parents and their partners. I cannot underline that strongly enough because, in a sense, this legislation goes to the very deepest meaning of what it is to be human—that is, it goes to relationships between husbands and wives or between partners, the future of children and their custody, et cetera. There is nothing more emotive or closer to the heart of people than this issue. I presume that every senator, every parliamentarian, in this place has had those same phone calls. The problem for us is that they come from both sides of the debate, so it is very difficult to get a balance between the phone calls.

It is not possible for any of us to deal with the contents of this bill in a completely neutral and objective way. I am sure that we are influenced, at least to some extent, by our own life experiences—no matter how hard we try not to be. If today we were asked to declare our own personal interest in this bill, I am sure that the majority of us—if we were honest—would have something to declare. Certainly, both in my professional and in my personal life I have experiences which reflect on this legislation. The problem for us is that we are never able to arrive at proper legislation by working from individual cases. That is very hard for people to understand, and sometimes we need to remind ourselves about it.

If we simply took an individual case and tried to write legislation to fit it, we would then end up with legislation which possibly did not fit anyone else's situation. I underline the fact that legislation can never be written simply from the point of view of the cases that we deal with. I recognise that for government that is one of the big issues. I know that I have raised individual cases from time to time and have beaten the government around the ear about them, but even as I do that I recognise that in the end legislation cannot be written from the point of view of individual cases, even though they do inform the debate. I think it is important that some of these issues are on the record as we struggle to come up with decent legislation. So it is a good starting point to be reminded that few of us remain untouched by issues such as these.

We know that the Child Support Agency is the subject of many complaints from both non-custodial and custodial parents. These complaints come to the Commonwealth Ombudsman and to federal members of parliament. It is interesting to note that the joint committee which examined the effectiveness of the Child Support Scheme in 1993 and 1994 received the largest number of submissions ever received by any parliamentary committee. Yet whilst there has been a recognition by both the previous Labor government and the coalition government of the shortcomings of the Child Support Scheme, until recently there seems to have been a reluctance by both governments to address these issues and—let me add—by the Democrats and all political parties, because of the difficulty of getting some kind of agreement on the issues.

Many of the shortcomings of the Child Support Scheme were identified by the major parliamentary inquiry held back in 1994. The Democrats were represented on this committee by former Senator Sid Spindler, and I believe it was something that really got very close to him as he listened to the evidence which was given. Some of the changes we are considering today are based on those which were recommended by this committee although in some cases the coalition has not gone as far as the report of the committee would have gone, and I can understand why.

While the changes which are before us today will go some way towards addressing the enormous number of complaints we receive about the operation of the Child Support Scheme every year, we believe there is still a lot of work to be done on the current scheme before we can say that it serves the custodial parent, the non-custodial parent or the children involved. One of the real problems we have in many of these cases—and I say this really out of my experience as a counsellor and a minister of religion—is that children end up almost as commodities or bargaining chips. That is a tragedy in our society. I guess it is impossible to avoid that because they do become part of the struggle between partners, but we ought, as far as possible, to write legislation which protects children from being bargaining chips in these kinds of disputes.

The Democrats appreciate many of the difficulties parents face because of the existing legislation dealing with child support and we recognise the importance of continuing to work towards developing a system which serves separated families better. In particular, I believe more effort needs to go into addressing the fact that a significant proportion of custodial parents still receive no financial assistance from their former partners at all.

In conclusion, I think this bill today and the number of very distressing letters and phone calls I have received in relation to the bill reiterate something I have felt very strongly about for a long time: that is, more resources and more effort need to be directed towards encouraging people to think twice about the responsibilities involved in having children. That is not an original statement. Someone once said that we spend enormous amounts of money on training people for occupations and giving them all kinds of skills through education to address all sorts of issues in life, except for one of the biggest issues that any person will face—the issue of dealing with relationships. That is one thing that we are very thin on in terms of pre-marriage counselling or pre-relationship counselling.

As a clergyman, of course, I have to take some of the blame for that. I do not believe that I could say that in every case where I have married people there has been adequate preparation. But there is no doubt that we have really got to do a better job in preparing people for marriage, for becoming parents and certainly in understanding the implications of any relationship that they enter into.

I believe that, while we are in a very tight economic situation, nevertheless more resources and more effort need to be directed towards encouraging people to think twice about the responsibilities involved in having children. In particular, we need to find ways to encourage people to recognise and take the responsibilities which go along with parenthood seriously, because at the moment we are seeing too many lives shattered through separation and family trauma. I have seen and tried to mitigate, by way of counselling, the damage caused by family breakdown. I sincerely believe that a lot of this damage—and a lot of the issues we are dealing with today—could be reduced through targeted marriage enrichment and through pre-marriage and pre-relationship counselling in our schools, particularly our high schools. If these were quality education campaigns we would be able to mitigate at least some of the effects of the legislation that we are dealing with.

We will be opposing one measure contained in this bill today: the section which would allow non-custodial parents to pay 25 per cent of their child support liability in in-kind payments. I indicate that, should our opposition to that fail, we will be supporting the Labor Party's amendment along those lines. We acknowledge the desire of many non- custodial parents to have a direct influence on how the money they pay for the support of their children is spent, but we have decided—this was the subject of a big debate in the party room; I am not going to say I actually won the debate on this one, but I support the party room decision, of course—that the case against this measure which has been put to us by custodial parents is a valid one. The issue many custodial parents have in relation to this change which is being proposed is that it will give non-custodial parents a degree of control over their lives that they will not be comfortable with. This is particularly important in cases where there has been a history of domestic violence or other forms of abuse.