I’ve been read­ing the dis­cus­sion doc­u­ment for the pro­posed changes to the child sup­port regime.   It took me for­ever to find the thing – god knows I spend far too much time on the IRD web­site as it is, so I hon­estly thought I knew my way around the site.   Appar­ently not.  Any­how, I found it even­tu­ally, and so can you:  http://www.supportingchildren.ird.govt.nz/

The first thing I noticed is how much more com­pli­cated the pro­posed new for­mula is for cal­cu­lat­ing child sup­port lia­bil­ity.  Cur­rently, you take the pay­ing parent’s income, deduct a liv­ing allowance, and then mul­ti­ply it by a per­cent­age (depen­dent on how many kids you’re pay­ing for), and hey presto, there’s your child sup­port bill.  Under the new for­mula, you take both par­ents incomes, deduct a liv­ing allowance for each of them, and use a pro­gres­sive sys­tem to cal­cu­late an amount which appar­ently rep­re­sents the cost of look­ing after the chil­dren.  Then, you mul­ti­ply this fig­ure by the pay­ing par­ents income (after the liv­ing allowance), and divide by the sum of both par­ents net incomes, to find the total lia­bil­ity.  Very com­pli­cated indeed.  One won­ders if the addi­tional money allo­cated to the IRD to inves­ti­gate tax fraud cases will end up being used to employ more staff in the Child Sup­port Depart­ment instead…. but more likely, you’ll just have to wait on hold longer when you try to call them.

Now, before I go on any fur­ther, I want to clar­ify a cou­ple of things.  Firstly, I agree that the child sup­port regime needs an over­haul.  The cur­rent sys­tem doesn’t reflect the addi­tional costs that a non-primary care­giver incurs in car­ing for their child – after all, it costs Daddy just as much to  pro­vide an extra bed­room for Lit­tle Johnny as it does for Mummy.  It’s also not fair that some par­ents pay an absolute for­tune in child sup­port, and then the cus­to­dial par­ent does every­thing they can to pre­vent access.   I absolutely believe that fathers should, in all but the most extreme cases, be allowed  - nay, encour­aged – to have a rela­tion­ship with their chil­dren.  It is, after all, in the best inter­ests of the child to have a lov­ing rela­tion­ship with both parents.

But, I’m sorry, I’ve got a few prob­lems with the pro­posed changes.  Firstly – the new for­mula, being based on both parent’s incomes, doesn’t seem to allow for the sce­nario where a par­ent is pay­ing child sup­port to sev­eral ex-partners.  I’ve searched the entire doc­u­ment to find a clause spec­i­fy­ing how such a sit­u­a­tion should be treated – to no avail.  If another reader can point me to such a clause, I’d be most appre­cia­tive.  But on the face of it, the pro­posed for­mula sim­ply doesn’t allow for such a sce­nario – and it should.  If some casanova sires chil­dren by mul­ti­ple moth­ers, he should take respon­si­bil­ity for all those children.

Sec­ondly, under the pro­posed for­mula, if the cus­to­dial parent’s income increases, the child sup­port lia­bil­ity decreases.  Thus, if the cus­to­dial par­ent works harder to get a payrise, their ex – not them­selves, not the child, but their ex – ben­e­fits.  This just doesn’t seem right.  It would reduce the incen­tive for cus­to­dial par­ents to be pro­duc­tive – after all, why strive for a payrise if you won’t ben­e­fit from it?

Finally  - under the pro­posed changes, child sup­port will decrease for EVERY SINGLE par­ent with full cus­tody.  I haven’t done the cal­cu­la­tions yet for shared-custody arrange­ments, so I can’t com­ment on those – I will endeav­our to do these over the next few days.  I’m sure a great many pay­ing par­ents will be quite happy with this, but bear in mind that many cus­to­dial par­ents count on the child sup­port pay­ments in order to meet the costs of run­ning a house­hold and look­ing after their kids.  Sub­stan­tial decreases in child sup­port pay­ments will cause extreme stress to those who will now have to find other ways to meet their finan­cial oblig­a­tions.  It’s not dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how the kids could end up miss­ing out.

Please refer to the fol­low­ing table, to see the effect of the pro­posed new for­mula on child sup­port pay­ments.  Please note that all pay­ments are based on a non-custodial par­ent who has no depen­dents liv­ing with them, and no shared care:

Gotta say – the dead­beat dads are gonna love Peter Dunne for this one.   And one can’t help but won­der why he’s so insis­tent on mak­ing life harder for sin­gle parents?

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Tagged as: Child custody • Child support • Parenting • Peter Dunne • Social Issues