There are multitudes of reasons why exes refuse to pay, or can't pay, child support. Maybe they're broke. Some scum have income hidden in trusts. Often they just want to punish the other, following a bitter custody battle, so they think nothing of using their children as weapons.
I call that child abuse, on the same bell curve as the man who threw his kids off a Melbourne bridge.
There are many reasons, but no excuses. You split up, you take financial responsibility for your family. You don't blame everyone else and make the country pay.
Not all liable parents are "exes". They were sperm donors. There was no "split-up". They don't pay child support because they are in prison, the mother hasn't named them as the father, they have more children and child support liabilities than a benefit can support. Think of the many who don't pay court fines. Some have been used to supply a meal ticket to the mother. That action might be described as child abuse on Deborah's "bell curve" too.
Yesterday I was speaking at the Libertarianz conference and we had a discussion along similar lines. That fathers should face up to their financial responsibilities. Bear in mind that even when they meet child support requirements most only pay a fraction of the DPB cost to the taxpayer.
I stated my position back in 2009. It is unchanged;
Mitchell said the traditional political response is to demand fathers face up to their financial responsibilities. "However, the child support problem is only a spin-off from the DPB system. If there was no DPB, which acts as an incentive to single parenthood, there would be nowhere near the current number of liable parents - 130,762. The state has effectively replaced many fathers who are nevertheless expected to pay the bills for children they often have no role in raising. "
"As a general rule fathers should take responsibility for their children but the state has to stop skewing the morality of this by putting up cash rewards to prospective single mothers."
"Before the DPB it was difficult for mothers to chase maintenance through the court system and fathers ran the risk of conviction and imprisonment for reneging on a court order. But that was forty years ago. Today, avoiding becoming pregnant and giving birth is much simpler. And in respect of relationship breakdowns, women, who now make up half of the workforce, are much better equipped to handle being a breadwinner and men are much better equipped for sharing parenting."
"Until the DPB is reformed to suit the times, the taxpayer will continue to foot the lion's share of its cost."
4 comments:
In the days now gone I often suspected Ms Coddington as being too glib to be a Libz member. When she posted airily in the Free Radical why she'd moved to ACT I was relieved.
Faversham
Sorry, Lindsay, but I deliberately did not mention 'fathers' once in this column. Many liable parents are women. And when you say 'sperm donors' are you talking about IVF?
Deborah Coddington.
Deborah, Last time I asked IRD, 18 percent of liable parents were female. Some separated couples share liabilities because they share care. So conservatively 85-90 percent of liable (and non-custodial) parents are fathers. Probably consistent with public perception.
And with this sentence, "I call that child abuse, on the same bell curve as the man who threw his kids off a Melbourne bridge", you invoked fathers.
I used the term "sperm donors" (for the first time ever I think) only because I cannot think of a better way to describe someone who is a one-night stand, a casual bonk and/or exploited to provide a meal-ticket child.
Your column approached child support debt from the perspective of separated couples. Yet increasing proportions of DPB recipients are neither divorced nor separated from a marriage or de facto relationship.
In an undistorted (by the state) situation, fathers should take financial responsibility but people need to understand that the problem has been exasperated by the DPB. So attention has to be directed to the right fix.
Hi Lindsay,
I speak from personal experience when i say that the system is deeply flawed.
The major flaw is that, in the specific example of an offshore based evader, once a custodian obtains a court order, it is up to the custodian to notify the authorities and basically enforce the law (when the evader is in the country).
This design severely underestimates the ability of a cunning manipulative, psychopathic individual. In my experience, the evader in question (a serious top 5% evader) has emotionally "battered" the custodian to the point of where the law is never enforced.
We need to recognize the "ability" of some of these people and take enforcement out of the hands of the custodian parent (once the court order is issued). We must also remember that in many cases (not in mine) the state picks up the tab left by these creatures and therefore has a vested interest in seeing the funds recouped. Every man woman and child in New Zealand is robbed by a serial, offshore based evader has significant sums of money are kept out of our economy.
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