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More than 40 per cent of children in single-parent households live in poverty in Australia. Enforcing child support payments would go a long way towards fixing the problem. By Anonymous.
One simple way to lift children out of poverty
A few months after my twins were born, their father contested paternity. Amid the joy, grief and chaos of those months, the results of a DNA test arrived in the post. Its long lines of uniform numbers confirmed what I already knew. My children’s father responded by avoiding his financial obligations and thus began my long engagement with Australia’s child support system.
In the decade since, I’ve received dribbles of child support collected and paid by Services Australia directly into my bank account. Sometimes $50, sometimes $100. Then nothing at all, for months and years.
Few single mothers speak out because of the stigma and shame. Australia’s child protection laws also restrict what can be published about child support cases, which is why this piece is anonymous. Silence keeps the issue in the shadows.
The annual child support owed to me has hovered around $7000 for years. At times, I’ve imagined what it could have bought: nappies, childcare, swimming lessons, soccer boots. When a child lost a school jumper or wore out another pair of shoes, it could have been the difference between a crisis and simply buying a replacement. It’s also the difference between children sharing rooms, or having their own. Parachuting a child who is being bullied into a private school – or not. Getting laughed out of the bank when you go for a mortgage, or being able to secure a loan to buy a home of your own. Staying out of, or getting deeper into, credit card debt.
I know those figures, because I have lived them. And I’m a university-educated professional. If you are socially disadvantaged, then $7000 is even more critical. It puts a roof over your head and food on the table. It pays the electricity bill, puts petrol in the car and buys a bit of joy at Christmas.
I’m not the only single mother owed this sort of amount. The average child support debt is $7261, and 84 per cent of recipients are women.
In June, the Commonwealth ombudsman accused non-payers of “manipulating and weaponising” the child-support system. The ombudsman said non-payers were “deliberately not making payments or not lodging tax returns, lying to reduce their income”. That’s strong language in any government report.
It’s not just non-payment that’s a problem. The minimum enforced payment in 2025 is about $500 a year. Mine has regularly been assessed as low as $800 annually. I’ll take $50 dribbling into my bank account any day, but it’s a tiny percentage of my household budget.
Australia’s current child support debt is the highest it has been in a decade. As of December 2024, $1.9 billion was owed, with 153,694 non-payers. While interest on unpaid amounts is payable to the government, it’s not passed on to the parents who are owed.
The Council of Single Mothers and their Children says one in three paying parents fails to lodge tax returns on time. It estimates that the parents of about 475,000 children are owed child support. That figure doesn’t include the 500,000 children who are the subject of private support arrangements, or the untold numbers of women who are too scared to lodge claims.
It is a criminal offence not to file tax returns on time, but the penalty is paltry – a few hundred dollars in fines. Meanwhile, thousands of Australian fathers are able to avoid child support payments by not filing returns, working cash in hand, hiding money in trusts or moving overseas. They mean to punish the mothers, but it’s their own children who suffer.
One in six children lives in poverty in Australia. UNICEF data from 2023 shows children in single-parent households are almost five times more at risk of being poor than children in two-parent households. Forty-one per cent of children in single-parent households are living in poverty, compared with 8.8 per cent in two-parent households. Some of them shift in and out of homelessness, go without meals and witness things no child should ever see.
Others are just quietly falling through the cracks. Many single mothers have no money for the things that dual-income families take for granted: Year 6 camps, Year 12 formals, tutors, braces, concerts, holidays. As my neighbour, a single mother of teenage girls, once told me laughingly in a discussion about the cost-benefit of buying bulk toilet paper: “I buy toilet paper in packs of six because it’s all I can afford on a week-to-week basis.”
The memories of being raised in financial hardship may fade, but the lifelong disadvantages do not. Research using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) dataset shows that if child support payments are received on time and in full, poverty in single-parent families headed by women is reduced by more than a fifth. Older single mothers who have struggled to make ends meet have housing insecurity to look forward to in retirement – as older women are the fastest-growing group of homeless people in Australia.
The ombudsman describes the child-support agency as “passive” when it comes to debt collecting. The agency can collect payments by agreement, or directly from bank accounts, Centrelink payments and tax returns. It can garnishee wages, investigate non-payment and issue travel bans. In reality, it rarely lifts a finger when parents do not pay.
Superannuation cannot be touched, though it sits like a golden goose, attracting compound interest. “The debt will still be owed to you by his estate, on his death,” a child-support agent once told me. By then the child will be grown up.
Ask any single mother what she needs most and the first thing she’ll say probably won’t be more money. It will be time. Time to herself, more time enjoying her children without the stress of paying bills, more time to exercise, cook properly, help with homework. But we live in a country where the wealthy exchange money for time, and life without either is not fun.
I stopped thinking longingly of that $7000 years ago. Instead, I did what non-payers who cry poor should do – I got a side hustle that quickly brought in more than $7000 annually, and from there I built a successful small business. I remember the year my personal circumstances changed and I had a little more money for the first time as a parent. Did I go on a holiday or buy a new car? No. I didn’t have to pack sandwiches for our Sunday bike ride. A $50 cafe lunch turned my Sunday morning from another slog into a simple pleasure.
The Commonwealth ombudsman’s report makes eight recommendations that essentially call on Services Australia to do more to make non-payers pay. The Department of Social Services has accepted all the recommendations except the one that calls for amendments to key child support and family tax laws that would strengthen compliance. That one it has merely “noted”. The department must update the ombudsman on its progress within 12 months.
Advocacy groups, including the Council of Single Mothers and their Children and Single Mother Families Australia, have called for the government to take on the debt owed to single mothers – owed to and enforceable by the Commonwealth. A growing campaign known simply as Fix Child Support is demanding payers be compelled to file tax returns annually, welfare cheques and wages be withheld, unpaid debts be listed on credit records and assessment formulas overhauled. The campaign also calls for child support to be delinked from family tax benefits, which can leave mothers owing phantom “overpayment” debts – calculated on the basis that child support is payable, even though it has never been received.
To that I would add the ability to garnishee superannuation prior to death or retirement. Yes, it’s a penalty, but it sends a message non-payers will understand. Why should a non-payer be entitled to a nest egg that attracts compound interest when the other parent is owed a debt on which they don’t even get bank interest?
To our prime minister, raised by a single mother, I would say: if the government can carry the lending risk on housing with the new first-home buyers 5 per cent deposit scheme, it can carry the debt on child support. The $1.9 billion owed to single parents is a drop in the government’s budget, but it would be life-changing for those parents and their children.
The half million Australian children whose parents are owed child support are waiting.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 8, 2025 as "Half a million kids are waiting".
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