By Lucinda Garbutt-Young in Canberra

Single parents will soon be able to recover unpaid child support from former partners more quickly, in a move that will reduce a common form of financial abuse.

Sweeping legal changes, announced in the May federal budget, will mean information shared by one parent when applying for support can be withheld from the other for protection.

Child support payments will generally be collected through wage deductions instead of being paid privately, which can be hard to enforce.

Single parents will have more opportunities from July 2027 to recover debt owed to them, and those who don’t lodge tax returns to avoid payments will be cracked down upon.

The historic $186 million package will be introduced to parliament on Thursday, but it has been on the mind of Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek for much longer.

Weaponisation of the system was pushing children into poverty and making it harder for parents to escape cycles of harassment from their former partners, she told AAP.

“Abuse of the child support system is an insidious form of family and domestic violence,” she said.

“While most parents do the right thing, when parents weaponise the system by deliberately not making payments, not lodging tax returns, or lying about their income or care arrangements, there are real and immediate impacts on children and parents.”

Until now, having up-to-date payments was a requirement for getting a certain type of family tax benefit, but single parents sometimes choose to go without both so they can completely cut ties with their abuser.

Many women avoid leaving a violent partner for fear of the payments being withheld.

In other cases, the payment was seen by abusive men as an excuse to question the legitimacy of their ex-partner’s mothering, a Women’s Legal Service Australia report found in 2024.

Child support debt will no longer affect a single parent’s ability to receive the benefit.

“Currently, our system allows all these things to happen,” Ms Plibersek told AAP.

“There are too many loopholes.”

“That will not be tolerated by this government. Government systems must never be allowed to become tools through which that abuse is perpetuated.”

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