There are 1.1 million children in Australia whose financial wellbeing depends on the child support system working. The Commonwealth Ombudsman’s verdict: it is failing too many of them.
Child support exists for one purpose: to ensure children are financially supported as they grow and develop during a critical time in their lives. When it fails – when payments are withheld, delayed, or manipulated – it is the children who go without. Not in some abstract, administrative sense. In the most concrete sense: food, school expenses, medical care, the basic costs of growing up. Research confirms that if child support is paid on time and in full, it can reduce child poverty by 21 per cent.
The 2026-27 Federal Budget committed $182.6 million over four years to reform the Child Support Scheme. That investment is welcome, and overdue. But to understand why it may not be enough, you have to understand the scale of what it is trying to fix – and how deeply the problem runs.
In a recent survey of separated mothers, 80 per cent said their former partner had used the child support system to commit financial abuse. That is not a fringe finding. It is consistent with the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s own investigation, with the findings of a Parliamentary Joint Committee, and with years of research from Women’s Legal Services Australia and others. I am one of those mothers – child support has been withheld, reinstated, and withheld again, used as a predictable lever to inflict punishment.
The government’s own Women’s Budget Statement puts the total tracked child support debt at $2 billion, owed across 229,235 paying parents. The debt grew five per cent in the 2023-24 financial year – the fastest rate of growth in a decade.
Behind each of those numbers is a child who didn’t receive money they were legally owed. And a parent – usually a mother – who quietly absorbed the shortfall.
The Ombudsman’s 2025 investigation found was that Services Australia – the agency responsible for administering the scheme – was not actively identifying financial abuse, was not using its enforcement powers proactively, and was in many cases compounding the harm. Receiving parents were being pursued for Family Tax Benefit debts that arose only because the paying parent hadn’t paid. The system was penalising people for someone else’s deliberate non-compliance.
A 2024 Swinburne University study gave 675 single mothers the chance to describe what the child support system actually looks like from the inside. Over three-quarters were experiencing some form of violence at the time of separation. More than half were experiencing financial abuse at the time of the survey. Many didn’t know their basic rights within the system – and were financially penalised as a result.
The budget reforms are meaningful changes, long advocated for by the sector. Stronger pathways from Private Collect to Agency Collect. Expanded employer withholding. Powers to halt vexatious behaviour. A requirement that parents with debts over $10,000 enter payment arrangements before travelling overseas.”
But a primary focus on enforcement reform – however strengthened – still starts from the wrong premise: that the receiving parent must wait for the system to catch up with the paying parent’s behaviour. The burden of someone else’s deliberate non-compliance still falls, in the interim, on the person least able to carry it.
The Fix Child Support campaign, backed by researchers from Swinburne University, has called for a fundamental principle shift: the Commonwealth pays first, and pursues non-compliance second – creating certainty of payments and removing the compliance burden from the people least able to carry it. It reframes the question entirely: from how do we make non-compliant parents pay? to how do we ensure children are not financially punished for their other parent’s behaviour?
The budget is also silent on two things advocates say matter just as much. It does not touch the child support formula itself – which fails to account for the real costs of raising children week to week, or the reduced earning capacity of the parent doing most of that care. And it does not delink child support from Family Tax Benefit. A 2026 Swinburne University report found one in four single mothers surveyed owed money to the government as a result of these intersecting systems – most had cut spending on food, more than half were going without medication. The researchers called it “Fembot Debt”: a systemic failure that shifts financial risk from perpetrators onto victim-survivors.
The Ombudsman is clear. The research is clear. What the budget treats as a compliance problem is, at its core, a violence problem – one that $182.6 million will not solve alone. Behind every statistic in this piece is a parent doing the maths on what they can afford this week. The harder work – of redesigning a system that has failed them for decades – needs to begin.