Child poverty exacerbated by increasing child support debt
It's the final day of anti-poverty week and the focus is on children. One in six Australian children are growing up in poverty. It’s being made worse by an increasing child support debt owed to single parents and their children. Terese Edwards from Single Mother Families Australia says lodging a tax return is one of the solutions to fix this.
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00:00 The data tells us that poverty is particularly harshly located in single mother families.
00:07 So 44% of children raised in a sole parent family will live in poverty and that is highly
00:16 located in families that are led by single mothers. And that means that children miss
00:25 out on that social, emotional, well-being development that's very important for them
00:32 through their formative and educational years. Child support is based on having accurate
00:38 and up-to-date financial information and what we have a system with one million children
00:45 we have nearly 200,000, nearly a quarter of people who have a child support payment, mostly
00:53 men who haven't lodged a tax return of more than a couple of years and it's a persistent
01:00 problem because we have around 16,000 who haven't lodged for more than 10 years. So
01:06 not only are we creating a system or have a system that is not transferring the amount,
01:13 we also have a system that allows the amount to be reduced or minimised. So a simple solution
01:22 if you have a child support just lodge a tax return annually that would change a lot of
01:27 the issues.
01:28 [BLANK_AUDIO]