Senate

Revised Explanatory Memorandum

(Circulated by the authority of the Minister for Social Services, the Hon Dan Tehan MP)

Outline

The Bill contains the following Schedules:

Schedule 1 - Child support amendments

Part 1 - Interim periods

This Part amends the Child Support (Assessment) Act 1989 and the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Act 1999 to extend the interim period that applies for recently-established court-ordered care arrangements and provide incentives for the person with increased care to take reasonable action to participate in family dispute resolution where a care dispute relates to an older court order, a parenting plan or a written agreement.

Part 2 - Amended tax assessments

This Part amends the Child Support (Assessment) Act 1989 to allow the Registrar to take into account an amended tax assessment in an administrative assessment of child support if it results in a higher taxable income or, where it results in a lower taxable income, if certain conditions are met based on the reason for the amended tax assessment and the timeliness of action taken to obtain an amended tax assessment.

Part 3 - Child support agreements

This Part amends the Child Support (Assessment) Act 1989 to allow for courts to set aside child support agreements made before 1 July 2008, as well as allowing all child support agreements to be set aside without having to go to court if certain circumstances change.

Part 4 - Overpayments

This Part amends the Child Support (Registration and Collection) Act 1988 and makes other consequential amendments, to align the Registrar's ability to recover a child support overpayment from a payee with the methods for recovering a child support debt from a payer; to ensure that backdated reductions to a child support assessment collected by the Registrar will be recoverable; and to include new provisions in relation to backdating of assessments, providing a fairer basis for retrospectively creating a child support overpayment or underpayment due to some changes of circumstances.

Schedule 2 - Family tax benefit amendments

This Schedule implements the Supporting No Jab No Pay - Healthy Start for School - new compliance arrangements measure announced in the 2017-18 Budget.

This measure builds on the 2015-16 Budget measure titled No Jab No Pay and the 2011-12 Budget measure titled Healthy Start for School.

This Schedule replaces the current compliance incentives that make the payment of the FTB Part A end of year supplement dependent on a four year old child of an individual or their partner receiving income support, undergoing a health check and on each FTB child in a family meeting immunisation requirements.

From 1 July 2018, families who do not meet the health check requirements or immunisation requirements for a child will, instead of losing their FTB Part A end of year supplement, have approximately $28 per child withheld from their fortnightly rate of FTB Part A.

This Schedule also inserts new Division 1, Part 3 of Schedule 2 to correct an overlooked amendment to the definition of "receiving" in subsection 3(1) of the Family Assistance Act, so that a social security recipient in an employment income nil rate period (who is not actually being paid social security) will no longer be regarded as receiving social security for family tax benefit (FTB) Part A rate purposes, from 1 July 2018. The Budget Savings (Omnibus) Act 2016 introduced amendments to this effect, however the amendments were incomplete in that they did not include reference to the provision which determines which method of rate calculation is applied in a particular person's circumstances.

Financial impact statement

Statements Of Compatibility With Human Rights

The statements of compatibility with human rights appear at the end of this explanatory memorandum.