Houellebecq:"Do you mean no CSA, but if a father or mother does a runner, or won't pay, means tested welfare goes to the custodial parent who has to prove how many days custody?"

The stated reason for CS is so that children are not forced to suffer due to a lack of financial resources available. We already provide a massive amount of taxpayer funding to women toward this end.

There are several public sector organisations who exist largely to service the "single mother" sector, including Centrelink, FAO, CSA, Women's Legal Aid as well as the various charities and the govt-funded women's groups that have sprung up like weeds and cost a huge amount.

Centrelink, FAO, etc seem to manage ok working out who's up who and who's paying. The only thing that would change is the CSA pursuing a father "to the grave" to quote a former Minister responsible for CSA, Joe Hockey.

Houellebecq:"It seems to me the money saved in administrative costs would be lost again by the people making their own arrangements deciding they don't want to be a mug and putting their hands out"

The $2.6 billion figure was for ALL CS transferred between parents. It includes both private and CSA collect arrangements. My sense is that many high income fathers, who already pay a great deal more than the $260 PA per taxpayer I propose, would continue to do so, and rightly so. The $260 per annum is hardly going to be a crippling burden, so he can easily pay additional funds, although he may not have to pay as much if she's getting a decent sum from the Gov in the first place, removing an incentive for the ex to cause dramas and giving him a chance to rebuild free of harassment. To put it in perspective, the Govt deems that a Dad on the dole is capable of paying $10 a week in CS and automatically deducts it. Is that really helping the kids, or just punishing him? Would $5 a week be such a terrible burden on those in work?

[cont]

benq the comments you make in post http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3680#88811 have truth to them but are also one sided. Those who benefit from biased decisions or have who make them are also severely disadvantaged when it comes to unbiased opinions. Most of us on our thread have stated our own stake in this, fathers who have had to deal with the system as "clients".

Do you have a personal stake in the discussion, some factor which could be considered to limit your own ability to form an unbiased opinion about CSA? The tone of your responses looks a lot like you may have a stake in this.

By the logic you are applying to this we would pretty much dismiss the testimony and views of those who considered that they had been abused or discriminated against from any debate on any topic.

Taken to the extreme rape victims should not testify because they can't form an unbiased opinion about the incident. In comparable situations women who believed that they had suffered systematic discrimination in a workplace should have their testimony and views dismissed because they are bitter and angry that things did not go their way. A claim of discrimination does not make it true, a pattern of such claims does give reason for concern.

R0bert

Those of you who cry out for help against the CSA on this forum, should look to the proposal put forward by the United Christian Constitutional Law Group. It will soon have a website up and running where people who have been abused by the failures of successive legislatures both State and Federal can register their disapproval, and do something practical about getting rid of these Quango’s.

The principles the CSA work on are anti-Christian, and contrary to the law of this land, victimize fathers, and hardly help mothers at all. The intrusive and arbitrary imposition of a tax on fatherhood, under dodgy authority, without any concern for the justice of each individual case must stop. It is an acquisition of property by the CSA on unjust terms. They first acquire it, and then pass on a percentage less administration costs, to the mothers involved. This is because the politicians in Canberra are a lazy, incompetent bunch, whose limited education, has precluded them from knowing that the word may, in s 126 Constitution, really means must, and the Commonwealth must have a real representative of Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second in every community, to represent the law of the land.

This person should be the Local Magistrate. He should be a Governor General’s plenipotentiary at grass roots community level, able to put the fear of God, into every public servant who willfully executes illegal and unconstitutional laws. S 2 of the Judiciary Act 1903 gives these individuals the power to declare any application to them to be an application for a new trial, and an application to draw into question the right of the Parliament of the Commonwealth to pass unconstitutional laws, like CSA. If you go to the www.community-law.info website, you will see that the United Christian Constitutional Law Group is proposing a class action against the Commonwealth, and maybe you should join them in that. Do something practical to ensure the laws of Australia are not discriminatory. They have no idea how many of you are out there. Get practical. Do this for your kids sake

benz, I am simply using govt terms in reverse. As someone pointed out Howard/Hockey resorted to the umurikan expression daeadbeat dads and added they would chase them to the grave. There were no "good" fathers, only deadbeats, they ALL got the label.

and as someone else pointed out they are quoting from personal experience, well I am talking from experience with some 1,000 clients, even wins in the Full Court of the FCA, so you might say I quote with authority, and it was because of those victories Howard acted contrary to Constitution [see Kirby J re Brandy] and closed down the "right to one's day in court" thus allowing CSA to do as they please.

we were all hoping Kev 07 might go back to ALP ways and have another proper JOINT enquiry as per the JSC of 1994, but seems he hasn't. Meanwhile I retired from CSA matters and wrote the book

and all fathers are good fathers to their kids mate, and in Howard/Parkinson speak the CSA is "for the Benefit of the Children"

The people who would be most helped by my proposal would be those on low to average incomes, for whom CS is often both a crippling burden on the payer and not enough to be especially useful to the payee. When combined with the costs and emotional drain of going to Court against an ex who is being supported by the State to do so it is a double whammy that some simply never get over. 40% of those from whom CSA "collects" are benefit recipients, many of whom were working men before their divorce who have either made a decision that working is now not worth it, or who have been so damaged that work has become impossible.

The details of administration should be reasonably straight-forward, it seems to me. All children receive a portion of the pool, perhaps based on age so as to reflect costs and it's up to their parents to work out the extras, just as 75% do now. Overall it would no doubt lead to more being transferred than is now the case, while also reducing administrative overhead. Who cares if a few cheap sluts milk it or a few deadsh!ts are better off? I don't have any moral objection to reducing overall costs, nor an ideological adherence to making fathers pay through the nose.

Benq, I have been dealing with the CSa since 1999. Their behaviour as an organisation during that period has been unvaryingly appalling, except for a brief period under the leadership of Matt Miller. From some of the comments that have been directed at me, I have formed the view that the people making them were profoundly biased against fathers. Many others have said the same thing. As R0bert pointed out, this is a pattern and patterns of misbehaviour within government departments need investigating. The Ombudsman has not had many good things to say about the Agency either, yet still we have it with us, growing fatter and less accountable and more top heavy with underachieving ideologues.

Get rid of the lot.

"There has to be a better way..."

There is. All compulsion on *anyone* to pay someone else to bring up their own child should be abolished. There should be no payment without consent.

Men have no more a "responsibility" pay the state or the mother for children they have biologically caused, than a woman has to submit to being forced to satisfy a man's sexual interest that the woman has biologically caused. It is an absurd argument; a denial of ethics; a gross biological determinism.

In an earlier thread these issues were exhaustively thrashed out and the advocates of compulsory child support were not able to come up with a single reason or ethical basis for the supposed "responsibility" on men to submit to being forcibly exploited as a money object, with no rights (all rights men have to have contact with their children in family law are as a matter of benefit to the child, not the father).

It makes me angry to hear people say the problem should be thrown ted onto the taxpayer. Why should people be forced to pay for other people's decisions whether to have or look after children?!

It’s a non-problem. The reason we have the CSA is not because there was a generalised problem with supporting children. It is because the government immorally undertook to pay a pension to people, mostly women, for no other reason than that they had had children without making provision for its support; and surprise surprise, government could not manage the endless demand it had created for free incomes! So they created the anti-social, utterly destructive CSA.

It is unjust because no-one has established that
a) those who want money to look after their own children should not raise the money themselves voluntarily by providing services to those willing to pay for them; or
b) obtain the consent of the father by offering reasonable terms to get his consent.

Yes, justice requires that the CSA *and* the sole parents pension should be abolished
*and replaced with nothing*