Lanna Hill: Budget child support is welcome, but it’s not enough to keep parents from being stretched too thin

For all the Budget talk that has dominated the media cycle over the past month, one reform has barely cut through: the Federal Government’s $182.6 million commitment to improve Australia’s child support system. But if the answer is only better compliance, faster collection and safer systems, it misses the deeper issue. Child support does not just distribute money. It shapes separated parents’ behaviour. When it makes parenting more adversarial or exhausting, the cost does not stay inside private homes. It shows up in children’s wellbeing, women’s economic security, workplaces, schools, sporting clubs and community life. We talk about social cohesion, loneliness, burnout and declining trust. But the glue of communities has always been ordinary parents with enough time and stability to show up: canteen duty, coaching sport, P&C committees and keeping schools alive. That glue is weakening. Families are stretched too thin. Cultural expectations still play a big part. We say we want fathers involved, and mothers financially secure, but too many workplaces still treat flexibility as something mothers need and fathers request at professional risk, which hurts everyone. It leaves mothers carrying invisible load, fathers fighting for time rather than being expected to take it, and children in arrangements that depend on who has the more flexible job, not what works best. Australia’s divorce rate sits at its lowest since the mid-1970s. The point is not that divorce is more common. It is that family life is more complex: more children move between households, and more separated parents maintain two homes in a housing market that barely works for one. Yet, the child support formula tries to reduce all of that to a calculation, converting care into nights, nights into percentages and percentages into money. A formula that’s not just inaccurate and outdated. It tells parents what the minimum is. And minimums have a way of becoming the standard. A night of care is easy to count. The weight of care is harder to measure. As a divorced parent, I know the difference between nights on a calendar and the daily weight of parenting — the formula doesn’t. A night does not capture school runs, appointments, sick days, uniforms, sport, WhatsApp groups, emotional labour or logistics. It doesn’t capture who leaves work early, books the dentist, and carries the mental load. The dollar amounts the formula produces are updated annually, but indexed to wages rather than redesigned around the actual cost of raising children. In a period when housing, childcare and family costs have shifted so dramatically, that distinction matters. The lazy version says the system is weighted against men. The deeper problem is that it is weighted against reality. It can be unfair to fathers doing the work, unfair to mothers carrying invisible care while juggling full-time jobs, and unfair to children measured in thresholds and losing out through conflict. The Government’s reforms matter, particularly where they address non-payment, income manipulation, financial abuse and the weaponisation of child support. But compliance reform alone is not enough. A system can collect money efficiently and still be asking the wrong questions. If Australia is serious about child wellbeing, women’s economic security, involved fatherhood, family violence and social cohesion, child support cannot stay buried in Services Australia. And parenting cannot keep being treated as a private inconvenience that families solve around work. We need systems that recognise and encourage modern parenting: a child support formula that measures care more honestly, and workplaces flexible enough for men and women to both do the work of raising children. Lanna Hill is a speaker, board director, and founder of Rally Group and Leverage Media.