A couple of considerations relevant to Child Support, from a discussion in another forum:

1. “Child Support” is a misnomer. Non-custodial parents (usually fathers) who earn an average or median income are required to pay far more than the children would ever cost to run. The maximum liability for two children is around $25000 per year (over $2000 per month). No way ordinary children will ever cost that much. So the tax is not conceived as child support at all, but as spousal support. I call it “Father Removal Tax” because it is mainly just a method to facilitate the expulsion of fathers from their own family units.

2. The current system of so-called “Child Support” is just another gender wealth redistribution technique invented by feminists, to go along with “matrimonial property” (usually including everything the man worked for prior to ever meeting the woman who then seizes it) and tax-related payments to women (such as the DPB, and the “Unsupported Woman” benefit for which there is no male equivalent). Taxes of course have always come primarily from male industry and productivity, for which men shorten their lives and ruin their health. Father Removal Tax is calculated on the after-tax earnings of the father, meaning that with two children non-custodial fathers are effectively taxed at around 65% of their gross earnings when income tax is included. Men are now slaves in the service of feminist interests.

3. People agree to make and to rear children, usually entering into some contract with a partner to do so, whether formal or informal. When one party then renegs on the contract by running off with some new exciting lover and trashes their children’s family unit, should the other parent still have to continue to service the breached contract? In my opinion, the other parent’s liability should at least be carefully limited to half of what are reasonable expenses specifically for children such as their clothing, school and medical expenses. Most NZ children would not cost more than $50 each per week ($2500 per year) to run, so the liability should rarely be more than $25 per week per child.

4. There is a spurious argument that the custodial parent (usually the mother) should be reimbursed for the larger house she needs to maintain with rooms for the children, the car she needs to transport the children etc. In fact, if the father wants to have a full and meaningful as possible relationship with the children he also needs to maintain a larger house with rooms for the children and a car to transport them and everything else, so his child-related lifestyle expenses are little different from the mother’s and there is no justification for him subsidizing such costs for her. Further, he usually contributes more than the mother to the costs of access, e.g. travelling to see them.

5. However, if the father is not the primary child-carer and he is the one who renegs on the contract, I think it is reasonable that he pays more and reimburses the mother to maintain something approaching the economic conditions she had during the marriage.

6. Of course, the most equitable arrangement that is also likely to be best for the children is a shared-care one where no other money exchanges hands unless some imbalance of specifically child costs develops. Feminists will argue that the mother who put aside her career for the family would then be disadvantaged, and I personally would support some additional subsidy to her following separation for a couple of years while she builds up her career again, but then only when it was the father who abandoned the marriage-type contract.

7. In most other legal contracts if you breach them there are penalties but with the most important contract of all, that of marriage and family creation, there is no penalty and in fact the State rewards primary child-care partners (usually mothers) for such skullduggery. If the State wants to facilitate often impetuous decisions by primary caregivers by paying them the no-fault DPB for breaking up their children’s family units, why should the other parent (usually the father) have to reimburse the State for its foolishness?

Hans Laven