Nearly 50 paying parents told News Cop the receiving parent in their case hid income, concealed repartnering or manipulated the system — and every one says the material they gave the agency led nowhere. The Commonwealth Ombudsman says Australia’s Child Support system can be weaponised by either parent, has found Services Australia unfair or unreasonable in how it handled child support weaponisation, and in a separate report said the agency remained knowingly non-compliant with the law for six years.
The Commonwealth Ombudsman Report has already conceded what many families have known for years: the child support system can be weaponised by either parent, not just by paying parents. Its 2025 report said anyone using the Child Support program can be a victim of weaponisation, even though the complaints and research before the Ombudsman overwhelmingly concerned separated mothers as victims.
That should have widened the public debate, not narrowed it. It did not.
Ask almost anyone about child support in Australia and you will get an emotional answer. Some will defend the paying parent. Others will defend the receiving parent. That is no surprise in a system built around highly adversarial separation involving children and money. But while public opinion is divided, the official framing has often focused on one form of abuse and one cohort of victims, the receiving parent, typically separated mothers. The result, critics say, is a blind spot around allegations that some receiving parents understate income, conceal business activity, hide repartnering or obscure household resources in order to maximise child support and reduce scrutiny.
News Cop has now spoken to nearly 50 paying parents, men and women, who are subject to agency collection. Every one of those interviewees alleged some form of selective non-disclosure, income reduction, concealed support or strategic misrepresentation by the receiving parent in their case and and reported a consistent experience that their evidence was not meaningfully acted upon by Services Australia.
They describe strikingly similar patterns: undeclared businesses, cash work not disclosed, income shifted through related entities, new partners kept out of the picture, rental income minimised, and household resources structured to make the receiving parent appear poorer on paper than they really are.
Paying parents contacted by News Cop unanimously reported that Services Australia, in direct contrast to the lack of investigation into receiving parents, used extensive powers to obtain their bank records, ATO information, loan details and even PayPal transaction history.
They say Services Australia sought to maximise their income, whilst minimising the receiving parents, to create the largest amount of child support payable possible.
Serious but as yet untested allegations raised with News Cop included use of unlawful income inflation practices by Services Australia staff and Contracted or Outsourced Decision Makers.
That does not prove every allegation is true. But it does raise a serious public-administration question when the same complaint pattern appears again and again and the parents making those complaints say their material did not lead to any meaningful investigation or correction.
Official complaint data show this is not a quiet corner of the system. The Ombudsman’s 2024–25 annual report places Child Support among the top five complaint areas by volume, while Services Australia’s own annual report says it recorded 22,634 feedback contacts about Child Support in 2024–25, 22,419 of them complaints, with the biggest issues being collection, quality of service and assessment. Service Australia’s response to complaints?
In a complaint response signed by Louise Hamilton, National Manager, Multicultural and Tailored Services, and seen by News Cop, Services Australia stated that concerns raised about the conduct, performance and integrity of a contracted child support decision-maker would be “managed internally” and that the affected parent “will not be contacted with an outcome”.
That extraordinary position goes to the heart of why confidence in the child support system is collapsing. When parents raise serious concerns about the people exercising coercive statutory powers over their lives, finances and even overseas travel, the public would reasonably expect transparency, accountability and an independent process, not an assurance that the agency will investigate itself internally and disclose no outcome.
It is precisely this closed culture, where enforcement continues but scrutiny remains hidden, that strengthens allegations that Services Australia staff view themselves as above the law and “untouchable” regarding the administration of the child support scheme and handling of family disputes.
Not just about money
The allegations reaching News Cop are not only about dollars. Paying parents also say child support conflict is being used to keep former partners locked in hostility, to damage reputations, to prolong coercive control after separation and, in most cases, used to disrupt children’s time and relationships with the paying parent.
That is not merely rhetoric. The Australian Institute of Family Studies says children can be impacted by “systems abuse”, meaning the use of systems and processes, including legal systems such as child support, to exert power and control over the other party. Its coercive control literature review also records that almost two-thirds of surveyed parents and carers who commented on improvements to family law non-compliance said their engagement with the system was harmful or had failed to protect their children from harm.
The child impacts are not incidental. AIFS says coercive control can harm children directly and indirectly, with negative behavioural, emotional and psychological consequences extending into adulthood. The review points to effects on education, confidence, health and later relationships. In other words, when institutions fail to identify or interrupt post-separation systems abuse, the damage is not confined to a ledger.
One adult child, now in their 30s, told News Cop they are still living with the consequences of what they say were child support system failures decades later. Raised in a week-about arrangement, they described the experience as horrendous, saying they watched their mother throw “hand grenades” at their father through child support while he worked two jobs and felt powerless to stop it. They say the damage did not end with childhood. It permanently changed family relationships and is the single biggest reason they chose not to have children themselves.
A system with extraordinary powers
The scale of the machinery matters. Services Australia says it transferred $2.0 billion through Child Support Collect in 2024–25. That is an extraordinary sum, much of it drawn through coercive enforcement against working Australians.
In the same year, the agency reported 105,431 tax refund intercepts worth $141 million, 90,541 active employer withholding arrangements, $87.4 million deducted from Centrelink and DVA payments, and 968 Departure Prohibition Orders collecting $32.2 million. The agency says those figures overlap and should not be added together. Even so, they reveal the breadth of the system’s reach.
A lawyer familiar with child support issues says the size of the problem doesn’t signal a problem with paying parents, it signals potential systemic issues in the administration of the scheme itself.
For many paying parents, this is not just an assessment. It is an enforcement machine. Tax refunds can disappear. Wages can be docked. Centrelink or DVA payments can be reduced. Overseas travel can be blocked.
News Cop’s earlier article, Robodebt 2.0? Families Question Inflated Child Support Assessments, raised concerns that a significant number of disputed assessments may have fed directly into Agency Collect outcomes. Critics argued that once a matter reaches Agency Collect, it is often already a marker of a hostile co-parenting relationship, with heightened scope for weaponisation by either party.
News Cop also investigated the use of outsourced contract workers in child support decision-making amid allegations that some were using unlawful practices to inflate paying parents’ incomes. Parenting advocates now argue that a significant part of the money reported as collected through Agency Collect may be based on assessments that do not reflect financial reality.
Review Pathways Exist — But Are They Realistic?
There is, on paper, a review pathway. Services Australia says it received 14,611 change-of-assessment applications in 2024–25, and that 43% of finalised applications resulted in a change to the child support rate. Of those, 70% related to income, property, financial resources or earning capacity.
A spokesperson for the Administrative Review Tribunal, the final administrative review pathway short of judicial review said: “The Tribunal publishes material related to child support decision outcomes in annual reports and on our statistics web page. The current year-to-date data indicates the proportion of child support cases in which a decision under review is changed (30%) by the Tribunal is consistent with the overall rate for the Tribunal (28%).”
Yet in News Cop’s reporting sample, only one interviewee out of almost 50 had pursued Tribunal review. That parent described it as “a waste of time” and alleged the proceedings were structured to protect the receiving parent from meaningful scrutiny.
That gap is telling. The existence of a legal pathway does not mean families can realistically use it. For many parents, the real barriers are time, cost, emotional exhaustion, and the difficulty of contesting a highly adversarial system while enforcement continues in the background.
What did Services Australia know — and when?
By now, it is difficult to maintain that Services Australia was unaware that child support could be manipulated by receiving parents. It is harder still to argue the agency was unaware that its own staff or contractors could be contributing to unlawful outcomes after the Ombudsman found it had knowingly failed to follow the law for six years.
In its 2024–25 annual report, the Ombudsman also found that Services Australia’s handling of widespread child support weaponisation was unfair or unreasonable, and that the agency lacked the policies, strategies and training needed to proactively identify and respond to financial abuse or domestic violence perpetrated through the child support system. Yet throughout that period, Services Australia continued to exercise powerful enforcement tools at scale.
The consistency of those complaints, coupled with the near-total absence of public information from either Services Australia or the Administrative Review Tribunal about how such allegations are tested, raises a serious question of public administration: did Services Australia know, or ought reasonably to have known, that in at least some cases receiving parents were understating income, concealing business activity, hiding household resources or misrepresenting their circumstances, while disputed liabilities continued to be enforced without equivalent visible scrutiny? The same concern arises where repeated complaints that the agency was inflating paying parents’ incomes appeared to produce no practical outcome.
If that occurred at scale, the resulting over-collection from paying parents over many years could be enormous.
Not following the law for six years
The Ombudsman’s later report, Following the law is not optional, should have been a political and administrative earthquake. It dealt with the “less than 35% care” issue and found Services Australia remained knowingly non-compliant with the law six years after the problem was first identified. The report says about 16,600 parents across around 10,000 child support cases were affected by the gap-period scenario. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this caused real harm to families the agency claims to protect. The report also drew an explicit comparison with Robodebt, noting that knowingly and deliberately not complying with the law sat at the heart of that scandal, and is no more acceptable in the child support system.
That finding matters well beyond the specific 35% issue. It is a public, documented example of Services Australia operating outside the law for years in a child support context. It does not prove every allegation made by paying parents about undeclared income, repartnering or hidden resources. But it destroys any comfortable assumption that the system can be trusted to self-correct simply because it is official. Parents are now asking a far more serious question: when agency staff or contractors knowingly disregard the law, will there be real consequences like there would be for the general public?
Is this now beyond internal review?
The continuity of complaints spanning at least two decades, the Ombudsman’s finding that Services Australia handled child support weaponisation unfairly or unreasonably, and the separate finding that the agency knowingly failed to follow the law for years, raise a much larger institutional question. At what point does this stop being a matter of individual grievances and become evidence of systemic failure? Where the same themes continue to emerge, secrecy, one-sided decision-making, coercive enforcement and resistance to meaningful scrutiny, ordinary complaint handling begins to look inadequate, or as one parent succinctly put it “a waste of time”.
In that context, the argument for a royal commission or similarly independent public inquiry is not rhetorical excess. It is a response to sustained allegations of systemic failure.
A royal commission is no small call. Neither is talk of criminal investigation. But where a public agency has been found to have knowingly operated outside the law for years, while continuing to exercise coercive powers over families and attract persistent complaints of unfairness and misuse, the case for independent scrutiny becomes difficult to ignore. An inquiry with powers of compulsion, public hearings, findings and referral pathways would be capable of testing whether these are isolated failures or part of something far more entrenched.
Compensation could be significant
There is another reason this story matters. Services Australia says people who suffer financial loss or injury because of agency error may seek compensation, whether on the basis of legal liability or defective administration. But its own guidance also says the CDDA scheme cannot be used to recover registered child support debts or overpayments.
Finance’s CDDA guidance further makes clear that an applicant must show direct detriment, such as personal injury, pure economic loss or property damage. In plain English, compensation may be available in some child support-related cases, but not all disputes will qualify.
What makes that significant is the growing body of allegations that receiving parents have manipulated the child support system for decades, and that Services Australia either knew, or reasonably ought to have known, this was occurring. Critics say the agency not only failed to stop it, but in some cases compounded the harm by knowingly inflating the assessed incomes of paying parents beyond financial reality.
A reasonable observer might conclude that Services Australia has concentrated overwhelmingly on enforcing compliance against paying parents while paying insufficient attention to whether receiving parents were being truthful. If that is correct, the scale of overpayment could reach hundreds of millions — potentially billions — of dollars over time.
The consequence is not just financial. It is a profound erosion of trust in Services Australia as a public institution, coupled with widespread social and familial harm.
What parents should do now
Parents who believe their evidence has been ignored, filtered out or treated one-sidedly should not leave the matter at angry phone calls. Preserve documents. Keep a chronology. Seek written reasons. Use formal review pathways where they are realistically available.
Most importantly, history suggests complaints to the Commonwealth Ombudsman are one of the few things that can force change and independent review.
Services Australia’s own compensation guidance says review and appeal options should usually be explored, while the Ombudsman’s annual reporting makes clear that own-motion investigations can arise from complaints, engagement activities and media coverage. Detailed complaints matter because they are how isolated grievances become identifiable patterns.
The Ombudsman has already established two propositions that can no longer be honestly brushed aside. First, child support can be weaponised by either parent. Second, in at least one child support context, Services Australia failed to follow the law for years. That alone justifies urgent scrutiny of how the system responds to manipulation by receiving parents.
Allegations are now widespread that Services Australia has for decades systematically inflated the incomes of paying parents while failing to subject receiving parents to the same level of scrutiny, or in some cases any meaningful scrutiny at all.
The unresolved question is whether Australia’s institutions will act now, or wait until what may become one of the country’s largest administrative scandals forces their hand.
