Child support policy rhetoric: A comparison of logics in four countries

1. Child support policy rhetoric: A comparison of logics in four countries A/Prof Kay Cook, Swinburne University, Australia Dr Michael Fletcher, University of Wellington, NZ Prof Christine Skinner, University of York, UK Prof Daniel Meyer, University of Wisconsin, USA

2. Child support policy • Money paid by a non-resident parent to a resident parent for the purpose of supporting children post-separation • Three inherent policy aims: • Reduce child poverty • Increase non-resident parent financial responsibility • Limit welfare state expenditure • At a conceptual level, child support programs are regarded as doing similar things across countries: • Determining how much is to be paid • Collecting money from payers • Passing money on to recipients

3. Aim and rationale • Given fundamental and incremental policy reform, it is important to assess how child support is now described in order to determine: • the extent to which it aligns with the three implicit policy aims • if it still meets societal policy expectations • Research questions • How does each country discuss child support? • What does each country’s discursive framing reveal about its policy priorities and logic?

4. Data and analysis • Data • Federal government policymaking, information and administrative documents • For the period from the last major policy change in each country, to the present • Analysis • Semantic corpus coding software (WMatrix) • Categorises a corpus of text into semantic domains according to frequency and significance • Provides semantic relationships within each domain • list of key terms that comprise a domain • contextual phases immediately prior to and following each instance of each key term

5. RQ 1: How does each country discuss child support? • Unique primary semantic domains: • US • Money: lack – deadbeat or dead broke; poverty • No respect – contempt (of court) • UK • Time: future – the cost benefits to be provided by the new system • Australia • Paper, documents, writing – bureaucratic procedures of applying, modifying orders, appealing decisions, etc

6. Common semantic domains • Kin (child, mother, parent, partner, etc) • Helping (aid, benefits, [child] support, welfare, etc) • Law and order • Money and pay • Money: debts • People (individual, human [services], person, etc) • But, within these common domains, there was significant diversity across countries focus of the analysis

7. Law and order • USA • codifying principles of behaviour or conduct (e.g. the intent of this rule is to…) • Final Rule (a legislative term to note an agreed upon change), court decision-making and the information they need and decisions they provide, incarceration as an option • UK • legislation in terms of what the new legislation will do and what problems the new system will fix • Australia • heavily focused on technical details and processes associated with terms such as appeals, legislation, statutory rules, and tribunals • NZ • rules, penalties, liabilities and legal action are common in this domain, with a focus on pursuing payments from non-compliant payers

8. Money and pay • US • funding and grants for state programs and incentive payments to states • lower liabilities can improve payment outcomes • programs that support fatherhood and increase the employment and income of child support payers • UK • funding provided to run the old program with limited outcomes and savings to be had as a result of the new system • underpayments as a historical legacy issue rather than an ongoing issue • affordability of fees, and simpler formula calculations • Australia • bureaucratic details regarding the operation of the formula to calculate liabilities • family tax benefit interactions for payees and tax returns as the basis of liability calculations dominate the domain • NZ • how the system benefits everyone in terms of recouping benefits and reducing taxpayer expenditure • child support calculations and changes • reducing tax and child support debts

9. Money: debts • USA • Differentiates between family-owed and state-owed arrears • Differentiates between unwillingness (deadbeat) and inability (dead broke) to pay • Identifies penalties for those unwilling to pay, incarceration as potentially unhelpful • UK • Historic arrears have built up in the old system, but many debts are not recoverable • There is some discussion of seeking to avoid the build-up of new debts in the new system • Australia • An equivalent focus on debts owed by payers and debts owed by recipients to the state as a result of benefit overpayment based on inaccurate child support income. Both types of debts are typically discussed together • Describes how arrears are dealt with procedurally in the system • NZ • Writing off debt plays a role in facilitating future payments

10. RQ 2: Policy logics • Unsurprisingly, the divergent ways that child support was discussed aligned with country-specific procedural settings: • calculating, collecting, and transferring payments • But, discursivediversity mapped onto implicit power relations inherent within each country’s financial settings: • Who were debts owed to? • How were child support programs funded?

11. Who are (or were) debts owed to? • The way that arrears and debts were discussed aligned with whether child support debts were owed to a resident parents (private) or the state (public) • Public debts could either be: • pursued to increase revenue (NZ) • waived to improve future compliance or reduce collection costs (US; UK; NZ) • pursued when owed by a child support payee (Aus) • Private debts were not pursued at the state’s expense unless they: • provided a financial return (US) • were cost neutral (UK)

12. How are child support programs funded? • Incentives for spending or recouping public money • US: state funding based on incentives (paternity, establishing orders, collections, etc) • Payer capacity and motivation is to be enhanced • State-owed debts waived to improve payment outcomes • UK: user pays • The new, minimal program costs less money to operate • Enforcement is minimal unless costs are recovered via fees • Australia: benefit reductions • Calculating liabilities and assuming compliance lowers outlays • Absence of discussion of program collection and transfer costs • New Zealand: state recovery • Payments are encouraged to reduce overall state costs • Waiving state debts is a strategy for future compliance

13. Conclusions: What is child support policy trying to achieve? • Reduce child poverty? • This was an original aim of child support, but it is absent from almost all documentation • The US was the only country to discuss poverty, but mainly in terms of poverty as a reason for non-compliance; far less so regarding reducing child poverty • Increase non-resident parent financial responsibility? • The US describes this indirectly as fathering and employment might lead to more reliable and increased payments • Waiving debts (US, NZ) is seen as a means of improving this in the future • Limit welfare state expenditure? • Reducing system and benefit outlays was an explicit discursive focus for most countries (US, UK and NZ) • Reducing benefit expenditure was an implicit outcome given the administrative rules, claw back and public debt recouping procedures described (Aus)