How You Can Help

How You Can Help and How We Use Your Information

At Dispute Child Support, we empower families to challenge the Child Support Agency’s (CSA) unfair practices and drive systemic reform. If you’ve experienced the CSA’s coercive behaviour, you can help by sharing your story to expose their harm and push for change. Here’s how you can contribute and how we use your information to achieve better outcomes for families.

Submit Statutory Declarations for Our Governor-General Report

The CSA’s aggressive tactics—relentless calls, misleading statements, and unjust Departure Prohibition Orders (DPOs)—devastate families and harm children. We urge you to document these experiences in a statutory declaration and upload it via our secure web form for inclusion in a comprehensive report to the Governor-General, calling for restrictions on the CSA’s powers. Your declaration can detail:

  • Financial and Emotional Harm: How CSA demands, such as inflated assessments or penalties, have caused financial strain, stress, or mental health issues (2009 Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Report).
  • Disrupted Family Dynamics: How CSA enforcement, like DPOs or delayed Departure Authorisation Certificates (DACs), has undermined your parenting role or strained co-parenting.
  • Impact on Children: How CSA actions have distressed your children, such as through reduced living standards or exposure to parental conflict.

How You Can Help: Upload your statutory declaration using our secure web form. Your submission will be included in our Governor-General report, and you may be asked to provide supporting evidence, such as CSA correspondence or financial records. Uploaded documents help our model learn from your experiences, improving outcomes for families.

How We Use Your Information: We combine your declaration with others to create a powerful report for the Governor-General, amplifying your voice to expose CSA harm and demand reform. Your story may also support submissions to the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) and Commonwealth Ombudsman, strengthening our case for accountability. Uploaded documents help our model identify patterns of CSA misconduct, informing advocacy strategies. All submissions are anonymised to protect your privacy.

State-Based Statutory Declaration Forms: Access the appropriate form for your state or territory:

Note: For Commonwealth declarations, you can create a digital version via myGov with a Digital ID, without a witness. Confirm the correct form with the receiving authority.

Expose Systemic Failings and Lack of Accountability

The CSA’s systemic issues—non-disclosure, misrepresentations, and coercive tactics—persist without accountability. We challenge the Fix Child Support narrative, which claims the system needs reform to protect receiving parents. We believe the system is primarily exploited by receiving parents to burden paying parents. Proposals like moving collections to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) escalate conflict rather than encourage cooperation. Families report:

  • Procedural Unfairness: The CSA withholds documents, like contact records, hindering fair reviews.
  • Coercive Control: Incessant calls from blocked numbers and DAC delays disrupt family stability (Fix Child Support, 2024).
  • No Oversight: The CSA’s complaints processes dismiss concerns, and external bodies like the Legal Services Commission cannot investigate (2009 Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Report).

How You Can Help: Include these issues in your statutory declaration for our Governor-General report, highlighting how CSA actions and proposals like ATO collections harm paying parents. Lodge complaints with the Commonwealth Ombudsman, referencing the 2009 Ombudsman’s Report to highlight ongoing issues.

How We Use Your Information: Your declaration and uploaded documents help us build a case against CSA misconduct, supporting our Governor-General report and Ombudsman submissions. We analyse submissions to identify systemic patterns, informing advocacy for reform while ensuring your privacy through anonymisation.

Uncover Hidden Practices with Freedom of Information Requests

The CSA’s reliance on external decision-makers raises transparency concerns. These contractors, reportedly paid millions, facilitate change of assessment applications with minimal oversight. Key issues include:

  • Unqualified Decision-Makers: External agents often lack legal training yet influence assessments and DPOs.
  • No Recourse: Contractor decisions face little review, leaving parents unable to challenge errors.
  • Taxpayer Cost: Outsourcing diverts public funds to lawfare, shielding the CSA.

How You Can Help: Submit Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to Services Australia to uncover details about external decision-makers. We suggest requesting:

  • Tender agreements with firms employing external decision-makers.
  • Records of change of assessment decisions by external agents (2020–2025).
  • Correspondence between the CSA and external contractors.
  • Internal practices, dispute resolution procedures and other internal guidance documents that perpetuate family conflict instead of resolving it.

How We Use Your Information: We provide advice on refining FOI requests to avoid refusals and appealing denials. Information obtained can expose conflicts of interest, support ART appeals, or strengthen our Governor-General report. Upload FOI responses to our web form to enhance our model’s understanding of CSA practices, improving outcomes for families.

Join Our Movement for Reform

Dispute Child Support is a movement to end the CSA’s financial and emotional harm to families. Together, we can:

  • Challenge Unfair Assessments: Use FOI data to appeal assessments or apply for DACs, countering CSA misrepresentations.
  • Protect Your Children: Document harm to your children in statutory declarations, highlighting CSA violations of their rights (Fix Child Support, 2024).
  • Demand Accountability: Amplify your voice through our network of families, combining declarations and documents to push for reform.

Get Started: Download your state’s statutory declaration form from the links above and upload it via our secure web form. Upload relevant documents to help our model improve outcomes. Together, we can hold the CSA accountable, protect families, and reform the child support system.

Help the Project

help

Maximum file size: 3MB

Early contributors will receive 12 months of free access
as a token of our appreciation.

Scroll to Top