Paternity

When a carer parent applies for a child support assessment from the Child Support Agency, the Agency can be satisfied that the person they seek child support from is a parent of a child only in 8 fact situations (section 29(2) Child Support Assessment Act):

• the child was born while the person was married to the child's mother or father. A child is born during a marriage even if the parties to the marriage have separated as long as a divorce is not finalised (i.e. before the decree absolute).

• the person is named as the child's parent in a register of births or parentage information kept under Australian law. The Agency needs to sight a copy of the birth certificate or the applicant must provide a statutory declaration stating that the person they named as the liable parent is recorded as a parent on the child's birth certificate.

• an Australian court has expressly found that the person is a parent of the child, or has made a finding that could not have been made unless the person was a parent of the child (and that finding has not been set aside, altered or reversed).

• the person has executed an instrument under an Australian law, such as a statutory declaration under the Oaths Act of an Australian state, acknowledging that they are the child's father or mother, and that instrument has not been annulled or set aside.

• the person has adopted the child.

• the person is a man and the child was born within 44 weeks of his marriage to the child's mother, which has since been annulled.

• the person is a man who was married to the child's mother and they separated, then resumed cohabitation for 3 months or less, and the child was born within 44 weeks of the end of that last period of cohabitation but after they divorced (after the date of the decree absolute).

• the person is a man who cohabited with the child's mother at any time during the period beginning 44 weeks and ending 20 weeks before the child was born, but they were not married at any time during that period. Cohabitation involves living together in a domestic relationship. The Agency can consider the financial and social aspects of the relationship, the nature of the household and the sexual relationship between the 2 people, in deciding whether they cohabited.

A significant amount of the work we do at Manby and Scott involves using DNA paretage testing to determine whether particular persons are, or are not, parents of the children involved.

If a payer of child support is shown not to be the biological parent of the child, the child support payments will stop. The mother is then likely to be ordered to re-pay all of the child support paid (under section 143 Child Support Assessment Act).