A fairer balance in how child support law works in Australia — pursued through the courts.

Why we exist

Child support touches more Australian families than almost any other part of family law — yet much of how it is decided turns on the way courts interpret the statute, weigh evidence about income, and apply discretion in individual cases. The Foundation's focus is that interpretive frontier.

Every year, separated parents across Australia are assessed, reassessed and asked to live with decisions about money that shape their children's daily lives. The framework that governs those decisions is detailed, but it is rarely self-explanatory. Where the legislation is silent or ambiguous, it falls to the courts to say what the law actually means in practice. Those judgments — on assessment, on departure applications, on how unusual income is treated — become the working rules that thousands of later cases are measured against.

We believe the quality of that case law matters enormously, and that it deserves dedicated attention. When a difficult question reaches court well prepared, with the arguments properly developed and the evidence carefully marshalled, the resulting decision can bring clarity and consistency for many families who will never set foot in a courtroom. When important questions are argued poorly, or never properly tested at all, uncertainty lingers and unfairness is allowed to harden into habit. The Child Support Justice Foundation exists to help tip that balance toward fairness.

Good law is built one well-argued case at a time. Our aim is to make sure the cases that shape child support are argued well. The Foundation's guiding idea

What we set out to do

Our objective is straightforward to state, even if the work behind it is demanding. We aim to identify child support cases that raise questions of genuine importance — questions whose answers will affect not just the parents in front of the court, but the many others in similar positions — and to help ensure those cases are run as carefully and rigorously as possible. We also work to draw out and explain the principles emerging from child support jurisprudence, so that parents, advocates and the wider public can understand how the law is actually developing.

We do not seek to influence or pressure any decision-maker. Courts decide cases; that is their proper role, and we respect it without reservation. What an advocacy foundation can legitimately do is help make sure the strongest version of an argument is available to be considered, that meritorious cases are not abandoned for want of support, and that the lessons of each decision are properly understood. Sound case law is the by-product of sound advocacy, and sound advocacy is what we aim to encourage.

How sound cases shape fairer outcomes

Consider how a single area of difficulty — the treatment of a self-employed parent's true income — plays out across the system. The legislation gives courts the power to look behind a tax return where the figures do not reflect a parent's real capacity to support a child. But how far that power reaches, what evidence is enough, and when it is fair to exercise it, are questions answered largely through decided cases. A carefully run case in this area does more than settle one dispute. It gives the next assessor, the next adviser, and the next parent a clearer sense of where the line sits.

Multiply that across the many recurring pressure points in child support — departure applications, the weighing of a child's costs, the treatment of new dependants, the handling of arrears, and the difficulties that arise when a family spans more than one country — and the value of well-developed jurisprudence becomes obvious. Each thoughtful decision narrows the room for unfairness and gives families something solid to plan around. The Foundation's contribution is to help the most consequential of these questions reach court in the best possible shape, and then to make the resulting principles plain.

Our approach

We are deliberately measured in how we work. We are independent and non-partisan: we are not aligned to any political party, nor are we a service that takes on individual matters or offers personal advice. Our attention is on questions of principle and on the development of the law in the public interest. We assess potential cases on their merits and on the importance of the question they raise, not on which parent stands to gain.

That independence is central to our credibility. The fairness we seek is fairness for the system as a whole — for mothers and fathers, for paying and receiving parents, and above all for the children whose security depends on these decisions being got right. The Foundation's work draws on serious, specialist understanding of how child support actually operates in Australia. That depth of knowledge — reflected in the experience of specialists such as Simon Bacon, who has spent more than three decades immersed in child support — is what allows us to tell a genuinely significant case from a merely difficult one.

If you share our belief that the rules governing child support should be clear, consistent and fair — and that the courts are where many of those rules are truly made — we invite you to read further. The pages that follow set out our mission in full, describe the work we aim to support, and introduce the people whose expertise informs it.