Supporting the cases that shape child support law — and explaining what they mean.
We concentrate on questions whose answers reach far beyond a single family: how income is measured, when an assessment should change, how unusual circumstances are treated, and how the courts build consistent principles from one decision to the next.
What we do
The Foundation's work has two strands that reinforce each other: helping the right cases reach the courts well prepared, and drawing out the principles those cases establish so that the wider community can understand and rely on them.
On the first strand, we look for child support matters that raise a question of genuine and recurring importance — a question whose answer will guide many families, not just the parents immediately involved. Where such a case might otherwise be argued thinly, abandoned for want of resources, or settled before the real issue can be tested, we aim to help ensure it is run as carefully and rigorously as possible. That can mean supporting the preparation of evidence, encouraging the framing of the central argument with precision, and helping the question reach the court in the clearest possible form. We do this in the public interest, never to favour one parent over another.
A case run with care gives the court everything it needs to weigh the question soundly.
On the second strand, we read and analyse the decisions that follow, and we work to explain them plainly. A judgment is only as useful as the number of people who can understand it. By translating the considered reasoning of the courts into language that parents, advisers and the public can actually use, we help good case law do the work it is capable of doing — guiding everyday assessments, settling disputes before they escalate, and giving families confidence that the rules are governed by reason.
A single difficult question, properly resolved, can bring fairness to thousands of families who will never see the inside of a courtroom.
Why we focus on questions of principle
The questions that matter
Kinds of cases the Foundation cares about
These are recurring pressure points where the legislation leaves room for interpretation — and where well-argued cases can make the law fairer for everyone.
Assessment fairness
Whether the standard assessment genuinely reflects a family's circumstances, and how courts approach situations where a formula-driven figure produces a plainly unfair result for a parent or a child.
Change of assessment
When an assessment should be departed from because of special circumstances — high costs of contact, a child's particular needs, or income that the formula does not capture — and how that discretion is exercised consistently.
Variable & self-employed income
How the law treats irregular earnings, business income, and arrangements where a parent's true earning capacity differs from the figure on a tax return — one of the most contested and consequential areas of all.
Cross-border & international
The difficult questions that arise when a parent or child lives overseas: how income and obligations are established, and how Australian arrangements interact with those in other countries.
Care, costs & second families
How shifting care arrangements, the real costs of raising a child, and the formation of new families are weighed — questions where small interpretive differences change outcomes for many households.
Arrears & enforcement
How accumulated liabilities, recovery and the consequences of non-payment are handled in a way that is firm but fair, and that keeps the focus on the child's ongoing support rather than punishment.
Why these questions, in depth
It is worth pausing on why questions like these repay careful attention. Take variable and self-employed income, perhaps the single most fertile source of dispute in the whole scheme. A parent who draws a modest salary from a company they control, while leaving profits in the business, may appear on paper to earn far less than their real capacity to support a child. The legislation gives courts the tools to look beyond the surface — but how far those tools reach, what evidence is required, and when it is fair to use them, are matters worked out case by case. A single, carefully argued decision in this area can give clarity to countless families and advisers who face the same pattern.
Change-of-assessment questions repay attention for a different reason. Here the law deliberately builds in discretion, because no formula can be just in every case. But discretion is only fair if it is exercised consistently and on sound principle. Decisions that explain clearly when a departure is and is not warranted — for unusually high contact costs, for a child with special needs, for income the formula cannot see — give the next family a reliable sense of where they stand. Without that guidance, similar families can receive very different outcomes, and confidence in the system erodes.
Where the statute leaves room for discretion, it is the bench that gives it principled, consistent shape.
Cross-border matters illustrate the value of sound case law from yet another angle. As Australian families become more internationally mobile, the questions of how to establish a parent's income abroad, and how to reconcile obligations across jurisdictions, arise more often and matter more. These are genuinely hard problems, and the parents caught up in them are often the least equipped to argue novel points of law unaided. Well-supported cases in this area can lay down principles that protect children whose circumstances span more than one country.
The difference sound case law makes
The practical effect of good jurisprudence is easy to underestimate, because most of it is invisible. The overwhelming majority of child support outcomes are never litigated. They are produced by an assessment process that applies settled understandings of the law to ordinary facts. But those settled understandings come from somewhere — they are the distilled product of the cases that have gone before. Improve the quality of those cases, and you improve the quality of millions of decisions that quietly follow the path they set.
Sound case law does three things at once. It guides, by giving assessors, advisers and parents a clear reference point for how the law applies. It resolves, by answering questions that the legislation left open, so that the same argument need not be fought from scratch every time. And it reassures, by demonstrating that the system is governed by reasoned principle rather than chance or sympathy. Each of those effects makes the scheme fairer, and each of them flows from the careful work that goes into the cases at the foundation of the law.
How we approach it
We are deliberate and selective. We do not measure our work by how many matters we touch, but by whether the questions we help bring forward are genuinely capable of improving the law. We assess potential cases on their importance and their merit, never on which parent might benefit. We are independent and non-partisan, and we are scrupulous about respecting the role of the courts: we help ensure the strongest, best-prepared arguments are available to be considered, and we never seek to influence how any matter is decided.
Behind this work sits real, specialist depth in how child support operates in Australia — the kind of understanding that allows a genuinely significant question to be told apart from a merely difficult one, and that informs how a case can best be prepared. We draw that depth from leading experts in the field, whose long, focused experience in child support informs our sense of which questions matter most and why.
Our work, then, is patient and principled by design. We will not always be able to point to a dramatic, single moment of change, because that is not how the law usually develops. It advances through the steady accumulation of well-reasoned decisions, each one slightly improving the clarity and fairness of the rules that families live by. By helping the most important of those decisions be reached on the strongest possible foundations — and by explaining what they mean — the Foundation aims to leave Australian child support law fairer than it found it.
