Who is Kate Legge?

[J.L.]

Who is Kate Legge?

An award winning journalist married to Greg Hywood: Former editor of the AFR, SMH and The Age over the years, who now writes a column for The Age, appears on Insiders and is consulting to the Bracks government on the rebranding of Victoria.
He is on the board of the Victorian State Library along with the head of the Victorian Institute of Teaching, former sex discrimination commissioner Susan Halliday; and former Australia Council boss Hilary McPhee, whose husband Don Watson wrote the speeches of Labor prime minister Paul Keating.

Why should we care who Kate Legge is?

The answer is that she has put forward possibly the most interesting journalistic entry on the Task force report ( as excerpted below) and we should be aware of where her potential authority for such an assertion comes from. These figures are very much in line with the amounts paid to the widows of the SAS Blackhawk crash in Queensland to raise their children. Divide it 50/50 and it becomes pretty obvious what the job of the CSA is about and why Prof. Parkinson wants to play with the FTB?s. It might be a good idea to include these points in any love letters you may wish to send to the politicians.
Combine this assertion with an article by Sue Dunleavy in the Daily Telegraph Monday 27th. June, 2005 P.16 which is within an article about the research into the costs of children by the taskforce and under the subtitle

? Community cost of children .?
? Research on the cost of raising children shows a family earning less than $26,000 a year spend $82 per week raising a child.
Families in this income range receive the full amount of Family Tax Benefit A, worth $66.78 a week. Plus the$613 lump sum benefit at the end of every financial year ? adding up to an average $78.00 per week. In addition, if one parent stays at home to care for the child they receive a further $57 per week in Family Tax Benefit Part B.
?For some very low income households, research presented to the taskforce suggested that government benefits meet the full measured costs of children in intact households.??
Families earning up to$32,000 a year receive the full amount of FTB B ? and the cutoff will rise to $37,000 a year under welfare changes planned by the Government.?
? ---- It costs a family on $51,000 a year $155 a week to bring up one child.?

From http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15644544%255E28737,00.html

Revaluing the family

"Social affairs writer Kate Legge
June 18, 2005

Patrick Parkinson, who led the taskforce, tells Inquirer: "You can't design a child-support policy around getting parents into work but you can be very aware of the disincentives to workforce participation and try to remove them."

He confides that an open secret among taskforce members is research showing that the Government's Family Tax Benefit covers most of the cost of children.

"Government benefits and getting back into the workforce are the important levers for keeping households afloat. By far the least significant element is child support," Parkinson says.

http://www.walkleys.com/2003/winners/legge.htm

Kate Legge ? The Australian ? ?Patrick: A case in the life of a Family Court judge?
Kate Legge is a senior writer with The Australian and has worked in newspapers for more than 20 years. She is a former editor of The Australian's Review of Books and a prolific features writer. Legge was a former correspondent in the political boiling pots of Canberra and Washington, and won the Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year award in 1994 for a series of articles on the issues confronting families in the 1990s. Kate Legge's story took readers into the carpeted chambers of the Family Court for a series of remarkably candid interviews with Justice Paul Guest, uncovering the personal and emotional fallout of a case he will never forget.
JUDGES? COMMENTS: A breakthrough piece involving an interview with a Family Court judge and QC at the heart of a custody trial that led to the death of a mother and child. It captured the modern dilemma facing the Court in this era of gay parents and sperm donation. The Family Court?s decisions touch many peoples? lives. This was an important, untold story with wider implications. It was intensely human and deftly and brilliantly handled.

From http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15620401-1242,00.html

Pained by tyranny of distance

By Kate Legge
June 15, 2005
SOLICITOR Bill Kable drove from Sydney to Taree over the long weekend to see his eight-year-old daughter.
He paid for the travel there and back, meals, accommodation costs for both of them, plus the ordinary out-of-pocket petty cash that gets frittered away on fun, but none of these expenses can be deducted from the $2558 he pays each month in child support.
At Easter last year, his former wife shifted with their two children to northern NSW, where she now lives with her new husband.
Mr Kable had no idea that the children he supported financially and held dear emotionally were moving 300km away. Tyranny of distance is a common complaint among non-resident parents. The average divorced man in Australia lives 162km from his children, and yet these dads get no concession for the costs associated with contact visits.
Mr Kable would like shared-parenting arrangements but makes do with an order that restricts him to three weekends a school term in Taree and half of the holidays in Sydney.
He loves seeing his daughter. On Saturday night they watched a fireworks display. On Monday they visited the local aquatic centre, and in between they played Monopoly and collected shells on the beach.
His 14-year-old son resists contact with his father, whom he has seen for only one weekend in the past 2 1/2 years.
Mr Kable does not spit venom about what happened to his marriage, but he is aggravated by the Child Support Agency and what he sees as injustices in the existing formula for determining payment which was introduced in 1988 with scant research on the costs of raising children.
When he and his wife separated in 2001, she got the family home, representing 70 per cent of his assets, and Mr Kable was left with his superannuation, which he couldn't touch. Establishing himself was difficult because so much of his salary went to child-support payments and these continued even while he was not earning any income.
His wife has not held a paid job since they got married. When they married, she had a young child from an earlier relationship, and Mr Kable says he encouraged her to stay at home full-time with his step-daughter because he could see the pitfalls of juggling child care and employment.
After effectively supporting another man's child as well as his own, he feels very much the loser, bearing all the costs while being denied the fruits that flow from companionship with the children he loves.
Yesterday Mr Kable welcomed news that the taskforce on child support starts from the proposition that children live in two households, not one.
He was also pleased with the recommendation for even-handed treatment of both parents' income. At present, the resident parent is allowed to earn exempt income which is set at a much higher level than the self-supporting component allowed for non-resident parents.
"I feel that my wife doesn't have to contribute at all," Mr Kable said. "The system is discriminatory. You can't help feeling aggrieved often that you have to keep paying child support even when you don't see the children."

From http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15618304%255E7583,00.html

Kate Legge: Simple formula the best solution

June 15, 2005
THE report In the Best Interests of Children is predicated on the notion that when parents divorce or separate, their children live in two households, not one.

This is the wishful thinking more akin to a world where dual-income households are the norm and new welfare-to-work rules encourage sole parents into employment.
Yesterday's report also reflects mounting international evidence that children benefit from the involvement of mothers and fathers.
Devising a child support formula to satisfy sets of parents who can barely agree on the date or the month is a Herculean test, but the present regime is broken and needs fixing.
The reforms would treat both parents' income more even-handedly; the formula would set higher payments for teenagers because older children cost more to feed and clothe; the costs of contact visits, which often involve interstate travel and accommodation, will be taken into account in assessing levels of child support; and a tougher enforcement regime will hit the large numbers of deadbeat dads who currently don't pay a zack.
Policy-makers want arrangements that encourage creative solutions to the difficult and fraught emotional terrain of divorce and separation. To this end they want to remove the 110-night rule which reduces child support payments if the non-custodial parent exceeds this amount of contact.
The new system will aim to foster more co-operative deals that help children move back and forth between households with a minimum of acrimony and disruption.
It is almost inconceivable that something so bloodied by the messy history of he-said, she-said, can be reduced to a simple equation for how much parents who live apart contribute to the upkeep of their children, but a formula remains the cleanest and most transparent solution.
The existing machinery was designed almost 20 years ago by plucking percentages out of the air. It was a model built on a rust-bucket social structure where men were breadwinners and women were carers.
Anger and frustration grew, particularly among men who represent 91 per cent of child-support payers. They formed Dads in Distress, lone-parent organisations, and more militant bands in black shirts who paraded their discontent with family law and the infrastructure set up to cushion children from the impact of divorce.
In 2003 a parliamentary inquiry recommended the appointment of yesterday's taskforce to properly research the costs of children who have two sets of everything -- beds, toothbrushes, clothes, shoes and sometimes school uniforms.
Read through the heartbreaking submissions from mums and dads, grandmothers and grandfathers and understand the impossible mission of calculating who should pay what. "I have not seen my children for 220 days and I am expected to remain calm, collected, positive," wrote Rajiv Solomon from Queensland.
Slowly the entire system is being recast. There is greater recognition of the need for fathers to develop relationships with their children.
Yesterday we got a preview of tomorrow's child-support formula based on economic modelling that recognises the complexity of modern family life, and social research that reveals the importance of getting both parents to move beyond bitterness and hate in the interests of their children's welfare.
Kate Legge, Social affairs writer"

J.L.


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[Paul T]

Good post J.L.
It is actually refreshing to read something that has the childs best interests established on a better researched level.
Wouldn't it be nice if all money that is considerd for the "child"
be divided in half. This being FTB, Maintanance and any other benifits.
50% to Dad and 50% to Mum.
Right from point of seperation, Money and time.
Then we could go to mediation on a level base of 50% care to all parent of their children.
Then those who don't want or are unable to have care would pay for the period they didn't have there child.
If they have 30% care they pay 70%.
And if a parent moves away they must provide a valid reason that is acceptable to both parties.
Or stand to pay full transportation costs or relequish care %.
If move is agreed upon between both parties they could each pay 50% of costs or meet half way.
Simple sollutions to a simple problem with one negative effect it would raise the unemployment rate of the country with a lot of out of work Lawyers, CSA staff and Social Workers and maybe a few Judges.
Hang on a sec where was the negotives ??????

[Kasey]

I had never heard of this journo, but after reading the above article I am super impressed. She has brought out alot of misconceptions, and it makes my blood boil to think that its an "open secret" that the exes pension more than covers the costs of raising a child. This is downright unfair. What the hell are we paying for then? Lets all e-mail Ms Legge and tell her our stories and thank her for finally printing a balanced view.

[Guest]