Accountants and solicitors have been criticized in the popular media in Australia for presenting papers at conferences on methods of minimizing liability for child support. One such method is to reduce one's personal taxable income by using companies or trusts as intermediaries. More worry- ing, perhaps, would be any practice by solicitors or judges to reduce the custodial parent's share in the family home because of the new levels of child support. If, say, a custodial parent who might previously have received 60 per cent of the home now receives only 50 per cent then the child could, on the facts, be worse off than before.
See for example, Sumner ( 1987:203-4). I leave out of account some defences of the will theory that adults can act as agents for children and exercise powers on their behalf, although the substantive issue is taken up later.
I appreciate that there are also theories based somehow in nature or religion, so that rights in these theories are related back to an alleged objective existence independent of human contrivance, but I adopt Mackie's argument that a belief in objective prescriptivity cannot in the end be defended: Mackie ( 1977:ch 1); Waldron ( 1984:171). Moral entities seem to me to belong within human thinking and practice so that they are either explicitly or implicitly posited, adopted or laid down.
Pettit ( 1990:116) puts it slightly differently: 'Deontologists say that, in some cases at least, the right option is that which honours a relevant value by exemplifying respect for it in this particular instance, whether or not honouring the value in this way promotes its realisation overall.'
As this paper was completed, a description of the consequences for girls was published but it was too late to incorporate into the text; see Maclean & Kuh ( 1991).
Such a proposal is not novel. I think it was at the core of the Finer Committee's recommenda- tions in Britain in 1974. Something similar was also proposed by the Women's Electoral Lobby in Australia. The reasons why it has not been accepted may lie in political theory, and in particular the liberal view as to the proper relationship between the state, men, women and children. This is touched on again in the Conclusion.
Research into the long-term consequences of parental separation may cause dilemmas for the majority of modern family lawyers who have long supported the removal of institutional pressures on adults to stay together. The old belief that a child in an unhappy two parent family is likely to be worse off than a child who lives with one fulfilled parent may be up for reconsideration, although it is too early to say whether any different conclusions would be reached.
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Publication Information: Book Title: Children, Rights and the Law. Contributors: Philip Alston - editor, Stephen Parker - editor, John Seymour - editor. Publisher: Clarendon Press. Place of Publication: Oxford. Publication Year: 1992. Page Number: 168.
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