Commentary Over one million Australian children are currently living without their fathers and the legislation underpinning the family court system and the child support scheme has been a major factor contributing to the present crisis of fatherlessness in this country. Contrary to popular belief, child support payments have nothing to do with irresponsible fathers abandoning their children. Developed in the late 1980s to outset the jurisdiction of the courts, the nation’s child support scheme was largely driven by the need to ensure that private transfers of money from fathers to mothers reduced the burden of the state in terms of welfare expenditure. According to Patrick Parkinson, the Dean of Law at the University of Queensland and one of the nation’s leading family law academics, the support scheme provides “perverse incentives … for primary caregivers to resist children spending more time with the other parent to avoid a reduction in the …