As Alannah* made plans to leave her abusive partner, she had to involve Centrelink.
She contacted them and requested they make her parenting payments into her new account – not the joint account she shared with her ex, who was emotionally, financially and psychologically abusive for years. He was later convicted of an offence against her.
Alannah was due to get a lump sum payment from Centrelink – several thousand dollars – and planned to use this to help her leave the relationship.
Instead Centrelink made that lump sum payment into the old account she shared with her partner.
“I knew he had access to my Centrelink stuff; I knew he was an excessive checker of the bank account. When he came home, he was like ‘what’s this about?’”
Alannah said she called Centrelink to report the error. “I said ‘you don’t understand the danger you’ve put me in’. And then there was this rigmarole, they couldn’t just take the money back.” In the meantime, her ex moved the money into his own personal account that Alannah had no access to.
Centrelink never explained how or why the payment got messed up, she said.
Alannah’s case is one of many that highlights the way that government platforms like MyGov, Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office are being used to facilitate financial abuse, as the Centre for Women’s Economic Safety (CWES) launches a campaign calling on the government to reform its systems to better protect women.
Rebecca Glenn, the CWES founder and chief executive, said the way these systems were set up made it easy for perpetrators to inflict ongoing financial abuse on a victim-survivor for many years after they left a violent relationship.
Financial abuse occurs in 79-99% of cases of domestic and family violence, according to estimates, with 16% of women and 7.8% of men in Australia experiencing partner economic abuse in their lifetime.
“A lot of these systems are designed to protect people from strangers but not from people they know,” Glenn said. “We know that people have a fair bit of information about their partners: email addresses, security questions, dates of birth, passwords, tax file numbers.
“The MyGov platform is often misused in many different ways by perpetrators of domestic violence and economic abuse. It can be used to learn about a new address, [and] during Covid we saw it misused to access super. Post-separation, it can be used to see health records and weaponise those in family court proceedings.”
Glenn said simply telling people not to share their password with a partner – particularly a controlling one – was not only unreasonable, it could be highly dangerous.
“It’s such an important platform in people’s lives, we are urging the government to consider safety by design in consultation with victim-survivors, to see how we can prevent the misuse of that system or mitigate harm.”
Among the other systems commonly used by perpetrators are the tax system and child support system.
“We see perpetrators misusing business structures and creating tax debt in the name of their partner and ex-partner,” Glenn said. “According to the way the law is written, the tax office can’t exercise discretion and has to chase the person in whose name the debt is.”
In May, Guardian Australia reported the case of Penelope*, who alleges her then-husband forced her to sign documents making her the director of his business. She alleges he then did not file tax returns for his business for several years and took out company loans that he did not repay and that she had spent years being chased by both the lenders and the tax office for these debts.
Penelope faced the prospect of bankruptcy and losing her home as a result and it has taken a professional financial counsellor over a year of work to try to extricate her from the situation.
Glenn said Penelope’s situation could have been avoided if Australia adopted a provision in its taxation legislation – as there was in the US – called “innocent spouse relief”, which gave the ATO discretion in cases of tax and debt relief when financial abuse had played a role.
The CWES is also calling for an overhaul of the child support system, which she said routinely failed women and children. According to data provided to a recent parliamentary inquiry into the child support system, there is currently $1.7bn in unpaid child support owed in Australia. Advocates say this estimate is on the low side.
“One hundred per cent of the women we support in our money clinics [financial counsellor sessions provided by the CWES for financial abuse victims] have not been paid child support, or have had it drastically minimised and it’s insufficient,” Glenn said. “No one gets the full amount.”
The CWES argues that child support payments should be guaranteed by the government – with the parent paying the child support paying it to the government, and if they fail to pay, the burden falls on the tax office to chase the funds.
“Effectively it becomes a debt owed to the government rather than a debt owed to the women and children,” Glenn said.
The minister for women, Katy Gallagher, said that after a meeting of national cabinet in September, the federal government announced it would undertake an audit of key government systems as part of its commitment to end violence against women.
“We know that too often perpetrators of family and domestic violence exploit and manipulate government systems to control, threaten or harass a current or former partner,” she said.
“The audit will initially focus on the child support, social security and tax systems and will be informed by people with lived experience.”
For Alannah, if she did not have to chase her ex-partner for child support it would give him one less tool with which to perpetrate post-separation abuse.
Alannah said that even though her ex was required to pay only about $40 per child per week in child support, he regularly made these payments late and required her to chase him for them.
“It forces me, even though I’m meant to have escaped him and shouldn’t have to even think about him … to focus on him and navigate him,” she said. “I can’t even get on with my life.”
* For privacy, Alannah is a pseudonym.
• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.
