Ms Louise Bayliss:

The maintenance review group is chaired by Judge Catherine Murphy. We have all fed into it and we are very grateful that she is doing the review. No country has a perfect system but there are countries that have better systems and at least they have a system. We have no system. We purely rely on the court and it is not the right area for it.

In Austria, New Zealand and many Nordic countries, the amount is assessed based on income revenue. The state pays the maintenance and then recoups it from the debtor. The parent is kept out of it completely. New Zealand and Australia have a system based on the involvement of the parent. This encourages greater parent-child contact. If the non-custodial parent has the child for 100 days a year, which is most weekends, he or she pays reduced maintenance compared with a parent who walks away completely. This is a very good system. However, I will put a caveat here. The only fear is that we would hate to think a child is being dragged away just to reduce the amount of maintenance.

Ms Byrne has made the strong point that we are in a childcare system that is piecemeal. It was allowed to develop and we are on a long path to find something good. In one sense we are at the opposite with maintenance because we have no maintenance. We are at ground zero. We are in a greenfield. We can look at other countries that have gone through the system and made their mistakes. I hope Judge Catherine Murphy's review will state we need a child maintenance system. Then we can do proper research and take the good parts from other jurisdictions and use the mistakes made and lessons learned and have a very good system. This is my hope. We have spoken to Scotland, Northern Ireland and even Australia. We have spoken to various jurisdictions.

None of them is perfect, but they are all better than what we have.