Technical Fixes as Challenges to State Legitimacy: Australian Separated Fathers’ Suggestions for Child Support Policy Reform

This article assesses fathers' evidence presented to an Australian inquiry into the child support scheme. We examine these data in order to address how fathers' proposed child support policy solutions compared against Eekelaar's critique of parents' moral responsibilities to children and his identification of three substitute social bases for parents' continued support. We find that despite the inquiry's technical remit, fathers' solutions challenged the very basis of child support as maintaining, reinforcing, or redressing their responsibilities to children. Here, we illustrate that such procedures may be unable to contain fundamental challenges to state legitimacy when dealing with contested social issues.