Wave of NZ child-support payers tipped to organise DNA tests

Men are being encouraged to take out "the best lottery ticket you could buy" through DNA tests to prove whether they fathered their former partners' children.

A fathers' group, Families Apart Require Equality (Fare), predicts that the Government will have to repay millions of dollars in child support after the precedent set this week by a Christchurch man who won back $18,000 for child support he paid to a child who was not his own.

The man, welder Gordon Dowler, 51, has been "overwhelmed" by the support he has received since his case was reported.

"A lot of people have come in and said, 'Good on you'," he said. "I've had old guys coming in with eyes full of tears telling me that they really admire the level of honesty and the way I've maintained the privacy of the child."

Mr Dowler has not publicly named the child, whose mother received his financial support from the time he and the mother separated, when the baby was 18 months old, until the child left school.

Mr Dowler came back from overseas in 1981 when the mother rang him to say she was pregnant. He bought a house for the family and helped to look after the baby, even though a former boyfriend of the mother told him three months after the birth the baby was not his (Mr Dowler's).

Mr Dowler disputed paternity when he was required to pay child support after the couple split in 1983, but could not prove it until the child grew up and gave consent for a DNA test in 2003. That test confirmed he was not the father.

Fare spokesman Bruce Tichbon said the Child Support Agency should now repay "hundreds of millions of dollars" to other men who had been falsely named as fathers. About 143,000 parents paid a total of $249 million in child support in the last financial year alone.

A recent Law Commission report said reported rates of "misattributed" paternity ranged from 1 to 30 per cent, 9 or 10 per cent being "commonly cited". It quoted a 2003 estimate by Dr Richard Fisher that between 1000 and 5000 of the 55,000 babies born in New Zealand each year have the wrong father's name on their birth certificates.

"If 10 per cent is the accepted figure then there are 400,000 adults and children in New Zealand who think the wrong man is their father," Mr Tichbon said.

"This is a very close-to-the-bone, personal issue which has the potential to tear families apart, but for some people getting a positive test is tremendously reinforcing for their families."

He said it was "grossly iniquitous" that the Inland Revenue Department would not accept DNA testing to determine the paternity of a child under 16 without the written consent of both the supposed father and the child's mother or guardian.

But the Dowler case showed the advantages of getting DNA tests with the consent of the children after they turned 16.

"We would advise any man in the child support system to do his own test. It's the best lottery ticket you could ever buy," said Mr Tichbon. "For a lot of men, the cost of the tests will be one, two or three weeks' child support payments."

Parents for Children spokesman James Nicolle said he was aware of two men in Auckland, one in Wellington and one in Southland who were already having DNA tests to get out of paying child support.

Another man is seeking a paternity test to prove that he is the father of a 19-year-old girl whose mother claims the father is her present partner. His case will be heard when he appears in the District Court at Whangarei on June 23 charged with breach of a protection order.

The Law Commission has recommended that any person named on a birth certificate as a parent should have the right to seek a paternity test, provided the other parent is notified. The other parent could object, but could not stop the test unless there were "compelling reasons".

"For example, if a child is very emotionally vulnerable, or might have taken a drug overdose, or has a diagnosis of potential schizophrenia, or is about to sit NCEA or is about to have surgery, and if the mother says, 'Can we wait six months?' then there has got to be that leeway," said Law Commissioner Frances Joychild.