This article draws on interviews with 41 Australian separated mothers, and the government forms, information and instructions used to administer their child support and benefit entitlements, to reveal four tactics through which women’s decision-making was coordinated to produce financial benefits to the state. The state pursued its preferred outcome by foregrounding women’s obligation to seek and collect child support, while at the same time, information on alternative choices was made deliberately opaque – making the state’s foregrounded option more likely. If women were entitled to, or sought, options that lay outside the default choice, the onus was on them to investigate, instigate and persevere with what was made to be a deliberately onerous and opaque process. As a result, the administration of Australian child support policy perpetuated low-income women’s experiences of economic and social inequity, entrenching the feminisation of poverty in single parent families.

本文根据对41位澳大利亚分居母亲的采访以及政府用于管理子女抚养费和福利待遇的表格，信息和指示，揭示了四种策略，通过这些策略，妇女的决策得以协调，从而为州带来经济利益。该州通过强调妇女寻求和收集子女抚养费的义务来追求自己的理想结果，与此同时，关于替代选择的信息被故意弄得不透明，这使得该州更倾向于选择该方案。如果妇女有权或寻求默认选择之外的选择权，则她们有责任调查，煽动和坚持不懈地进行，这是故意的繁重而又不透明的过程。因此，