If you’re a sole parent and you’re claiming a benefit, should you have to reveal the identity of the other parent?

At the moment, if you don’t name them, your benefit is cut – on average, you'll lose about $22 to $28 a week.

That's a penalty imposed by WINZ, presumably to encourage sole parents to name what in most cases will be the father, and that will allow WINZ to then pursue them for financial support.

At the moment, 17,000 children fall into this category. They have a sole parent but that parent has not named the other parent, so their benefit is reduced. This affects about 20 per cent of sole parents who rely on benefits. The father hasn't been named.

Labour says that law should be reversed.

It says its overwhelmingly women who are hurt by this penalty. They make up 97 per cent of the sole parents who fall into this category, and it unfairly penalises their children too, says Labour.

There are, in some cases, very good reasons given for not releasing the identity of a father.

Among them, the child may be a victim of incest or rape. Or there may be a fear of violence.

In these cases, the sole parent has to write a statement about why they can't identify the other parent.

But what of the others?

If you take the emotive side out of this debate for a moment, anyone who parents a child should surely be held financially accountable. If you father a child, then why should it be up to us - the taxpayers - to fund that child's upbringing with zero financial input from the father himself?

I agree, the current system penalises the mothers and their children -- and yes, we can bang on about how they shouldn't have got themselves into this situation in the first place, but it's happened so there's no point trying to shut the gate when the horse has bolted.

I would argue that WINZ needs to do more to encourage the naming of fathers, rather than simply penalise the mothers. Men who father children should be stumping up child support.

Labour wants to amend the social security legislation rewrite bill, to reverse this. To stop penalising mothers, but I think that's the wrong approach.

That won't do anything to make dead-beat fathers financially accountable for the children they've fathered. And that's where I think you have to start. Get in front of some of these sole parents and find out why they won't - or can't - name the father.

Incentivise them to do so. Give them a one-off $1000 payment, perhaps.

If you father a child, you need to realise that raising that child will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that's your financial responsibility, not the State's.