Ah. I’ve found further information about the child support situation re the mushroom murders.
Simon paid for the schooling and medical care and other expenses - up until Erin Patterson applied for child support and also wanted Simon to sign a document which she’d prepared, stating they’d each be responsible for half of the school and medical fees (separate to the child support).
We already know that his accountant had filed his tax return in 2022 with marital status “separated” without his knowledge. Erin Patterson was enraged by this, as evidenced in the recovered group chats in the “Signal” app. That’s when she applied for child support, as assessed by Services Australia, and also for the family tax benefit.
It’s also when she secretly pulled the children out of the school jointly agreed upon by her and Simon - and refused to list Simon in the paperwork with the school.
The initial assessment for child support was indeed ludicrously low ($38 per month - per child?) but had already been reassessed at $473.
Services Australia had advised Simon not to sign any separate financial agreement; if child support is sought, the payments and financial arrangements do need to go through the official channels.
According to Erin, the family tax benefit amount annually would have been around $1500.
Quoting from the trial:
❝
Mandy has probed Simon on how the couple planned to resolve the issue of their children’s school fees.
The court earlier heard that Patterson has pushed for them to split the costs of school fees, but Simon said he had been advised by “child support people” not to.
Delving into further detail, Simon told Mandy:
“The child support people were going to tell me how it was going to work. That amount I would pay would cover school fees. They said, ‘don’t pay that now, because you will be double paying’.”❞
In light of this … surely Erin would have been better advised to drop the child support application and go back to their previous arrangement where the pair had amicably shared expenses, with shared custody and family holidays….? By going through the official child support route, but trying also to have a separate written agreement, it strikes one as attempting to have her cake and eat it. I can’t see that she’d have been getting more though the child support application, Ben with the family tax benefit (or am I missing something?).
Re the document she tried to gave him sign - bad idea. Really bad idea. In my opinion he was wise to refuse to sign. He suggested to her that a) they let Services Australia finish all assessments with child support being arranged, or b) they go back to the previous arrangement of sharing all of the expenses. I don’t find the options unreasonable given this background.
I’ll have to quote from this link as it’s behind a paywall…
❝When Leongatha father Simon Patterson put on his tax return in 2022 that he was separated, it set off a lethal chain of events.
The relationship between him and his estranged wife, Erin Patterson, deteriorated well before a mushroom lunch killed three church parishioners as the pair quarrelled over child support payments and where their children would go to school.
“He quit his job. I was getting $38 per month child support,” Erin told a government employee in the aftermath of the lethal lunch that killed Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson.
“I asked for reassessment from child support. Every time he got really angry. When it went up to $473 per month ... he cancelled his direct debits for his [children’s] activities – stopped paying private health cover.
“I changed the kids’ school and enrolled them in [another]. I did not tell him, but he found out and kept calling the school, demanding they put him on the enrolment. He started a campaign against the school … angry they enrolled the children without his permission.”
The inner workings of the Patterson family relationships would be on display during Erin Patterson’s triple-murder trial. The jury was told about how Simon and Erin got together, their wedding and an eight-year marriage rocked by repeat separations and reconciliations. They parted permanently in 2015. [NB: they were actually still open to reconciliation.]
Simon told the court their split had been friendly and they shared custody of the children, went on family holidays together and organised to divide their assets without intervention from lawyers.
But while dropping his children back to Erin Patterson’s Gibson Road home in Leongatha, he said, he became aware there was an issue.
It was late October or November in 2022, he recalled, when his estranged wife pulled him aside for a chat. She sat in the car with Simon and said she had discovered that his tax return for the previous financial year noted they were separated.
“Before that, we hadn’t gotten the government involved in the fact we were separated at all before,” Simon said. “She said that it mattered, I think, for the family tax benefit, something of that nature. And so, she would be obliged to claim child support off of me, which had never happened before.”
Simon told the court his tax status was changed as a result of a miscommunication between him and his accountant. He said Erin rejected his efforts to revert it.
From then on, Simon said, communication became more functional and less “chatty”.
“That was probably the first thing that made me feel that there was a substantial change in our relationship, that before that, our habit for years was to message each other a lot, in a chatty way, and the chatty nature of it pretty much stopped,” he said.
He said that a few weeks later, Erin applied for child support. She was also keen for him to sign a form stipulating that they would each pay half of the children’s school fees.
However, Simon told Erin he had been advised by government staff not to do so, as the school fees would be covered in the child support payments.
“I’m sure she was very upset about that,” Simon told the jury.❞
There’s also quite a lot in this link:
And here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/05/alleged-mushroom-murders-trial-husband-simon-...
