Sure, they were both famous, so there was that connection, but he was the kooky country singer and she was Hollywood's leading lady. It didn't quite make sense.

No wonder the whole thing lasted less than two years, people knowingly huffed later.

There is something a bit Julia and Lyle about the current family payments and childcare debate. This year, the Coalition married the two policies, arguing you couldn't have childcare reforms without cuts to family payments.

Originally, when the Coalition set out to reform the childcare sector – tasking the Productivity Commission to do a big report in 2013 – it said there would be no new money for the changes.

But when it realised that actual reform would be difficult to achieve without money, the final policy was born in May with $3.5 billion attached. With it came the argument that this new money was tied to family payment cuts, some of which have been stuck in the Senate since the 2014 budget.

Even when the Coalition revamped its family payments savings into a new $4.8 billion plan in October (including raising the age at which family tax benefit B would cut out from 6 to 13), the link remained.

"There is a desperate need for reform to the childcare system. Everybody recognises that there are 165,000 Australian families crying out for change to the childcare system," Social Services Minister Christian Porter told question time this week after Labor agreed to only pass a small chunk of the family payment changes.

True, the government is also making the case that family payments cost the budget more than $20 billion a year and need to be reined in a bid for the sake of the overall budget (the words "rational restraint" are favoured by Porter).

But the childcare/family payments union remains at the forefront of the government's reasoning. And it's a link that makes some within the childcare and families sector uneasy.

While groups like ACOSS have been calling for better targeting of family payments for years, there is unhappiness that families who need childcare when their children are young are going to lose out on family payments when their offspring become more expensive as teenagers. The discomfort is heightened because the family payment cuts would hit single parents and grandparent carers, who by definition (the payments are means tested) are on lower incomes.

Advocacy group The Parenthood has described the pairing as "robbing Peter to pay Paul".

There has also been an argument that it is possible to find the money elsewhere in the budget and the government is not as dependent on family payment savings as it has made out.

For example, a quick glance at some of the less controversial family payments cuts in the past two budgets that have either passed Parliament or are likely to, comes up with about $2.5 billion over four years.

This includes ditching supplements for large families, no payments for families who do not immunise their kids and lowering the income threshold to qualify for family tax benefit part B.

Labor says it could save a further $1.4 billion by agreeing to part of the government's most recent FTB savings and blocking other sweeteners in the plan.

There are also the billions (about five of them a year) earmarked for Tony Abbott's whiz bang paid parental leave scheme. This was to be paid for by a levy on big businesses (that has since been ditched), but in making the case for abandoning PPL, the government also argued that they wanted to focus on childcare instead.

As Treasurer Scott Morrison said last month, "we agreed to pursue … the childcare reforms in [PPL's] place".

There was (misplaced) hope in the childcare sector earlier this year that if childcare reform was such a priority – and so important for women working and productivity – then maybe the levy would be transferred across from PPL to the families package.

But there has been an ongoing suspicion that linking childcare with family payments was just a way to get the unpopular cuts through the Senate.

And here you get to Arthur Sinodinos, the unusually straight-talking Liberal senator from NSW.

Penny Wong was quizzing officials about family payments and the childcare package at Senate estimates last month when Sinodinos noted "they are linked".

Wong shot back "politically linked", with the cabinet secretary agreeing, "for political purposes," before adding, "well, we have to pay for these things".

At the end of all this is the fact is that big questions still hang over the childcare reforms themselves.

In broad terms, we know the government wants to roll multiple childcare payments into one and that parents will be paid a subsidy based on the type of care they access, their income and the number of hours they work.

But without legislation (it is due by the end of the year), there is still no fine print on how the policy on a pedestal will work in practice.

The government says that families earning between $65,000 and $170,000 a year will be about $30 a week better off, but there is a blind spot about how it will interact with the family payment cuts. And whether that $30 will noticeably address skyrocketing childcare costs and the lack of childcare places in some parts of Australia.

All of which leaves one with that Julia and Lyle feeling.