Australia’s treasurer, Jim Chalmers, may be handing out the treats in this week’s budget, but the man is not Santa: he’s asked for something in return. Babies.
Last week, he told Australians it’d “be better if birth rates were higher”.
The rate of local population growth is declining. There’s been a 20% drop in the fertility rate since 2008. Dr Jim’s plea is not so the lights of wonder can shine in more new eyes or puppies have more itsy-bitsy hands to hold them.
It’s because the economy depends on ever-expanding markets for stuff and – surprise! – markets turn out to be people. Migration has been pumping those local markets for years.
Meanwhile – as Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan are finding out – more old people than young means more work to do and less people to do it. Jonathan V Last points to the age structure in today’s Japan and asks: “Tell me how that under-30 group is supposed to financially support an over-65 group that’s close to double its size?” Social safety nets – pensions, welfare, state care – are “not sustainable in a sub-replacement environment”, Last writes.
Again, migration plumps local labour markets. If flow is interrupted, implications are dire. What could possibly go wrong? Uh, the Wall Street Journal cites figures this week that show “fertility is falling almost everywhere”. “Demographic winter” is a long-term planning challenge that no treasurer wants in the inbox.
We’ve been here before.
In high-income nations, fertility actually started falling beneath the replacement rate in the 1970s.
Whether you’re from a populated-or-perish or one-plague-on-the-planet worldview, Australia presently requires a birth rate of 2.1 kids per birthing parent to sustain current systems without migration. Faced with a rate of 1.7 in 2004, anxious Coalition treasurer Peter Costello launched a “baby bonus” incentive of $3,000 cash per birth and a memorably gross instruction: “Have one for Mum, one for Dad, and one for the country.”
It didn’t work and the fertility rate kept declining. The policy expired in 2014.
Analysts often point to cost of living challenges, resources disparities and relocation of women’s labour from the home to the workplace to explain the drop. It’s known that education causes women and girls to delay childbearing to complete their studies.
The Conversation has recently suggested also that “children are expensive and time-consuming”. The mathematics of accessible work, Australian childcare costs that outpace inflation and a desire to invest direct quality time with children all condition how much parenting one human being can feasibly do, especially if they’re working.
A mere 3% of the 3,000 organisations that report to the federal government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency provide childcare centres for their employees. Sixty-eight per cent offer no childcare assistance at all.
Yet the Wall Street Journal notes women “across all levels of income, education and labour-force participation” are having fewer children.
If we analyse how all of these conditions might intersect, an elephant in the room casts a shadow on the wall.
It’s a male elephant. While analysts look at birth rates through the prism of women’s work, women’s education and women’s resources, the analysis is not looking at men.
But women are.
Globalisation and mass communications of the last century have allowed women worldwide to see themselves, their societies, potential partners and the trajectories of their lives with greater clarity than ever before.
In Australia, there’s data available for an easy calculus. Women are disproportionately primary caregivers to children, and more likely to become primary caregivers to old people and people with disabilities. The “sandwich generation” of women sometimes do all three at once. Meanwhile, women still earn less money but are more likely to become single parents. Forty-seven per cent of marriages with children end in divorce. Is anyone surprised 80.3% of single parents are women?
The decline in the fertility rate in Australia coincides with when divorce-with-children rates peaked at 68% in the 1970s. Could it be an entire generation of women witnessed how little support there was for their parenting?
Australia’s broadening discussion about family violence has exposed, too, how abusive men have used women’s pregnancies and children to limit their capacity to leave them.
Look at discussions to limit women’s reproductive healthcare dominated by men and you’ll see a monstrous political id determined to force women into unwilling parenthood so established cultures of masculinity won’t have to change.
Fellas, if you want there to be more babies, this traditional direction of masculinity must change – because threats of global economic instability mean nothing to women who can see in their own lives the risk of abuse, exploitation and impoverishment that every pregnancy poses.
Manfluencers choke social media feeds daily, hawking aggressive confections of masculinity to boys and men insecure about their own.
Masculinity exists as a relative construct. If you insist that a weak, subordinate “feminine” characterises the human population of adult women who are demonstrably just as smart, strong, courageous and capable as men are, you will experience sad frustration.
Dare I suggest a helpful cultural pivot? Because there’s a human community who are dependent, frail and need guidance, protection and instruction in every way grown women don’t.
Kids.
If you want to assert what tradition says it means to be a man, be a dad. A dad in the home. In the community. Of your own kids. Of all kids.
Not only does active, present parenting-in-the-home-and-beyond-it by men relieve women of disproportional parenting pressure.
It gives democratic heft to transforming the institutions – of childcare, the workplace, equal economic opportunity – that have demonstrably failed our population.
• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
