Opinion: Flaccid campaign so far fails to provide a stimulating conversation point

OPINION: Remember when Australians got cash for coitus – that $5000 government cheque you received for creating a baby?

Remember when Australians got cash for coitus – that $5000 government cheque you received for creating a baby?

REMEMBER when Australians got cash for coitus – that $5000 government cheque you received for creating a baby?

The Baby Bonus arrived in 2002 just as the mining boom was taking off and offered tax refunds of $2500 a year for five years after the birth of your first child.

Australians, like ­pandas in captivity, appeared strangely reluctant to breed.

When Australians, like ­pandas in captivity, appeared strangely reluctant to breed, then-treasurer Peter Costello flashed that trademark smirk, put a $3000 cash payment on the bedside table and gave us a hurry up. “Have one for dad, one for mum and one for the country,” he urged in 2004.

In terms of effective public policy, it appeared to be a dazzling success. One study identified 12,000 extra kids springing to life in 2006 courtesy of the Baby Bonus, which by that year had put the value of a gurgling bub at an alluring $5000.

There’s nothing remotely resembling that magnificent inducement for your vote in the 2016 campaign which, ­relative to those far-off festive years, has an almost Dickensian atmosphere of bleak charity.

The Greens may issue dire warnings about mining’s threat to the environment, but it sure knew how to show Australia a good time, and it didn’t end with the Baby Bonus.

While the rest of the world went to hell in a handbasket in the global financial crisis, we got a $900 cheque courtesy of the then-Rudd government’s stimulus package.

Americans lost their homes – we got a flat-screen TV and a mountain bike from Kmart.

Now we get offered a tax break of $225 a year for those earning more than $85,000, instead of a holiday on the Gold Coast in exchange for one procreative act of copulation.

Fittingly enough for sombre financial times, while the Government offers few cash inducements for anyone to enter the world, there might be an incentive to exit it. If your partner dies and you’re on a government pension, you might be eligible for a bereavement payment.

Originally published as Opinion: Flaccid campaign so far fails to provide a stimulating conversation point