Federal Budget 2022: ‘Shagkeeper’ payment to save shrinking families

Aussie couples are being priced out of the housing market and the maternity ward as families shrink and our fertility rate plummets. Something needs to be done.

Josh Frydenberg’s last budget before heading to polls provided cost of living relief for families – but those families may become a lot smaller in number if Australia doesn’t lift its fertility rate.

The Howard-Costello era baby bonus provided a bump in the national fertility rate and lifted the total number of babies being born and occurred at time when single people had relatively few problems in coupling up.

The need for a couple fix (would it be called ‘shagkeeper’ or ‘shagseeker’?) may have arrived.

The number of babies born in Australia fell to a 13 year low (294,000, less than 300,000 for the first time since 2007) with the fertility rate hitting a record low of 1.58 babies per woman, the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed in December.

Australian couples are not just being priced out of the housing market but also the maternity ward while a younger generation are gently eased back into meeting up after a health pandemic.

Aussie couples are being priced out of the housing market and the maternity ward as families shrink and our fertility rate plummets.

The $10 billion outlay on childcare is an obvious positive for cost of living pressures and sensible given the number of households where there a dual incomes required for the family budget. But for child care centres looking at forward planning, the fertility rate is a concern.

Where will the next cohort of babies come from?

Women are having babies later in life but the window to have multiple births is obviously reduced which is evidenced by the average family size now at 2.53, down from 3.1 within the last 20 years.

The Covid baby boom many predicted with photos of excited grandmothers hugging expectant daughters and photos of dumbfounded cigar-in-mouth-blokes with the ‘duh me?’ look never happened.

Calls to bring back the baby bonus are obvious but this is a problem across many Western countries and we need to acknowledge that life is expensive, especially when a baby is in the mix.

The baby bonus is a thing of the past.

A policy derided as being too expensive was abolished by the last federal Labor government and replaced with a means-tested alternative which for some reason only served to infuriate new families with its complexity.

The lesson is obvious, incentives from government have to be straight forward and deemed accessible by all.

Interestingly, in 1912, it was a Labor Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, who introduced the Maternity Allowance Act that provided a payment to all mothers, including unmarried women and it was a payment directed to women.

Financial support is one part of a policy platform that has to also look at the shelter component in terms of property along with a cultural reset on such matters.

It was only a decade ago that talkback radio was littered with the same arguments used to decry Prime Minister Fisher’s incredible policy a century earlier.

“Why should James Packer get the baby bonus?” was the talkback catch cry and that “women on welfare were having babies to get the 5K and spending it on plasmas!”

The alternative to such dribble is an ageing population demanding more from a dwindling tax base and lamenting a lost opportunity to cradle that most important of institutions, the family.

Originally published as Federal Budget 2022: ‘Shagkeeper’ payment to save shrinking families