Declining birth rates reveal something very scary about our national mindset

I’ve been telling young people this forever. Have kids. They are our hope for the future. Deadset proof we are investing in eternity. Now, our fertility rate is the lowest it’s ever been and shows no signs of bounceback.

There are good reasons for the decline. People are freaked out about money. Worried about climate. There is no sign our polity will ever return to a sign of engaged democracy, nor to a political process where differences were respected and dealt with.

The Australian birth rate is the lowest it’s ever been.Credit: Getty Images

And you can’t nest when there’s no safe place to make a nest. Nearly two-thirds of Australian renters now believe they will never own their own home, says the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. Which would be fine if renting in this country was governed by principles of decency and kindness, instead of unrestrained rapacity. Sure, Europeans have been renting forever, but in general there are regulations that stop landlords behaving badly. The institute insists we need a significant reset on tax and housing systems, which right now shelter and grow our money better than they shelter and grow our families.

The decline in the birthrate is hardly a shock – but I reckon it says something much worse about our national mindset. It means we have no hope for the future. We’ve given up on anything that matters. We don’t think we should invest in decades ahead. When I read a few years back that David and Emma Pocock had decided not to have kids, I was a bit broken. Now their baby is due any minute and I hope to heaven they will light the path for everyone (oops, that sounds a bit cultish, but I just mean they prove it’s possible).

“Heaps of our friends, lots of people in our generation are grappling with this question. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer,” Emma Pocock told this masthead earlier this year. “When we found ourselves in this situation, we kind of ended up deciding that we were pretty excited about it.”

There’s a reason we need to step up and redesign our communities to make all that possible. Cease the individualism. I’d say I believe in family values – but that idea is too restrictive. It doesn’t encapsulate what it means to believe in the value of a family to connect and support each other, through generations and the immediate needs of chaos, particularly since governments appear to have little interest in building affordable, accessible childcare systems for everyone.

Having children is the best (despite endless snot and vomiting). I have very few boundaries, so people tell me; and as a result, I’ve been instructing, encouraging, berating for decades now. Have kids before your gonads are past it. Seize the moment before you become irretrievably grumpy. Yes, I’m sure not everyone is cut out to be a parent but most of us have battled through and come out OK the other end, and so have our offspring.

Not maternal? Not paternal? God knows what that means, but you can pretty much learn anything. I was never particularly gushing except over babies. Parenting is not a one-way street where the parent gets all the benefits of making and loving. The children grow too.

It is, at once, the most blissful and the most stressful thing I’ve ever done. But these kids of mine, their children, their friends, their colleagues, their generation, go into tomorrow and build our futures. Sure, it’s all been a bit buggered by the election of Donald Trump, but he too shall eventually pass.

Which is not to say parenting is at all easy. While we wait for governments to catch up with the changed roles of women and men, of parents and grandparents, there are things we must do ourselves.

Leonora Risse, associate professor of economics at the University of Canberra, wrote her PhD thesis on parental leave during the time of the Howard government and Peter Costello’s baby bonus. Immediately after the bonus, there was a brief increase to an average birth rate of 2.0 children per family, but now we are down to 1.5 and only headed one way.

Many women don’t have kids because they can’t manage everything everywhere all at once. Risse says there shouldn’t have to be a trade-off between having children and pursuing the other dimensions of life, like a career. Ideally government policies, business structures, and society in general would be set up in a way that makes it possible to genuinely harmonise all the competing priorities in our lives.

She also wants to give a shoutout to the nation’s grandparents, whose unpaid caregiving makes modern family life possible. A linchpin in the economy, she wishes governments would better recognise and back them too.

That brings me to what men and women my age must do if we want to do more than just get shoved into a dismal retirement village and left to desiccate. The University of Melbourne’s Lyn Craig is blunt: provide housing and childcare.

Earlier this year I wrote a story for the Good Weekend on modern grandparenting. What horrified me was the number of men and women I spoke to who had no interest in helping their children even though they could. People who said things to me such as, “We had to do it on our own.” As if struggling were in itself a good thing. It’s not. It leaves us broken for years after.

Babies are our beacon. They make it necessary for us to imagine a decent future. They are our last best hope.

Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.

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