Fertility strife: We need babies more than we do migrants

New borns at Royal Hospital for Women at Randwick.

Despite the immigration numbers blowout, the biggest problem is there are not enough Australians, and we’re not creating enough new Australians.

This is mainly because of an ideological and sexist denial of women’s choice. This is an illiberal imposition on women, and on men, of a narrow, foolish, gravely outdated ideology. But it’s also set to have devastating social, economic and strategic consequences for Australia.

All over the Western world, women and men are having fewer children than they want to have, partly because of the way we’ve structured our economies, partly because of ideology.

Australia’s birthrate last year was 1.63. As recently as 2018 it was 1.7. (This is a statistical measure of how many babies each woman will have over her lifetime.) Our median age is a geriatric 39.

Our fertility rate has been in decline for a long time. But 1.63 is getting dangerously close to what demographers call ultra-low fertility, below 1.5. Once ultra-low fertility gets a grip, it’s nearly impossible to pull out of. Even if the fertility rate rises, there are too few women in child-bearing years to reverse radical population decline quickly.

John Howard and Peter Costello, in the last years of their fecund partnership, raised the fertility rate to 2.01, a fantastic result.

This was partly brought about by the baby bonus, a no-strings-attached payment to each mother who had a baby. That was good policy and should never have been abandoned. But equally important was Costello advocating more children.

“One for mum, one for dad and one for the country” is a fairly clumsy slogan, but it’s memorable and sums up an important truth. More, it showed the government believed in babies, believed in the future, believed in Australia. Couples deciding whether to have a first, second or third baby thought they would get some help, and some honour. The decency and idealism of their choice was affirmed.

Naturally this was demonised as reactionary Howardesque social authoritarianism. But the fact it worked showed people wanted it. Howard and Costello had uncovered a truth now confirmed by social research: people want more children than they end up having.

More children are tremendously important to keep an economy and society viable. But they are much more.

Every individual has the right to make their own decision about having children and no one should be criticised for their choice. But these choices are made in the face of coercive feminist and green ideology that depicts children as enemies of self-fulfilment and destroyers of the planet, and in an atmosphere where the entire Western project is demonised.

Former Treasurer Peter Costello with new born babies at Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne.

A society that turns its back on babies has lost self-confidence, self-belief and a sense of purpose. Babies are life, babies are adventure, babies are the future, babies are brothers and sisters for other babies.

I’ve always been in favour of a big immigration program. But not all immigration is equal. If you get Albert Einstein as an immigrant, you’ve done pretty well; if you get Adolf Hitler, not so much.

In our recent immigration surge – though my guess is the vast majority of people will turn out valuable for Australia – most are in the wrong categories: overseas students and temporary workers. Both are chosen almost indiscriminately, have difficult or non-existent paths to citizenship, and these categories have involved massive rorting.

A friend recently had a car accident involving a South American alleged student who literally could speak not a word of English, was working as an Uber food delivery driver in a car he rented informally, and was without any driver’s licence except from his country of origin. We’re exploiting modern indentured labour.

The best category of newcomer is a skilled migrant with good English who plans to become a citizen and commit their civic identity to Australia. It doesn’t matter much if their specific skills are in demand. Well-educated people learn new skills. We also need family reunion because families are nearly everything, and of course we want to take in genuine refugees whom we choose.

Nor is immigration a Ponzi scheme, as some of my conservative friends mistakenly argue. If immigrants make your society younger and better educated that’s a benefit. It’s no more a Ponzi scheme than the whole of life is. Everyone starts out with potentially a long life ahead but gets nearer senility and death every day.

Albert Einstein

So long as you have a reasonable birthrate your society can be endlessly refreshed, demographically and educationally, by selective immigration.

As society gets bigger it will need more immigrants in absolute numbers, but still only the same proportion of the population as before. And population increase from any source means governments have to arrange houses, roads, hospitals, schools etc.

Australian governments have failed at this. They’ve taken the financial gains of immigration, got lazy about attracting and selecting immigrants properly, and not taken any hard decisions about providing something as basic as houses and apartments.

We’ve been lucky so many of our recent immigrants have come from India, China and Southeast Asia. They’re better educated overall than the society they join, younger, more socially conservative, more religious.

They also often have a better idea of the distinctive virtues and advantages of Australian society than our own kids do, brought up as they are on a diet of educational poison designed to instil the deepest shame and hostility about Australia.

Immigrants voted in huge numbers against a radical, pro-identity politics change to the nature of the Australia they love in the recent voice referendum.

But this is not a column about immigrants but about babies. If a society hits ultra-low fertility rates, no plausible level of immigration can save it.

Two fascinating papers on this were produced for the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in Britain. One, Migration, Stagnation, or Procreation, paints a neat trilemma. A society can have any two of the following: low fertility, high economic growth or ethnic continuity. It can’t have all three.

In fact the paper establishes that with ultra-low fertility it can’t even really have high economic growth. The authors demonstrate that if Britain’s fertility rate continues on its current path of decline, it will by 2080 need more than half its population to be first-generation immigrants to avoid a crippling, unmanageable dependency ratio. Otherwise there would be fewer workers than dependants, a recipe for social collapse.

My only disagreement is that they argue that 14 per cent or so of population is the maximum ratio of new immigrants consistent with social stability. Socially stable Australia proves that false with 30 per cent of our population today born overseas.

The ideology of identity politics and extreme multiculturalism is incompatible with successful immigration. A society that is self-confident, with a strong national identity, that believes in itself, can welcome newcomers and recruit them to the national project through a creed of values, and the institution of citizenship. Not too much welfare but lots of economic opportunity help too.

But no society is self-confident without babies. Lots and lots of babies. For a society to reject children is to embrace a culture of sterility and death. Babies are the culture of life.