Fertility key to sustainable population

Julia Gillard has deliberately confused population policy with refugee policy

IF you are sick and tired of hearing about population as a "divisive" issue in this election, then join the club. Everyone is talking about population and no one is talking about the right thing.

What is more, various groups, are deliberately confusing different aspects of population policy for their own propaganda.

There are two main variables that govern population. The first and most important is fertility. The reason is that fertility, unlike immigration, most influences the age pyramid of our nation.

We need a very large number of children at the bottom of the pyramid in order to produce enough young people of working age at the middle part of the pyramid. As the population ages the numbers should shrink and the young should ideally be supporting fewer people at the top who are retired.

However, fertility, unlike immigration, is very fragile, and less responsive to policy over the short term. Infertility is multi-causal and deeply cultural. It takes generations to turn it around.

When I began writing, Australia was facing the kind of scenario of drastically falling birthrates that most European countries are still experiencing. Some nations, particularly Japan and Korea, have failed to resolve their fertility problems and will be the first countries in the world to go into negative fertility and decline.

The Howard government managed to pull Australia back from this decline. Now we hear almost nothing about fertility, and the Australian electorate doesn't understand any of it.

Julia Gillard's only pronouncements on population policy have deliberately confused population policy with refugee policy and put her in the no-growth "people are bad for the environment" camp of green fanatics.

But we still have a big problem. There are still not enough babies born in Australia. The main reason for this phenomenon in Australia as in Europe is delayed child birth.

Since 1972 the median age of Australian women having their first child has grown older and older. It is now nearly 31 years. That is also combined with the tendency to marry later (the two do still go together for most sensible people). That means that families are smaller. But most people don't realise that women with three or more children actually provide the bulk of the nation's children. Think about it.

While you are thinking about that one, think about this. At last count our fertility rate had gradually climbed from 1.7 to 1.9 births per woman per year, the highest it has been for 10 years. But if we had to rely solely on this fertility rate our economy would be under great stress, and there would be no smirking at our ability to weather the financial crisis.

So just to reach a stable point, where our population will not grow markedly, but as the new rhetoric goes will remain "sustainable", each family should aim to have at least three children, or for each woman to aim at three. Sound familiar?

Peter Costello's attempt to raise the birth rate with a baby bonus was met with great scepticism and a few sniggers, but that policy and the other pro-family polices John Howard put into place actually worked to raise the birthrate Why? Possibly the effect was cultural. The combination of decline in marriage and late motherhood is an accelerating phenomenon.

The more there is the more it grows and will continue to prevent much rise in fertility. Culture mitigates against the family.

But you don't have to be Einstein to realise that in a climate where families are given moral support as well as financial incentives there is a climate of optimism. It is a way of saying to the average mum and dad, what you do is important.

I hear frequently particularly from mothers is that "society"or 'the government" simply don't care about them. Costello and Howard did. They realised fertility was the main part of the population debate. You cannot control or plan population or immigration intakes, and you certainly cannot use the term sustainable in any meaningful way, without a steady fertility rate.

Tony Abbott knows about this. One of the reasons he introduced a generous maternity leave policy is that he believes it will encourage more women to have children. He knows most women combine motherhood with working . That is all very well for the ones who have one or perhaps two children while working. But what if you want them to have a couple more?

Once you start having three or four kids things get a bit more difficult on the work front. Part-time employment becomes a more attractive option and in fact no employment if you can afford it becomes even more attractive. It is at this point, where they have three children, that women begin to drop out of the work force.

Maternity leave won't stop that. They simply want to be at home. Consequently, most women with three or more children (that is women who supply the bulk of the children) aren't in the paid workforce at all.

Kevin Andrews, the shadow families minister, is probably the best informed of any member of parliament on the family. Abbott must listen to Andrews, not the reborn feminist Joe Hockey. If the Liberals are serious about the cultural population debate they too should avoid getting sucked in to a phony debate about illegal immigration, which mixes up that issue with population policies. That is Gillard's tactic.

They should start banging the pro-family drum, explain their population vision and bring out a few polices to support Australian families having their own children.

This election campaign has convinced me that most Australians just don't get this. The Australian media, and the political leaders have made a very poor job of explaining it. The average Australian now thinks the whole debate on population is simply about immigration . They are also very susceptible not just to confusing immigration with asylum-seekers, who should more properly be called illegal immigrants, but they are also susceptible to green propaganda about the environmental effects of immigration.

There's nothing divisive about population, as long as you know the facts.