Why we're only pushing single mothers to breed

LATE in 2006, just before Kevin Rudd's ascendancy, I was asked to address an ALP policy forum in Sydney. It was in the form of a debate and the person I debated was that rather formidable relic of ideological feminism, Susan Ryan.

The topic was women and work, and I began by pointing out that I didn't know any women who didn't work, whether that took the form of paid work or the unpaid work that overwhelmingly most of us did just by being mothers. Most women eventually wanted to combine unpaid and paid work, with the emphasis on staying at home with their children when they were young. The response - boo hiss - from the old-time feminist claque in the audience was expected. But what I didn't expect was that afterwards most of the younger women in the group came running out to tell me that they agreed with me.

This experience confirmed what I had begun to suspect. Things really had changed since I began writing 15 years ago and the terms of the debates about women families, children and work had shifted in favour of family-focused adaptive women. Why? The answer of course lies, as always, in real-life experience.

There has been a slight persistent rise in the fertility rate to 1.93 births a woman and, according to a Productivity Commission report on fertility that came out this week, it is largely because youngish 30-something women are having the children they might have postponed. The new 30-somethings have learned a cautionary lesson from the previous generation and are doing now what they had always wanted to do, which explains the reaction of the girls at the forum, many of whom had children and were my daughter's age.

The report also claims there are signs that this upward trend in Australia's fertility rate may continue. But there is no need to breathe a sigh of relief and simply ignore the persistent problem of low fertility. That is because it is not yet clear if a catch-up phenomenon is the sole reason behind this or whether it also indicates a more profound cultural shift. My own feeling about this is that during the past 10 or 12 years there has been a combination of two things, but that they are not necessarily different phenomena.

For a long time Australia's fertility has been viewed simply as a problem of women balancing work and family obligations. But that is a symptom of the problem, not a cause. Australia's fertility is part of a much bigger picture, the family picture.

The main reason for infertility everywhere in the Western world is late marriage and later family formation. Australia's families have been in a parlous state, assailed ideologically and practically from all sides. Young people, particularly educated young people, have been vigorously discouraged from any thought of family formation, at least until their 30s. This of course shrinks the window of fertility for women.

But, at the same time, sex is simple and comes with a no-obligation mentality. Consequently there has been a sharp rise, almost a doubling from the early 1990s, in the number of ex-nuptial births to women in their 20s who have no tertiary education. These are girls who would have married and had several children by their 30s but can no longer expect the father of their children to marry them. No doubt many of them would like to, even if they can live well enough within the welfare system.

It is these 20-something girls, with limited education, who are the ones paying the price for the so-called sexual revolution of their parents' generation.

However, for the educated middle classes, who have other things to occupy them in their 20s, such as education and professional training, there is a buffer against the corrosive "no strings" new morality. Yes, they have delayed marriage and babies - the dramatic fall in the fertility rate of the '80s and '90s reflected this - but eventually the middle classes are marrying and having children, forming stable families with no great harm done along the way. But for the young underclass mothers and their children, this is not the case. These girls are providing a growing proportion of the nation's children, about 30 per cent of all births, which means a larger proportion of our children are growing up fatherless, with all the problems that entails: poor education, lack of family stability, lack of male role models and so on. Not a good prospect for one of the richest countries in the world.

Meanwhile, the economic, tax and welfare environment during the years of Coalition government, combined with generous family policies, favoured both low-income families and the new late-blooming model of middle-class family. Mothers who wished to work were encouraged to ease themselves back into the workforce with the tapering family tax benefit part B, which was assessed on their income alone.

But to the discomfort of gender-equity theorists, many middle-class women grabbed the opportunity to fulfil another part of their delayed expectations and stay at home with their long-hoped-for babies for as long as possible. It is no accident that the fertility rise has showed up towards the end of the Howard government.

But fertility is fragile. Under the Rudd Government, the cost of living is rising and there are predictions of it becoming uncontrollable with an emissions trading system. The Government is twittering on about tax reform but will not do anything radical such as introduce a family-unit taxation system.

It has already means-tested the FTB partB, turning it from a tax benefit into a welfare payment, and it remains to be seen how many more payments that are envisaged as part of the tax-transfer system will be further means-tested.

This Government makes working-family noises and it will certainly force more mothers into the workforce, as middle-class families lose out as they did during Paul Keating's period, paying a disproportionate amount of tax and getting nowhere themselves but supporting the children of welfare-dependent single mothers.

Middle-class families will resent a government that only selectively supports the nation's families and their children. Young, unmarried, educated people will find even less encouragement to marry and have children and, with the approval of the new-age environmentalists, their fertility rate will drop again. But the fertility rate of single mothers will grow.