Fertility rates are plummeting — fortunately, we have migrants

According to current predictions, the global population – which has generally increased for roughly 300,000 years – will start to contract in the last quarter of this century. Picture: istock

Australia’s fertility rate today is half what it was 60 years ago at the peakof the baby boom. In the intervening years Australia and, as it turns out, the broader world have gained better control over fertility via access to contraception.

Although the pill was technically available from the mid-1960s it wasn’t widely accessed until the 1970s. Thereafter fertility declined in Australia – although not as fast or as far as in Japan, China and South Korea.

The decision to have children is a complex calculation. It is a function of confidence in the future and the cost involved, including time out of the workforce. These expenses weigh against the instinctive desire to reproduce.

While Australia’s fertility has been below replacement for some decades, it nevertheless sits within a range common for developed nations. This shows that young Australians and others in the West are more confident about bringing babies into the world than their peers in many other countries.

Confidence in the future was undoubtedly a factor in hyping the post-war baby boom. Then again, young couples had been separated for years by World War II and so there was a lot of catching up to do. Interestingly Australia’s baby boom kicked off in late 1946, about nine months after demobilisation of the troops.
As I said, a lot of catching up to do.

Between the ages of 22 and 33 in the late 1940s and 1950s, my mother had six children. In turn, baby boomer couples were most likely to have had two kids in the late 1970s and 1980s. Millennial couples this century might have two kids, although single-child households and childlessness are more socially acceptable options today than a generation ago. Indeed, the two-kid option is now more likely to be pushed into the parents’ thirties, thus freeing up the twenties for tertiary education, technical training, gap years, trialled jobs and relationships, and saving for a house.

These trends seem to have applied across the developed world. There is now evidence of reduced fertility in Africa, though. Fertility in places like Nigeria, for example, had been as high as six births per woman up to the 1990s. But in projections of the global population to the year 2100, the UN is now showing a continued diminution in Nigerian fertility – not down to our current level, but to where Australia was 60 years ago.

According to current predictions, the global population – which has generally increased for roughly 300,000 years – will start to contract in the last quarter of this century.

This big-picture perspective raises some interesting questions. If the world population continues to fall into the 22nd century, does this reduce carbon emissions (albeit a century too late)? And will Australia emerge as an outlier state late this century as one of the few places on Earth capable of attracting young immigrants to offset our (chosen) modest capacity for reproduction?

Fewer kids, shallower labour pools, less demand for family housing and yet, still highly sought-after as an immigrant destination. We are, we have been and I think we will remain – even through this evident demographic disruption – the lucky country.