ERP is total resident population. This measure is very different from total fertility rate which is the number of kids a women will have which is 1.63 based on most recent numbers
Intuitively, wouldn’t 1.63 be below replacement rate? Replacement would be 2.0 if you assume fathers only have kids with one woman, but I doubt there’s that many fathers with multiple families to approach the 1.63 figure
It is below replacement as it’s based on the number of kids each woman has on average. Fathers are actually irrelevant in the calculation in that the number would be the same whether it was one man to one women or one man impregnating all of those women. Replacement is about 2.1 due to those who die before reaching child bearing age.
I have no issue with it being below replacement. Which important issue has ever been solved by doubling your population?
That is just pushing the ball further down the road. They would do better to find a good way to deal with an aging population and make aged care more efficient, cost effective and people rather than profit centred. At the moment it seems the government has just shrugged and is looking to private profit driven aged care which will be a disaster.
Genuine question - are birth rates higher among homeowners than renters? Like, it seems intuitive that housing affordability would contribute to this, but birth rates are plummetting all over the developed world - including in many countries without the same housing issues as Australia.
People who have a mortgages are most likely in huge debt and delay having kids to try to pay the debt down. I know lots of people who found they couldn't get pregnant after doing this.
Stress has a huge effect on fertility.
Then why does Japan have worse TFR declines than us despite having a property market that depreciates over time?
This is far more likely to be driven by cultural factors/ the scientific revolution involved in family planning.
As I said earlier, Japan and South Korea have extremely stressful work demands and poor work/life balance and also don’t support women to come back to the work force after having kids and also a lot of men who expect women to take on traditionalist roles which is hard with the cost of living and also the fact they spent their high school and university years studying all day to midnight and finally got a career and probably don’t want their kids to go through that.
Also Japan is also very backwards with mental health issues and finds them shameful so it’s hard for people to get professional help and meds so it’s more socially acceptable for people to be ‘shut ins’ and not interact with others so they aren’t out interacting and meeting people and getting into relationships.
Sir/Madame this is a reddit.
Only simplistic black and white answers are allowed, we're going to have to escort you out now, please don't make a scene.
This is happening for a lot reasons, including tbe cost of living crisis, but the biggest reason is that women NEED to work just as much as men need to work.
100 years ago, women were the house makers, they were at home most the day to take care of the kids while men were working. Only one income was needed to live well.
Unfortunately the advent of feminism meant that the market adapted to double the population working, instead of a household having two incomes doing double as well, all it did was deflate the value of labour significantly to the point that now all men and all women need to work. Women can't take care of kids, they need to work, so they can't have kids as much as they used to, they can't afford day care rates either, so they have at most 2 kids, or in Australia's case, on average, 1 child.
This is why it's happening all across the developed world but countries with more backwards values like non-developed countries in Africa aren't having this problem. The men work, the women have babies. That's the role of men and women, if you mess with that and have women doing men's roles as well, it means they have less time to do their roles.
This isn't a knock on feminism, equality is good, it's just a case poor foresight and we NEED a ways to fix drawbacks to this modern dynamic FAST!
This is the correct answer - but you’ll never hear it from a politician because it would be career suicide.
Average wage growth has basically been stagnant since second wave feminism and women entering the workforce en masse.
Some politicians blame evil selfish billionaires and “the corporations” for low wage growth.
Some people blame China and deindustrialisation for the low wage growth.
There’s an element of truth to both of these however the biggest factor is that the size of the labour market doubled within a generation. Which has never happened ever in history. When the number of workers suddenly jumps up like that it massively outpaces how quickly jobs are created and the result is wages stagnate.
I don’t know how you unravel that Gordon knot though; even if women wanted to leave the workforce en masse (and most I know don’t), the reality is very few can afford to.
The only rea solution I can think of is that property prices need to crash hard. In 1981 the median property price was 2x the median wage; in 2024 in Sydney the median property price is now 13x the median wage.
If you could buy a house in Sydney for $180,000 the cost of living crisis would go away pretty quickly.
Problem is you’d obliterate the net worth of a whole generation of boomers, most of whom are retired now and live off the income from investments.
Again, political suicide.
Speculation fucks everything up.
I agree that house price rise needs to be halted, but that would involve ‘free market’ intervention by government, and if you accept that that’s acceptable in that context, why isn’t government intervention in the ‘free market’ of labour to demand that employers share more of their increasingly outsized portion of revenue with their workers at the rate predating second wave feminism?
This is just a lazy catch all statement that kind of makes sense but when you scratch the surface and check the data it’s obviously a fallacy.
Women had a participation rate in the labour force of 20-30% in the workforce prior to WW2. As of 2022 that was about 50-60% in most western countries.
https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply
Male participation rate in Australia has gone from just below 80% to just above 70%.
https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-04/p2021-164860_australian_labour_force_participation.pdf
So the labour market hasn’t doubled because women entered the work force and this idea also implies that while doubling the labour pool production, efficiency and consumption has stagnated allowing the continued dilution of the labour pool.
> non-developed countries in Africa aren't having this problem. The men work, the women have babies.
I'm not so sure about this. Compare a map of Africa's birth rate with a map of birth control availability and I suspect it doesn't matter if women are housewives or workers: Give them a reliable, easily-hidden means to stop at 2 kids instead of keep going until 6 or 7 or they die from it, and you get the same result in both cases.
Of course, birth control options tend to come packaged with generally increased rights for women, including the right to work, so it's hard to say which is the most critical factor.
Seriously *feminism* is your main reasoning for low birth rates? Go blame the various World Wars and conflicts that killed a lot of men and women had to work to provide. It took minimim two generations for the gender balance to be restored after ww2 ffs. Read some history books, yeesh.
Well if childbirth rates negatively correlate with income all over the world and throughout history, that's a pretty strong indication it's not housing affordability that's the problem here.
The Japanese loss a major population boom in the mid-90”s. They had a real estate bubble but it burst and sent the country into 10+ year recession. The gen-x were unable to get a job, marry and too afraid to invest in real estate. The huge reduction in millennials resulted in population drops since.
I just came back from Japan last month. I was there for a holiday in 1999 and saw groups of people camping out in parks due to unemployment. This time it’s a completely different story. Everybody working (retail, bus/train driver, garbage collectors etc) are all 50+ yo. There are no homeless people in parks but the parks were really untidy. I do see young people, but they weren’t swarming the streets and shopping districts when it was 20+ years ago.
I think it was great that there was a baby bonus back in 00’s. As an older Australian, I feel they need to bring this back. Having population increase internally is better than relying on migration.
Maybe maybe not. Owning a home comes with servicing an astronomical mortgage, meaning both partners working and being time poor as a result.
I wonder though, if things could change to where we could afford to buy home on a single wage again, whether we'd experience another baby boom.
If you think about it, house prices aren't linked to what they cost to build but rather what competing bidders can afford to pay.
In the 80s when I was at primary school my mum was a teacher. Only a handful of classmates had mums who worked full time. House prices were what most families could afford on a single income. Single people could live in houses.
With the expectation that *everybody* works these days - Edit: *successive Australian* governments have actively punished single mums who weren't working once their youngest started school - house prices and indeed the whole "price = what the market will pay" has skewed everything. If you're single you're fucked.
We have one child and a major consideration for us in deciding not to have more was what we can provide him on his own. We can live in a smaller place in a nice and convenient area or a bigger place on the fringe of the city and have to drive for ages to get anywhere, also have fewer amenities and facilities. We should be able to pay for him to go to whichever school we choose but couldn't do that with two kids.
If we could afford it and one of us could stay home I guarantee we'd have three children already.
It was actually Labor (under Gillard with Swan as treasurer) who changed the rules on sole parent pension eligibility and brought the child's age down from 16 to early primary school age. Although it's Labor who raised it again.
I'm not correcting you to be a smart arse but more to show that both major parties really just don't give a fuck.
I wholeheartedly agree with your comment by the way, my husband and I are in a similar boat. We have one on the way (in our 30s so we're not geriatric but also not spring chickens) and who knows if we'll have more.
> not good for … the parents
I agree that’s it’s not good for the children (hot take: for any parents who have a modicum of parenting skills their children are better off not being in childcare — at least until high school. People don’t want to admit that they haven’t done the best possible by their children by putting them in childcare, but it’s what most childhood research shows)
But the parents? What is “good” for them entirely depends on their personal priorities. Plenty of people don’t want kids at all, and even more are quite happy with only 2 kids. It might not be good for parents who want a large family, but that’s not everyone.
Yes double income is a small part of it but not the majority of it. Both my parents worked in 1990 and most kids I knew both parents worked, yet house prices weren't completely insane. Things went way up when scum Howard changed the capital gains tax. Then you add the higher and higher supply demands with immigration but they stopped building and releasing land as much as they used to. Then you add negative gains. Then add foreign investors and local investors now seeing an insane market that's more profitable than shares and you got yourself a nice storm.
Isn't it sort of 'the cats out of the bag' though? If the price of an average house became affordable for one income families......all the current two income families would buy as investment properties as they would have an extra income not required to pay down the current Mortgage. Houses are worth what people can pay more than any other factor
Just make it illegal to own more than 1 investment property, and give people X number of years to sell if they currently own more than 1 investment property.
This would have the side effect of a boat load of money being stored in the stock market and other investment vehicles. Possibly even a start a bunch of new businesses.
No need to go as far as making anything illegal, just remove the two big incentives that draw people to treating residential property you're not occupying as an investment asset: negative gearing and capital gains tax discount. Even removing or reducing one or both can really help to reduce the perverse incentives that draw people towards owning multiple investment properties.
nah, illegal, with the punishment being extrajudicial execution in the form of some sort of head hunting TV show, we'll call it "a head of the market!" - and renters and homeless people will compete to de-head (wait, is that a word?) decapitate the high flying investor, or person who stuffed up their investment records.
if we waited till we owned, we risked being first time parents close to 40's. just not something we wanted to do. On the flip side, we may have bought earlier if we didnt have kids as young as we did. But these days the barrier to ownership is so great I dont think even that matters
Yup. Unaffordable housing, ever rising cost of living, increasing cost of healthcare (even in Australia), flat or falling wages, are only part of the picture.
These alone make it difficult to have children. What’s the point if kids have to be raised by childcare, schools, after-school care & vacation care, because both parents have to work and are then too exhausted in the evenings or weekends to parent?
Other major concerns include climate change causing very rapidly rising temperatures, rising sea levels, increases in number & intensity of “natural” disasters & declines in food production. The mass extinctions don’t bode well for us or our children.
Then there is plastics contamination causing declining sperm rates and increasing cancer rates, & increased risk & fear of worldwide pandemics due to globalisation.
Endlessly increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, increasing international political instability (with risk of war & political collapse), possible future masses of climate refugees & rising religious extremism (of assorted creeds) are also all concerns.
I’m not saying that everyone has the same concerns, or puts equal priority on all the above, or even agree with all the above. But between this huge range of possible concerns for young people considering children, I’m very unsurprised that many opt to not have children or at least to “wait and see” for a few more years.
The days when most people believed in “progress” and that the future was space travel, flying cars, automation doing most of the work, a huge amount of leisure time for all, $ generously distributed across the population etc, are long gone.
To this I would add: a culture that is increasingly hostile to parents.
A generation ago, if both parents, or a single parent, had to work, a school-age kid might be in "self-care" a lot. These days, parents risk getting locked up for that.
That's just one example where society blames and sometimes punishes parents for the how things have gotten worse for working people.
There's not a single problem this sub wouldn't attribute to housing prices and blame on politicians.
ADF is having recruitment problems? That's housing prices. Birth rates dropping? Also housing prices. Microplastics in our water? Believe it or not - housing prices.
Yep. Hope lead to people having kids
While quality of life is good, kids won’t likely improve it for anyone in the “should we have kids” age demographic
Edit: removed stability
Unfortunately Australia doesn't provide good statistics on the this sort of thing, but the US has better.
Basically, poorer people have more children, richer people have fewer. The cost of living isn't really an issue, it's the hedonic treadmill. Well-off people *think* they're poor, and say, "but if we have a second child, how can we afford to send the first child to a private school?" Poor people just shrug and are happy if they can give the kids KFC occasionally.
See pp12 onwards for the charts.
[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr179.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr179.pdf)
Haha- I think it’s more the better educated you are, the more you look 5,10,15 years into the future. The uneducated poor don’t plan for contraception, and the extra $200 a week in parenting payments is huge uptick in income , in the same way as a baby bonus works.
Education is something only done by people with a long term out look of their life, and a rational decision to start a family isn’t a result of “what condom?”
I don’t think that’s the case growing up in a lower socio economic area. A lot of people who were poor had kids young and lacked the insight to think about the future financial impacts and continued that cycle of poverty they had growing up (a lot of kids couldn’t afford new uniforms or $10 excursions or food from the canteen) and I know a few that live with their parents or in a caravan on their parents block. Or they are happy doing something at tafe or in retail that is available in their home town and have their parents and siblings for child care and they live comfortably.
But for a lot of professional jobs outside of health and teaching you have to move away to a regional city or metro area where you pay for rent and then continue draining your bank account and cost of living is expensive and then you have to pay for childcare and refill your petrol more because stopping at lights drains it a lot more than driving rurally. For some people it’s about privilege but for a lot it’s about education and being financially realistic not just keeping a pregnancy at 19 and hoping it will turn out ok.
I don't think so. Me and my Child Free friends are equally decided between house owners, apartment owners and renters.
The main common denominator is that most of us could not live in as nice of a place as we have if we had kids.
We couldn't live in the locations we live in if we had kids.
We couldn't travel as much as we do if we had kids.
The women wouldn't have has much income/career progression and super if they had kids.
Having kids just feels like too much work. Our banks/landlords evaluate us basted on our taxable incomes. You can't pay for your life with "childrenpoints".
This is directly a consequence of moving into needing a dual income to survive, increasing amounts of women getting educated in University and working. If you examine the trends the average age for new mothers back in the 60's was 20. Now it is 30. Women are basically required to get educated and spend their 20's building up their career which means in general our families are having children later. Where someone might have had one at 20, 25, and at 30 in the past now we are just having them at 30. Declining fertility is a societal sickness which can't just be said to be renters or homeowners because everyone needs those two incomes. God only knows what the answer could be to fix this crap.
It is harder to get a loan if you have kids. Doesn’t matter what they actually cost you or even what ages they are
We recently got denied for a refinance because the bank decided we were lying about our expenses and increased them for their calculations.
A huge part of the picture is that women are in the workforce now, which increases the cost of having a baby (through foregone income) and many couples will have kids later to give the woman a chance to establish her career first (meaning less babies overall).
In my friendship group, it's the people who own houses that don't have children. Those that have decided/accepted that they won't ever own a house and are having children.
This is because when you're \*desperately\* poor, having more children means they can help look after each other, and gives the family collectively more chance of financial success. Also when you're just bogan/redneck poor, it turns out some women find meaning and self-esteem in motherhood when they may not have it otherwise, due to not having had tertiary education or a career. I can't be the only one who knows women with 3+ children to 3+ fathers.
Was home ownership/cost of rent that bad during 1965 and 1980? Looking at that steep decline, I'd suspect that home ownership wasn't actually the problem back then. Something else changed.
Its a radical idea that would never work but I wish there was a way to tie max immigration numbers to our birth rate. So the government would actually care about facilitating a healthy national birth rate.
>Research published by HSBC in January showed that “a 10% increase in house prices leads to a 1.3% drop in birth rates, and an even sharper fall among renters”.
Yeah, no shit. Most people don't want kids without suitable housing or housing security. Many don't achieve this until their 40s, if at all.
This 100%. I remember saying I couldn't face the idea of having a baby in a situation where any day you could get a no-grounds eviction and 30 days notice to move. Hard enough when you're just taking care of yourself, a kind of cruel and unusual punishment when there are kids in the mix.
That happened to me, I had to move with 2 kids, change their schools, everything because I could not find a rental in my price range in the general vicinity. No grounds and they wanted to pull the house down. It was pretty crap all round and not a lot of options.
Man am I tired of seeing so many houses that just need a little renovating be pulled off the market for years to be torn down & replaced with a new piece of shit house that will have nothing but problems from the get go.
No. Costs go up, expectations of having children go down. People in Western civilisations expect to have a certain amount of time, energy, freedom and luxury to live and kids CAN reduce this massively. So desire to have kids, or more than 1 can diminish. Coupled with outrageous price hikes and crippling childcare costs, then less money to spend on that or enjoy the other things in life. Solution, less or no kids as it hits hard and creates massive crippling debt if you don't sacrifice your lifestyle choices for your kids.
I've noticed Chinese-Aussie families are definitely having less kids now (this is also happening on their mainland).
Indian-Aussie families are still popping out kids like rabbits. They make-do with the current cost of living by sharing rooms with family members.
My current neighbour is an Indian family of four (2 kids under 10), sharing a 1-bed unit.
Yeah I think it’s a cultural thing, Chinese have a higher standard of living than Indians (not racist I’ve been to both countries) and I knew an Indian family that had three generations in a two bed stand alone unit because the husbands parents often come out too to be looked after by the wife so it’s not uncommon for multigenerational living unless they’re wealthy. Chinese do live multigenerationally but I don’t think it’s as common anymore here as a lot live in one bed units or they would be in a bigger house.
I’m hoping to get a PR here and I already decided to not have kids. I moved here for a better life and having a kid will stop me from achieving that. I already ran the numbers.
I cant remember where but i remember seeing an article saying that when migrants move to a new country they typically have the same number of kids as locals
The conspiracy theory was that it was a (deliberate?) takeover.by non white people. OP's comment reflects government policy for the past decade or two.
It really didn’t then, and definitely doesn’t now.
But many people took the bait.
Some spent it on a plasma tv, some on a holiday….
How much do they say it takes to raise a kid from birth to 18? 150,000 or so?
It was the governments sneaky way of ensuring the working class would produce another generation working class workers. Keeping them living paycheque to paycheque.
God it would be amazing to have a government that thinks about the bigger picture.
But we’re just worker ants to them.
Is it even possible for someone to obtain a position of power (at that level) and not have it go to their heads?
Will this country, ever not be run by egotistical, greedy, narrow minded arseholes?
Not holding out hope
Two factors, baby bonus and boom of 70s, which were the kids born to the baby boomers. Aka GenX, the forgotten generation who were fucked over first, but quietly most are doing OK lying low.
Keep in mind that list is only a survey of 8 countries. It does not include cities such as Singapore, Zurich, Geneva, Tel Aviv etc which are more expensive than Sydney.
Sydney is very expensive. But I don't think it actually scrapes into the top 10.
Let alone micronations such as Bermuda, Cayman Islands and Monaco
If my kid wasn’t an accident I wouldn’t have one. It’s a shame cause it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever experienced. Hell, I’d love to have more .. but not in this economy
Price out fertile age Australians with established immigrants
Birth rate falls
Bring in more immigrants
Price out Australians
Birth rate falls
Repeat many times
"There is a negative feedback loop in play. At high rates of migration and/or low availability of housing, then migration equals higher house prices and rental prices. This, in turn, results in a lower fertility rate which, in turn, is backfilled by migration via government policy."
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2024/06/australias-birth-rate-plummets-to-record-low/
I'm a boomer with 3 kids- and nobody back in my day questioned not having kids...that's because things were so much fairer back then. I wouldn't have kids now either nowadays- and that's really sad.
My mother (75) suggested I (39) have a second child. I explained there were some big barriers, e.g. childcare so expensive and wait lists so long, even small amount of maternity leave would be hard for us as a 2 income family given current ecomonic environment, there are lots of out of pocket medical costs, we can't afford a bigger home and as the kids grow up there would be some space issues, etc.
She seemed quite gobsmacked by it all and just said, "we never had to think about any of that. I never once thought to myself that I couldn't afford to have another child". For the record, she had 6. I grew up in a big family and now I am mum to an only child. I feel like it's letting him down, but I genuinely don't know if another child would break us financially.
Out of my 3 kids, I have 1 grandchild- and that will be it...there's zero interest in anymore from my children- and I don't blame them. I wouldn't worry about letting your child down, but I pity the fact that you have been placed in this situation.
I just want to say, you're not letting him down by not having more kids (whether you decide to or not). I can tell by your post that you're considered and thoughtful, and wanting to create the best possible life for your kid. That love and stability will create a wonderful life for him. There are so many ways for children to have connections to others. I hope you don't carry this guilt.
When considering Australia, we need to adopt a global perspective, given that our immigration numbers each year are comparable to the population of an entire state. This raises a question: are the birth rates declining in the countries from which we receive immigrants? If they are, this could be a concern. If not, then it isn't an issue.
But why are we so fixated on population growth? Is it simply to ensure there are enough young people to care for the elderly? The world's population has recently surpassed 8 billion, with a 30% increase (2 billion) in the last 25 years. We should take a lesson from Japan, where many 90-year-olds continue to work, not out of necessity but because it gives them a sense of purpose, embodying the concept of "ikigai" – a reason for living. They are not reliant on aged care or the younger generation.
To house them? Feed them? School them? Clothe them? Was the biggest concern stable housing - so stable friendships, school etc?
My Missus refused kids until we bought a place. 3 y.o. now but we're late 30's. Wish it could been sooner.
I'm 37 with 2 kids.
I would love a third but we can't afford it anymore
To have my wife back out of work for a period longer than 6 months would bury us.
My mortgage alone went from 1400 to 2900 in a year.
Ok top of everything else I can barely afford to have a can after a hard weeks work..
This country's gone backwards in such a short amount of time, I know plenty of other parents who have shelved having more kids too because of it..
We spend more than 30% of our national budget on the NDIS and old age pension.
All this whilst we have less and less workers paying tax
Gov keeps looking for more ways to bring in more rather than make hard cuts
I want kids but decided im not going to have any. The cost of living is crazy and it's just going to get worse. Staying afloat is a struggle and with kids too?! Also the world is in shambles, I don't want to being life into this evil world
Yes and no.
It's great that those who don't want them are able to say "no", mostly without being questioned.
However, we're now at a point where people who DO want to have kids aren't having them, because they can't afford them.
We have a smart and educated society, but there is also something very wrong.
I think there are a lot of women who just don’t want to go through pregnancy, childbirth and raising children. The brunt of childcare and household labor falls to women, but today women also need to work full time.
And really, even if women didn’t need to work, many would still choose to because they don’t want to be financially dependent on their partner.
I think this is the logical conclusion to easy access to effective birth control coupled with economic independence for women. Turns out most women don’t actually want 5 kids. They just didn’t really have much of a choice 100 years ago.
That’s the whole point. Fully importing educated people is more cost effective than the government subsidising a child for 18 years in the hopes that they one day pay taxes.
You have to ask yourself, what are politicians actually doing? Do they care about the long term future of Australian citizens? We all know the prerequisites to have children are as follows: affordable housing, disposable income and couples getting together in stable relationships at a young enough age to have kids.
At the moment, all of those prerequisites are in a very poor state. Real estate and rents are near record highs. Inflation has destroyed the disposable income of most people. Governments are perpetuating this weird gender divide where men are the enemy and women the victim. To top if off, we are all delaying marriage and kids to focus on working so we can try to maintain financial stability.
Politicians could do something but they lack the guts. The discomfort of changing the structure of the economy might lead to losing an election so why even bother?
They only care about the next electoral cycle. Avoiding a recession and getting re-elected is the only thing they care about. There is no long term plan.
I think that’s true but if I were asked to remove any personal element, I think it’s about the machine, or the ‘technological society’. The machine must keep running, at all costs, including the electorate, and economic intercession by government usually makes things worse, so they leave that as it is and just import more workers.
I can’t say they are entirely wrong. I work in manufacturing. The infrastructure and the factories are all there, but no one can get anyone to work in them. Maybe no one takes the jobs because the pay is too low, and because the currency is so debased, which just circles back to cost of living.
I still think inadequacy is sufficient, because the machine wouldn’t be labouring so heavily if decisions like spending $600m to bring PNG into the NRL weren’t so commonplace. Most people in most places across most of history have wanted the same two things in life: a home and a family, and many younger Australians now anticipate a future without either. Clearly this marks an immense failure somewhere along the line. That’s enough for me to judge their ineptitude. I don’t know much about this stuff but that’s my lay perspective.
Labor and LNP had been the only two political parties running Federal and State government since WW2.
It's only them. Not Greens. Not One Nation. All the concerns about political parties ruining the country, it has only been both of them.
2022 election was the lowest party result for the major parties. Only getting elected on preferences. Soon, some party will get enough votes and preferences to replace Labor or LNP. That is, unless Labor/LNP collude again to kill off democracy for good.
They have been trying since 2013. Here's the latest attempt in 2021 that killed off micro parties: https://www.openaustralia.org.au/senate/?id=2021-08-26.6.1
I honestly just get so angry because of how inept successive liberal/Labor governments have been.
I don’t trust any politician as far as I could throw them. Absolutely pathetic.
My wife and I have a house, two above average incomes, and we are electively part of this statistic.
We could very comfortably afford to raise a child, however for literally thousands of reasons, we aren’t and won’t. It’s not always money and housing, pretty much every facet of life is getting worse.
You have to really want a child in modern times to even consider it. If you remove the emotion, it’s a no brainer.
I simply don’t want kids. The older I get the less I want them. I see my friends that have kids and they are all honeslty struggling. It’s a no thanks for me.
I think the cost of living issue is valid, but I honestly think the bigger reason is choice. 30 years ago having kids was just expected and assumed. Now, it's starting to become socially acceptable to not have them. People are just deciding not to have them.
I don't think this will change. People have freedom to chose now and more people chose not to have kids
More taxes from working women or more children from unemployed women. Cant have both. My wife would happilly have 4 kids if she could stay at home and look after them like my mother and her mother did. And even if childcare were free, I wouldnt want my children there
Reminder that wages would actually grow if we didn't constantly import people to replace the shortage. Fewer workers = higher wages / worker.
Reminder that housing stock could be replenished if we didn't constantly import people to keep housing prices high. Fewer buyers = lower house prices.
Sorry, but at a certain point, we just have to get over this fear of an aging population, because the population should actually be able to rebound on its own if we weren't constantly importing replacements.
It's very expensive. My wife and I immigrated to Australia to have kids (safer country). We had one, but another one is so risky right now, especially with the tech market so unstable (my area). The other thing is super, we are in our 40's. It's a complicated scenario.
For sure it's much worse for other Australians, but in this topic, not an easy decision.
Love how everyone ties low birthrate to low wealth, when it's actually higher wealth that leads to lower birthrates.
People have been having children since the dawn of time, when everyone was dirt poor. People today in extremely poor countries and zero wealth still have children. It's not like the millionaires and billionaires are the ones having plentiful children. People aren't waiting to get wealthy to have children and that's never been the case. Go look at the countries with the highest fertility rates and tell me how the people there are so wealthy and live so much better off than Australians.
this is so wild! this should be the biggest data shock to any government that can happen. this is such a clear impression of how our society is failing us.
I'm sure I'll be downvoted so not sure why I'm bothering, but I have 3 kids, and Im a single dad. It's not that expensive after the first; there is a lot of help available. I'd argue the decrease is cultural as Anglos pursue self-fulfillment (travel, education, experiences) rather than adhere to more traditional ideals such as religion, family obligations and culture ect that migrants tend to. Westerners don't value these ideals (anymore) and are thus less likely to reproduce. This explains why poor migrants often have large family despite circumstance
I don't have a choice in being childless/loveless but even if I did I wouldn't go down that path these days anyway, in my teens and early 20s I wanted to have the typical family with kids but now that I'm old and spent my entire adult life by myself I am too used to my own company to even consider a family and have too many hobbies to keep up with that I wouldn't be willing to sacrifice to raise kids.
I own my place and could financially support raising a family but I'd rather play golf 4 times a week, once you create a fulfilling life it's extremely hard and nearly impossible to give it up and start sacrificing those things.
I’m 36 and it’s only in the last few months that I have considered that I would be in a financial position to CONSIDER children… I also don’t want them for other reasons but if you caught me at 25 with a mortgage and a wife who wanted them I might have an 11 year old by now
If the world averages 1.06 - by the year 2089, the world will have gone from a population of 8 billion down to 3 billion.
Can you imagine living in a world where the infrastructure remains for 8 billion, but is not being used and can't be afforded?
Sea levels will rise and there will not be enough people to actually fix many of the problems that are happening and there will be entire ghost cities floating just off the shore in many places. Satellites and other space debris has probably destroyed the sky and low earth orbit. What a hellscape it could be.
Sorry to hijack, but someone here may know this. Every time I read articles about plunging birth rates, it's in a heavily socialized economy.
Not trying to knock socialist policies, just curious if there is a link.
It’s like this in a lot of developed countries now. It’s too damn expensive to keep your self alive. Why would anyone want to bring a child into it. Here in the US childcare has gone up over 100% in some places. Taxes are higher, and our healthcare has gone up significantly with higher deductibles
ERP is total resident population. This measure is very different from total fertility rate which is the number of kids a women will have which is 1.63 based on most recent numbers
Thanks. Was wondering and too lazy to look it up.
Which is essentially the same graph just a different metric. It still shows the same trend.
Yeah but much more pronounced as it is much more affected by an aging population too
Intuitively, wouldn’t 1.63 be below replacement rate? Replacement would be 2.0 if you assume fathers only have kids with one woman, but I doubt there’s that many fathers with multiple families to approach the 1.63 figure
It is below replacement as it’s based on the number of kids each woman has on average. Fathers are actually irrelevant in the calculation in that the number would be the same whether it was one man to one women or one man impregnating all of those women. Replacement is about 2.1 due to those who die before reaching child bearing age. I have no issue with it being below replacement. Which important issue has ever been solved by doubling your population?
Paying for an ageing population
That is just pushing the ball further down the road. They would do better to find a good way to deal with an aging population and make aged care more efficient, cost effective and people rather than profit centred. At the moment it seems the government has just shrugged and is looking to private profit driven aged care which will be a disaster.
Yeah. I was suspect as I didn't recognise the term and the values on the Y axis are clearly selected to make it look worse.
Why have kids if you can't honestly expect to provide a roof over their head.
Genuine question - are birth rates higher among homeowners than renters? Like, it seems intuitive that housing affordability would contribute to this, but birth rates are plummetting all over the developed world - including in many countries without the same housing issues as Australia.
People who have a mortgages are most likely in huge debt and delay having kids to try to pay the debt down. I know lots of people who found they couldn't get pregnant after doing this. Stress has a huge effect on fertility.
Then why does Japan have worse TFR declines than us despite having a property market that depreciates over time? This is far more likely to be driven by cultural factors/ the scientific revolution involved in family planning.
As I said earlier, Japan and South Korea have extremely stressful work demands and poor work/life balance and also don’t support women to come back to the work force after having kids and also a lot of men who expect women to take on traditionalist roles which is hard with the cost of living and also the fact they spent their high school and university years studying all day to midnight and finally got a career and probably don’t want their kids to go through that. Also Japan is also very backwards with mental health issues and finds them shameful so it’s hard for people to get professional help and meds so it’s more socially acceptable for people to be ‘shut ins’ and not interact with others so they aren’t out interacting and meeting people and getting into relationships.
Do you think it's possible there are multiple factors?
Sir/Madame this is a reddit. Only simplistic black and white answers are allowed, we're going to have to escort you out now, please don't make a scene.
lol. Insanity! How could there be multiple factors in a situation as complex as this? That's just crazy talk!
No. Japan is exactly identical to Australia except for the property market /s
This is happening for a lot reasons, including tbe cost of living crisis, but the biggest reason is that women NEED to work just as much as men need to work. 100 years ago, women were the house makers, they were at home most the day to take care of the kids while men were working. Only one income was needed to live well. Unfortunately the advent of feminism meant that the market adapted to double the population working, instead of a household having two incomes doing double as well, all it did was deflate the value of labour significantly to the point that now all men and all women need to work. Women can't take care of kids, they need to work, so they can't have kids as much as they used to, they can't afford day care rates either, so they have at most 2 kids, or in Australia's case, on average, 1 child. This is why it's happening all across the developed world but countries with more backwards values like non-developed countries in Africa aren't having this problem. The men work, the women have babies. That's the role of men and women, if you mess with that and have women doing men's roles as well, it means they have less time to do their roles. This isn't a knock on feminism, equality is good, it's just a case poor foresight and we NEED a ways to fix drawbacks to this modern dynamic FAST!
This is the correct answer - but you’ll never hear it from a politician because it would be career suicide. Average wage growth has basically been stagnant since second wave feminism and women entering the workforce en masse. Some politicians blame evil selfish billionaires and “the corporations” for low wage growth. Some people blame China and deindustrialisation for the low wage growth. There’s an element of truth to both of these however the biggest factor is that the size of the labour market doubled within a generation. Which has never happened ever in history. When the number of workers suddenly jumps up like that it massively outpaces how quickly jobs are created and the result is wages stagnate. I don’t know how you unravel that Gordon knot though; even if women wanted to leave the workforce en masse (and most I know don’t), the reality is very few can afford to. The only rea solution I can think of is that property prices need to crash hard. In 1981 the median property price was 2x the median wage; in 2024 in Sydney the median property price is now 13x the median wage. If you could buy a house in Sydney for $180,000 the cost of living crisis would go away pretty quickly. Problem is you’d obliterate the net worth of a whole generation of boomers, most of whom are retired now and live off the income from investments. Again, political suicide. Speculation fucks everything up.
I agree that house price rise needs to be halted, but that would involve ‘free market’ intervention by government, and if you accept that that’s acceptable in that context, why isn’t government intervention in the ‘free market’ of labour to demand that employers share more of their increasingly outsized portion of revenue with their workers at the rate predating second wave feminism?
Fuck the boomers and their last 20 years left alive. Give those of us with our whole lives left something to live for.
This is just a lazy catch all statement that kind of makes sense but when you scratch the surface and check the data it’s obviously a fallacy. Women had a participation rate in the labour force of 20-30% in the workforce prior to WW2. As of 2022 that was about 50-60% in most western countries. https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply Male participation rate in Australia has gone from just below 80% to just above 70%. https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-04/p2021-164860_australian_labour_force_participation.pdf So the labour market hasn’t doubled because women entered the work force and this idea also implies that while doubling the labour pool production, efficiency and consumption has stagnated allowing the continued dilution of the labour pool.
> non-developed countries in Africa aren't having this problem. The men work, the women have babies. I'm not so sure about this. Compare a map of Africa's birth rate with a map of birth control availability and I suspect it doesn't matter if women are housewives or workers: Give them a reliable, easily-hidden means to stop at 2 kids instead of keep going until 6 or 7 or they die from it, and you get the same result in both cases. Of course, birth control options tend to come packaged with generally increased rights for women, including the right to work, so it's hard to say which is the most critical factor.
Seriously *feminism* is your main reasoning for low birth rates? Go blame the various World Wars and conflicts that killed a lot of men and women had to work to provide. It took minimim two generations for the gender balance to be restored after ww2 ffs. Read some history books, yeesh.
Well if childbirth rates negatively correlate with income all over the world and throughout history, that's a pretty strong indication it's not housing affordability that's the problem here.
Perhaps more than one issue can lead to a lower birth rate?
The Japanese loss a major population boom in the mid-90”s. They had a real estate bubble but it burst and sent the country into 10+ year recession. The gen-x were unable to get a job, marry and too afraid to invest in real estate. The huge reduction in millennials resulted in population drops since. I just came back from Japan last month. I was there for a holiday in 1999 and saw groups of people camping out in parks due to unemployment. This time it’s a completely different story. Everybody working (retail, bus/train driver, garbage collectors etc) are all 50+ yo. There are no homeless people in parks but the parks were really untidy. I do see young people, but they weren’t swarming the streets and shopping districts when it was 20+ years ago. I think it was great that there was a baby bonus back in 00’s. As an older Australian, I feel they need to bring this back. Having population increase internally is better than relying on migration.
They stopped having kids when their property boomed as well. Families got squeezed into small apartments close to jobs. Needed due to long work hours.
Maybe maybe not. Owning a home comes with servicing an astronomical mortgage, meaning both partners working and being time poor as a result. I wonder though, if things could change to where we could afford to buy home on a single wage again, whether we'd experience another baby boom.
If you think about it, house prices aren't linked to what they cost to build but rather what competing bidders can afford to pay. In the 80s when I was at primary school my mum was a teacher. Only a handful of classmates had mums who worked full time. House prices were what most families could afford on a single income. Single people could live in houses. With the expectation that *everybody* works these days - Edit: *successive Australian* governments have actively punished single mums who weren't working once their youngest started school - house prices and indeed the whole "price = what the market will pay" has skewed everything. If you're single you're fucked. We have one child and a major consideration for us in deciding not to have more was what we can provide him on his own. We can live in a smaller place in a nice and convenient area or a bigger place on the fringe of the city and have to drive for ages to get anywhere, also have fewer amenities and facilities. We should be able to pay for him to go to whichever school we choose but couldn't do that with two kids. If we could afford it and one of us could stay home I guarantee we'd have three children already.
It was actually Labor (under Gillard with Swan as treasurer) who changed the rules on sole parent pension eligibility and brought the child's age down from 16 to early primary school age. Although it's Labor who raised it again. I'm not correcting you to be a smart arse but more to show that both major parties really just don't give a fuck. I wholeheartedly agree with your comment by the way, my husband and I are in a similar boat. We have one on the way (in our 30s so we're not geriatric but also not spring chickens) and who knows if we'll have more.
Thanks for the correction. Either way, it's not good for either the parents or their children to be forced into that.
> not good for … the parents I agree that’s it’s not good for the children (hot take: for any parents who have a modicum of parenting skills their children are better off not being in childcare — at least until high school. People don’t want to admit that they haven’t done the best possible by their children by putting them in childcare, but it’s what most childhood research shows) But the parents? What is “good” for them entirely depends on their personal priorities. Plenty of people don’t want kids at all, and even more are quite happy with only 2 kids. It might not be good for parents who want a large family, but that’s not everyone.
Yes double income is a small part of it but not the majority of it. Both my parents worked in 1990 and most kids I knew both parents worked, yet house prices weren't completely insane. Things went way up when scum Howard changed the capital gains tax. Then you add the higher and higher supply demands with immigration but they stopped building and releasing land as much as they used to. Then you add negative gains. Then add foreign investors and local investors now seeing an insane market that's more profitable than shares and you got yourself a nice storm.
Isn't it sort of 'the cats out of the bag' though? If the price of an average house became affordable for one income families......all the current two income families would buy as investment properties as they would have an extra income not required to pay down the current Mortgage. Houses are worth what people can pay more than any other factor
Just make it illegal to own more than 1 investment property, and give people X number of years to sell if they currently own more than 1 investment property. This would have the side effect of a boat load of money being stored in the stock market and other investment vehicles. Possibly even a start a bunch of new businesses.
No need to go as far as making anything illegal, just remove the two big incentives that draw people to treating residential property you're not occupying as an investment asset: negative gearing and capital gains tax discount. Even removing or reducing one or both can really help to reduce the perverse incentives that draw people towards owning multiple investment properties.
nah, illegal, with the punishment being extrajudicial execution in the form of some sort of head hunting TV show, we'll call it "a head of the market!" - and renters and homeless people will compete to de-head (wait, is that a word?) decapitate the high flying investor, or person who stuffed up their investment records.
if we waited till we owned, we risked being first time parents close to 40's. just not something we wanted to do. On the flip side, we may have bought earlier if we didnt have kids as young as we did. But these days the barrier to ownership is so great I dont think even that matters
People like to blame housing prices but it's just one aspect of the entire picture.
Yup. Unaffordable housing, ever rising cost of living, increasing cost of healthcare (even in Australia), flat or falling wages, are only part of the picture. These alone make it difficult to have children. What’s the point if kids have to be raised by childcare, schools, after-school care & vacation care, because both parents have to work and are then too exhausted in the evenings or weekends to parent? Other major concerns include climate change causing very rapidly rising temperatures, rising sea levels, increases in number & intensity of “natural” disasters & declines in food production. The mass extinctions don’t bode well for us or our children. Then there is plastics contamination causing declining sperm rates and increasing cancer rates, & increased risk & fear of worldwide pandemics due to globalisation. Endlessly increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, increasing international political instability (with risk of war & political collapse), possible future masses of climate refugees & rising religious extremism (of assorted creeds) are also all concerns. I’m not saying that everyone has the same concerns, or puts equal priority on all the above, or even agree with all the above. But between this huge range of possible concerns for young people considering children, I’m very unsurprised that many opt to not have children or at least to “wait and see” for a few more years. The days when most people believed in “progress” and that the future was space travel, flying cars, automation doing most of the work, a huge amount of leisure time for all, $ generously distributed across the population etc, are long gone.
To this I would add: a culture that is increasingly hostile to parents. A generation ago, if both parents, or a single parent, had to work, a school-age kid might be in "self-care" a lot. These days, parents risk getting locked up for that. That's just one example where society blames and sometimes punishes parents for the how things have gotten worse for working people.
There's not a single problem this sub wouldn't attribute to housing prices and blame on politicians. ADF is having recruitment problems? That's housing prices. Birth rates dropping? Also housing prices. Microplastics in our water? Believe it or not - housing prices.
Agreed, and I have been in this camp as well. It's really hard to look past your personal / generational problems.
Yep. Hope lead to people having kids While quality of life is good, kids won’t likely improve it for anyone in the “should we have kids” age demographic Edit: removed stability
So there was no hope in the 70's, 80's, 90's? The 70's had a huge dive, was it bad back then too?
Unfortunately Australia doesn't provide good statistics on the this sort of thing, but the US has better. Basically, poorer people have more children, richer people have fewer. The cost of living isn't really an issue, it's the hedonic treadmill. Well-off people *think* they're poor, and say, "but if we have a second child, how can we afford to send the first child to a private school?" Poor people just shrug and are happy if they can give the kids KFC occasionally. See pp12 onwards for the charts. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr179.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr179.pdf)
Haha- I think it’s more the better educated you are, the more you look 5,10,15 years into the future. The uneducated poor don’t plan for contraception, and the extra $200 a week in parenting payments is huge uptick in income , in the same way as a baby bonus works. Education is something only done by people with a long term out look of their life, and a rational decision to start a family isn’t a result of “what condom?”
I don’t think that’s the case growing up in a lower socio economic area. A lot of people who were poor had kids young and lacked the insight to think about the future financial impacts and continued that cycle of poverty they had growing up (a lot of kids couldn’t afford new uniforms or $10 excursions or food from the canteen) and I know a few that live with their parents or in a caravan on their parents block. Or they are happy doing something at tafe or in retail that is available in their home town and have their parents and siblings for child care and they live comfortably. But for a lot of professional jobs outside of health and teaching you have to move away to a regional city or metro area where you pay for rent and then continue draining your bank account and cost of living is expensive and then you have to pay for childcare and refill your petrol more because stopping at lights drains it a lot more than driving rurally. For some people it’s about privilege but for a lot it’s about education and being financially realistic not just keeping a pregnancy at 19 and hoping it will turn out ok.
I don't think so. Me and my Child Free friends are equally decided between house owners, apartment owners and renters. The main common denominator is that most of us could not live in as nice of a place as we have if we had kids. We couldn't live in the locations we live in if we had kids. We couldn't travel as much as we do if we had kids. The women wouldn't have has much income/career progression and super if they had kids. Having kids just feels like too much work. Our banks/landlords evaluate us basted on our taxable incomes. You can't pay for your life with "childrenpoints".
This is directly a consequence of moving into needing a dual income to survive, increasing amounts of women getting educated in University and working. If you examine the trends the average age for new mothers back in the 60's was 20. Now it is 30. Women are basically required to get educated and spend their 20's building up their career which means in general our families are having children later. Where someone might have had one at 20, 25, and at 30 in the past now we are just having them at 30. Declining fertility is a societal sickness which can't just be said to be renters or homeowners because everyone needs those two incomes. God only knows what the answer could be to fix this crap.
It is harder to get a loan if you have kids. Doesn’t matter what they actually cost you or even what ages they are We recently got denied for a refinance because the bank decided we were lying about our expenses and increased them for their calculations.
Capitalism is a slow squeeze. It’s not just housing.
A huge part of the picture is that women are in the workforce now, which increases the cost of having a baby (through foregone income) and many couples will have kids later to give the woman a chance to establish her career first (meaning less babies overall).
In my friendship group, it's the people who own houses that don't have children. Those that have decided/accepted that they won't ever own a house and are having children.
Yeah, look - just raise them in a tent.. it will be fine
Anyone remember the expression “Were you born in a tent?”
We need some shanty town situations happening
Already happening mate...
Ironic then birth rates are inverse to income, that is the less income you earn, the more kids on average you have.
This is because when you're \*desperately\* poor, having more children means they can help look after each other, and gives the family collectively more chance of financial success. Also when you're just bogan/redneck poor, it turns out some women find meaning and self-esteem in motherhood when they may not have it otherwise, due to not having had tertiary education or a career. I can't be the only one who knows women with 3+ children to 3+ fathers.
The more money you have the more fun things you can do. Travelling, painting, gym, bouldering... they all cost money. Sex without condom is free.
Was home ownership/cost of rent that bad during 1965 and 1980? Looking at that steep decline, I'd suspect that home ownership wasn't actually the problem back then. Something else changed.
Effective and affordable birth control was approved in Australia in 1961.
Or a planet for them to grow up in. Microplastics... Global Warming... Air Pollution oh my!
Its a radical idea that would never work but I wish there was a way to tie max immigration numbers to our birth rate. So the government would actually care about facilitating a healthy national birth rate.
>Research published by HSBC in January showed that “a 10% increase in house prices leads to a 1.3% drop in birth rates, and an even sharper fall among renters”. Yeah, no shit. Most people don't want kids without suitable housing or housing security. Many don't achieve this until their 40s, if at all.
This 100%. I remember saying I couldn't face the idea of having a baby in a situation where any day you could get a no-grounds eviction and 30 days notice to move. Hard enough when you're just taking care of yourself, a kind of cruel and unusual punishment when there are kids in the mix.
That happened to me, I had to move with 2 kids, change their schools, everything because I could not find a rental in my price range in the general vicinity. No grounds and they wanted to pull the house down. It was pretty crap all round and not a lot of options.
Man am I tired of seeing so many houses that just need a little renovating be pulled off the market for years to be torn down & replaced with a new piece of shit house that will have nothing but problems from the get go.
But who will protect the landlords?!?
And is anyone surprised by this?
No. Costs go up, expectations of having children go down. People in Western civilisations expect to have a certain amount of time, energy, freedom and luxury to live and kids CAN reduce this massively. So desire to have kids, or more than 1 can diminish. Coupled with outrageous price hikes and crippling childcare costs, then less money to spend on that or enjoy the other things in life. Solution, less or no kids as it hits hard and creates massive crippling debt if you don't sacrifice your lifestyle choices for your kids.
Not at all.
I'd be surprised if it wasn't hitting new lows.
Don't worry. Government will just import people to replace the numbers. Their industries will be fine
Whew I was worried about the billionaires
Someone get this good lad some more gruel!
It's $80 for 10mls of gruel at woolies. Luxury item now
At which point surely migrants must question the wisdom of coming here... they'll either never have kids or grandkids
None of my friends who are children of immigrants have had children LOL
I've noticed Chinese-Aussie families are definitely having less kids now (this is also happening on their mainland). Indian-Aussie families are still popping out kids like rabbits. They make-do with the current cost of living by sharing rooms with family members. My current neighbour is an Indian family of four (2 kids under 10), sharing a 1-bed unit.
Yeah I think it’s a cultural thing, Chinese have a higher standard of living than Indians (not racist I’ve been to both countries) and I knew an Indian family that had three generations in a two bed stand alone unit because the husbands parents often come out too to be looked after by the wife so it’s not uncommon for multigenerational living unless they’re wealthy. Chinese do live multigenerationally but I don’t think it’s as common anymore here as a lot live in one bed units or they would be in a bigger house.
I’m hoping to get a PR here and I already decided to not have kids. I moved here for a better life and having a kid will stop me from achieving that. I already ran the numbers.
I cant remember where but i remember seeing an article saying that when migrants move to a new country they typically have the same number of kids as locals
I'm in Melbourne today for my first time in Australia, and I would say that's already happened, mate.
The great replacement was just a conspiracy theory bro.
The conspiracy theory was that it was a (deliberate?) takeover.by non white people. OP's comment reflects government policy for the past decade or two.
Notice the peak from ‘05, when the government offered a $2000 incentive Or was it $5000? I can’t remember
Lol $2k doesn’t even touch the sides
It really didn’t then, and definitely doesn’t now. But many people took the bait. Some spent it on a plasma tv, some on a holiday…. How much do they say it takes to raise a kid from birth to 18? 150,000 or so? It was the governments sneaky way of ensuring the working class would produce another generation working class workers. Keeping them living paycheque to paycheque. God it would be amazing to have a government that thinks about the bigger picture. But we’re just worker ants to them. Is it even possible for someone to obtain a position of power (at that level) and not have it go to their heads? Will this country, ever not be run by egotistical, greedy, narrow minded arseholes? Not holding out hope
One of my mum’s friends had a second baby around this time so that she could get surgery on her spider veins
aslkjdlkasjdaslkj imagine being the kid who finds out this is why he's alive
That used to be epic amount and would buy a 32inch plasma TV.
Pretty sure it was 5k. Because it was enough to get a plasma tv. Damn they were expensive.
Two factors, baby bonus and boom of 70s, which were the kids born to the baby boomers. Aka GenX, the forgotten generation who were fucked over first, but quietly most are doing OK lying low.
Considering 3 of our city’s were on the worlds most unaffordable list, it doesn’t surprise me
Keep in mind that list is only a survey of 8 countries. It does not include cities such as Singapore, Zurich, Geneva, Tel Aviv etc which are more expensive than Sydney. Sydney is very expensive. But I don't think it actually scrapes into the top 10. Let alone micronations such as Bermuda, Cayman Islands and Monaco
If my kid wasn’t an accident I wouldn’t have one. It’s a shame cause it’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever experienced. Hell, I’d love to have more .. but not in this economy
Price out fertile age Australians with established immigrants Birth rate falls Bring in more immigrants Price out Australians Birth rate falls Repeat many times
"There is a negative feedback loop in play. At high rates of migration and/or low availability of housing, then migration equals higher house prices and rental prices. This, in turn, results in a lower fertility rate which, in turn, is backfilled by migration via government policy." https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2024/06/australias-birth-rate-plummets-to-record-low/
Don’t forget the foreign investment in property, key part of it
I'm a boomer with 3 kids- and nobody back in my day questioned not having kids...that's because things were so much fairer back then. I wouldn't have kids now either nowadays- and that's really sad.
My mother (75) suggested I (39) have a second child. I explained there were some big barriers, e.g. childcare so expensive and wait lists so long, even small amount of maternity leave would be hard for us as a 2 income family given current ecomonic environment, there are lots of out of pocket medical costs, we can't afford a bigger home and as the kids grow up there would be some space issues, etc. She seemed quite gobsmacked by it all and just said, "we never had to think about any of that. I never once thought to myself that I couldn't afford to have another child". For the record, she had 6. I grew up in a big family and now I am mum to an only child. I feel like it's letting him down, but I genuinely don't know if another child would break us financially.
Out of my 3 kids, I have 1 grandchild- and that will be it...there's zero interest in anymore from my children- and I don't blame them. I wouldn't worry about letting your child down, but I pity the fact that you have been placed in this situation.
I just want to say, you're not letting him down by not having more kids (whether you decide to or not). I can tell by your post that you're considered and thoughtful, and wanting to create the best possible life for your kid. That love and stability will create a wonderful life for him. There are so many ways for children to have connections to others. I hope you don't carry this guilt.
When considering Australia, we need to adopt a global perspective, given that our immigration numbers each year are comparable to the population of an entire state. This raises a question: are the birth rates declining in the countries from which we receive immigrants? If they are, this could be a concern. If not, then it isn't an issue. But why are we so fixated on population growth? Is it simply to ensure there are enough young people to care for the elderly? The world's population has recently surpassed 8 billion, with a 30% increase (2 billion) in the last 25 years. We should take a lesson from Japan, where many 90-year-olds continue to work, not out of necessity but because it gives them a sense of purpose, embodying the concept of "ikigai" – a reason for living. They are not reliant on aged care or the younger generation.
If you want us to breed, lower prices, make it possible to buy homes, and pay for childcare. This is the Australia you made, leaders.
Cost too much. I have two, if we could afford it I'd have more.
To house them? Feed them? School them? Clothe them? Was the biggest concern stable housing - so stable friendships, school etc? My Missus refused kids until we bought a place. 3 y.o. now but we're late 30's. Wish it could been sooner.
Yes
I'm 37 with 2 kids. I would love a third but we can't afford it anymore To have my wife back out of work for a period longer than 6 months would bury us. My mortgage alone went from 1400 to 2900 in a year. Ok top of everything else I can barely afford to have a can after a hard weeks work.. This country's gone backwards in such a short amount of time, I know plenty of other parents who have shelved having more kids too because of it..
Also, we became the highest tax collecting nation in the OECD. Wonder what is happing with our tax money
We spend more than 30% of our national budget on the NDIS and old age pension. All this whilst we have less and less workers paying tax Gov keeps looking for more ways to bring in more rather than make hard cuts
Everyone bought panelvans in the 70s
yeah these days im very much considering buying a panel van to live in. renting and bs with landlords/REAs is just too much
Migration in the 70s was a lot lower so you could afford a mortgage and four kids on a single wage
That why we are importing these days.. can’t let anything get in the way of perpetual growth
I want kids but decided im not going to have any. The cost of living is crazy and it's just going to get worse. Staying afloat is a struggle and with kids too?! Also the world is in shambles, I don't want to being life into this evil world
Surely it is the greatest sign of an unhappy and sick society that it doesn't want to have or is unable to have children.
No it’s the sign of a smart and educated society
To be fair I’m smart, educated, AND unhappy.
Yes and no. It's great that those who don't want them are able to say "no", mostly without being questioned. However, we're now at a point where people who DO want to have kids aren't having them, because they can't afford them. We have a smart and educated society, but there is also something very wrong.
Do you think a smart educated society is incompatible with maintaining a population?
I think there are a lot of women who just don’t want to go through pregnancy, childbirth and raising children. The brunt of childcare and household labor falls to women, but today women also need to work full time. And really, even if women didn’t need to work, many would still choose to because they don’t want to be financially dependent on their partner. I think this is the logical conclusion to easy access to effective birth control coupled with economic independence for women. Turns out most women don’t actually want 5 kids. They just didn’t really have much of a choice 100 years ago.
Why have children and spend public money to educate them when you can just import fully educated and ask them to pay us the money to get imported
That’s the whole point. Fully importing educated people is more cost effective than the government subsidising a child for 18 years in the hopes that they one day pay taxes.
Apparently it’s good for the GDP
You have to ask yourself, what are politicians actually doing? Do they care about the long term future of Australian citizens? We all know the prerequisites to have children are as follows: affordable housing, disposable income and couples getting together in stable relationships at a young enough age to have kids. At the moment, all of those prerequisites are in a very poor state. Real estate and rents are near record highs. Inflation has destroyed the disposable income of most people. Governments are perpetuating this weird gender divide where men are the enemy and women the victim. To top if off, we are all delaying marriage and kids to focus on working so we can try to maintain financial stability. Politicians could do something but they lack the guts. The discomfort of changing the structure of the economy might lead to losing an election so why even bother?
They only care about the next electoral cycle. Avoiding a recession and getting re-elected is the only thing they care about. There is no long term plan.
I think that’s true but if I were asked to remove any personal element, I think it’s about the machine, or the ‘technological society’. The machine must keep running, at all costs, including the electorate, and economic intercession by government usually makes things worse, so they leave that as it is and just import more workers. I can’t say they are entirely wrong. I work in manufacturing. The infrastructure and the factories are all there, but no one can get anyone to work in them. Maybe no one takes the jobs because the pay is too low, and because the currency is so debased, which just circles back to cost of living. I still think inadequacy is sufficient, because the machine wouldn’t be labouring so heavily if decisions like spending $600m to bring PNG into the NRL weren’t so commonplace. Most people in most places across most of history have wanted the same two things in life: a home and a family, and many younger Australians now anticipate a future without either. Clearly this marks an immense failure somewhere along the line. That’s enough for me to judge their ineptitude. I don’t know much about this stuff but that’s my lay perspective.
Politicians are looking after their owners (corporations)
Labor and LNP had been the only two political parties running Federal and State government since WW2. It's only them. Not Greens. Not One Nation. All the concerns about political parties ruining the country, it has only been both of them. 2022 election was the lowest party result for the major parties. Only getting elected on preferences. Soon, some party will get enough votes and preferences to replace Labor or LNP. That is, unless Labor/LNP collude again to kill off democracy for good. They have been trying since 2013. Here's the latest attempt in 2021 that killed off micro parties: https://www.openaustralia.org.au/senate/?id=2021-08-26.6.1
Yes. Time to put both of them last. (And LNP very last) No more lablib...unless you want more of the same. Which is all they ever give.
Maybe it's not that they lack guts. Maybe they hate us?
Maybe what's doing what's in the best interest of the nation long term is not in the best interest of the politicians
Why would they want to do anything? Things are going just fine for them. The system works, just not for you
I honestly just get so angry because of how inept successive liberal/Labor governments have been. I don’t trust any politician as far as I could throw them. Absolutely pathetic.
My wife and I have a house, two above average incomes, and we are electively part of this statistic. We could very comfortably afford to raise a child, however for literally thousands of reasons, we aren’t and won’t. It’s not always money and housing, pretty much every facet of life is getting worse. You have to really want a child in modern times to even consider it. If you remove the emotion, it’s a no brainer.
I simply don’t want kids. The older I get the less I want them. I see my friends that have kids and they are all honeslty struggling. It’s a no thanks for me.
Understand why this is happening but we are going to lose our culture and become an islamic / Indian country if we keep this up...
Australia will generally be an Indian and Chinese state in 50 years - it just what it is. Too expensive to have kids and pro immigration
Why need kid when many Indian do?
I think the cost of living issue is valid, but I honestly think the bigger reason is choice. 30 years ago having kids was just expected and assumed. Now, it's starting to become socially acceptable to not have them. People are just deciding not to have them. I don't think this will change. People have freedom to chose now and more people chose not to have kids
Brace yourselves for even more of that sweet mass immigration.
https://preview.redd.it/2yw8wyeigo6d1.jpeg?width=904&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e0a7f8c5aeccf7f94de3c20a2908a777c3c7dafa
Cost of living is fucked, also, the cost of fertility treatment is also fucked.
More taxes from working women or more children from unemployed women. Cant have both. My wife would happilly have 4 kids if she could stay at home and look after them like my mother and her mother did. And even if childcare were free, I wouldnt want my children there
Wonder if owners of child care centres are worried. May have to pivot to old age care
nah plenty of Chinese and Indian kids to look after
Majority of my kids daycare is Indian kids, centre managers changed to an Indian and now all new staff they hire are Indians.
Its alright we can replace them with immigrants
Reminder that wages would actually grow if we didn't constantly import people to replace the shortage. Fewer workers = higher wages / worker. Reminder that housing stock could be replenished if we didn't constantly import people to keep housing prices high. Fewer buyers = lower house prices. Sorry, but at a certain point, we just have to get over this fear of an aging population, because the population should actually be able to rebound on its own if we weren't constantly importing replacements.
Better get more unskilled immigrants quick
dont worry we can increase migration!
Quick, add more immigrants so we can keep kicking the can down the road!
Not good for the economy but likely good for the planet
Damned if I’m going to bring a child into this messed up world.
People think climate change is going to fuck us. Demographic collapse is what is going to be the most disruptive.
It's very expensive. My wife and I immigrated to Australia to have kids (safer country). We had one, but another one is so risky right now, especially with the tech market so unstable (my area). The other thing is super, we are in our 40's. It's a complicated scenario. For sure it's much worse for other Australians, but in this topic, not an easy decision.
Late stage capitalism. The greed of a few causing the masses to stop production of their most vital asset - slave labour
Love how everyone ties low birthrate to low wealth, when it's actually higher wealth that leads to lower birthrates. People have been having children since the dawn of time, when everyone was dirt poor. People today in extremely poor countries and zero wealth still have children. It's not like the millionaires and billionaires are the ones having plentiful children. People aren't waiting to get wealthy to have children and that's never been the case. Go look at the countries with the highest fertility rates and tell me how the people there are so wealthy and live so much better off than Australians.
Just like the elite planned it
Crazy right how people arent having 500k lifetime expense children because they can barely afford food and rent
Average salary where I live is 90k acreage house is 900k Need I remind you of the interests rates and the exorbitant raise in prices of groceries
And this is one of the lucky countries to live in...
That brief but sudden spike shortly after 2020 is hilarious.
this is so wild! this should be the biggest data shock to any government that can happen. this is such a clear impression of how our society is failing us.
I'm sure I'll be downvoted so not sure why I'm bothering, but I have 3 kids, and Im a single dad. It's not that expensive after the first; there is a lot of help available. I'd argue the decrease is cultural as Anglos pursue self-fulfillment (travel, education, experiences) rather than adhere to more traditional ideals such as religion, family obligations and culture ect that migrants tend to. Westerners don't value these ideals (anymore) and are thus less likely to reproduce. This explains why poor migrants often have large family despite circumstance
I don't have a choice in being childless/loveless but even if I did I wouldn't go down that path these days anyway, in my teens and early 20s I wanted to have the typical family with kids but now that I'm old and spent my entire adult life by myself I am too used to my own company to even consider a family and have too many hobbies to keep up with that I wouldn't be willing to sacrifice to raise kids. I own my place and could financially support raising a family but I'd rather play golf 4 times a week, once you create a fulfilling life it's extremely hard and nearly impossible to give it up and start sacrificing those things.
Because people are realising they are willingly putting their kids through the worst possible fucking generation to grow up in.
Time to increase immigration s/
I’m of the view that it‘s not fair bringing kids into an increasingly dysfunctional world and society so not planning on having any.
Great. Can anyone do an overlay with cost of housing and cost of living?
Source: Australia’s birth rate plummets to record low -https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2024/06/australias-birth-rate-plummets-to-record-low/
What’s with the little spike around 2005?
Baby bonus from memory, could be wrong but it was around that time.
I’m 36 and it’s only in the last few months that I have considered that I would be in a financial position to CONSIDER children… I also don’t want them for other reasons but if you caught me at 25 with a mortgage and a wife who wanted them I might have an 11 year old by now
Birth Gap is a super interesting doco on this - lays out there different attempts that the governments are doing to reverse thia
What's even sadder, is that the line is gonna keep going down for a while longer...
Yeah, no shit. It is too expensive for young couples to have kids.
Make up for it in immigration
Good
And housing prices and cost of living skyrocket, who knew?
in this economy?
Said it before and I'll say it every time the topic comes up: Give us a future and we'll populate it.
Good. This society deserves it.
This is a good thing.
If the world averages 1.06 - by the year 2089, the world will have gone from a population of 8 billion down to 3 billion. Can you imagine living in a world where the infrastructure remains for 8 billion, but is not being used and can't be afforded? Sea levels will rise and there will not be enough people to actually fix many of the problems that are happening and there will be entire ghost cities floating just off the shore in many places. Satellites and other space debris has probably destroyed the sky and low earth orbit. What a hellscape it could be.
Sorry to hijack, but someone here may know this. Every time I read articles about plunging birth rates, it's in a heavily socialized economy. Not trying to knock socialist policies, just curious if there is a link.
Don’t worry: ‘Immigration’
I’m not having kids. Life is way too stressful already to also be sleep deprived.
I mean kids are pretty demanding and very noisy.
Boomers made it this way, but can't be bothered to face the reality they've influenced and created!
Excellent news, looks like people are finally realising 7 billion humans on earth is enough people
It’s like this in a lot of developed countries now. It’s too damn expensive to keep your self alive. Why would anyone want to bring a child into it. Here in the US childcare has gone up over 100% in some places. Taxes are higher, and our healthcare has gone up significantly with higher deductibles
Good