This is an important issue for all nations concerned about aging and the provision of incomes for the elderly. It also has serious implications for defense and security. Unless these trends are reversed there will be global problems for the support of billions of elderly people without any means of earning income.

Babbette Francis is a well-known pronatalist who baulks at the idea of anyone getting their rocks off and dodging the preganacy and birth bullet. Her faux concern for population aging is just a smokescreen for her real agenda; making pregnancy and childbirth compulsory.

Parents do not choose to have children to render a future taxpayer to the nation so that old faux altruism chestnut ends right there.Parenthood is a private good because the benefits of parenthood are privately consumed by parents alone.

Yes children are future taxpayers thus it is the children who are social goods, not their parents. As such, assistance for children ought to be socialised such as better schools and health care for children, improved ante-natal and post natal care (including support for miscarriage and PND) and even mothercraft and fathercraft classes. I have no issue with my taxes spent on this because that is a bonafide investment in children and their future.

The childless/childfree do not owe the baby-makers a debt of gratitude. That there are parents who may begrudge the impact children have on their consumption of adult goods is not the responsibility of the the childfree or childless and they should not have to be fiscally penalised. Conscripting the childfree/childless to cross-subsidise parents is not social justice, it is the overt social engineering that Francis seeks so that the government is regulating what does on in the bedrooms of consenting adults.

The Black Cat - You completely miss represent what Babette is saying a number of times in your comment
It is ridiculous to suggest her real agenda is "making pregnancy and childbirth compulsory.
And just as ridiculous to state that "the benefits of parenthood are privately consumed by parents alone." Parents are the fundamental building block of society and without children there is NO FUTURE society.
When you or your "childfree or childless" friends, as you call them, get old, I have no doubt that you will be very thankful for someone else's children, who were given the chance to be born and properly raised, to look after you.

'In my opinion, abortion should be a major federal issue, not only from the perspective of the human rights of babies in the womb, but from the impact a below-replacement level birth rate has on the economy of a nation '

you are right Babette but remember secularism has no moral conscience. The rights of the 'woman ' is more important than the life of the unborn. The evils of driving a car or turning on a heater is further up the scale as far as voting issues for most. By banging on about the 'greatest moral dilema of the century ' the secularist feel very self righteous and so the life of a baby means little unfortunately.

The Black Cat,

"Her faux concern for population aging is just a smokescreen for her real agenda.."

Yes, that seems entirely plausible, there are far too many vested interests in the population debate.

http://www.openforum.com.au/content/immigration-inappropriate-response-ageing-australia’s-population

The jury's still out on which is the greater problem, a high population growth rate, or an ageing population, the "cure" might be worse than the disease.

Increasing the birth rate is merely kicking the can of aging population a bit further down the road.

Every bit further it goes, the harder it is to fix when the crunch finally comes.

If anyone cares to talk with people over the age of sixty they will tell you that the post-WW2 age hump in the population has been actively discussed by advertisers, lobbyists for all manner of interests, and government since the 1960's at least.

So for fifty years and more the 'age hump' has been used to justify increasing record numbers of immigration. Yet it was arguably immigration that has contributed to the 'problem', if any exists. Not that that concerns lobbyists and governments who for the same fifty years and more have shamelessly used the 'hump' and built inter-generational jealousy to justify socially unpalatable changes in policy, such as placing new limits to qualify for the age pension and delays and parsimonious paring of any increases in payment.

At the same time government, Menzies I believe, stole the millions from the taxes paid by all for an age pension from 60 for women and 65 for men, paid it into consolidated revenue and used it for other purposes.

The duplicity of federal governments is also seen in such dubious and callous behaviour as forcing their own middle aged APS staff into redundancy to serve the affirmative action and multicultural imperatives. Doubly nasty when one also remembers that while politicians themselves have their superannuation linked to changes in average male weekly earnings to proof themselves against inflation, the same politicians as bosses are adamant in refusing to allow the same indexation for the superannuation of their employees, public servants and soldiers. That is despite the government's own independent reports recommending a change in the indexation applied to public servants.

Australian governments have form for creating whipping boys out of sectors of the population to justify their own poor planning.

Explicit in such arguments which are promoted by right-wing religionists and nationalists all over the world is the presumption that the human population can and must keep on increasing for forever and a day.
Unfortunately this is impossible on a finite planet. And no amount of clever technological fixes will alter the fact that crunch time will inevitably come - or the planetary eco-systems (that is Gaia) will bite back with a horrific vengeance.
Remember too that Peter Costello encouraged Australian women to have more babies, which they dutifully did. Never mind that his government failed to even begin to put in place the necessary infrastructure or services to cater for the resultant baby boom.

The issue of fertility must have a strong moral component judging by the hysterical efforts by some commentators to discredit Babette's unassailable arguments by supplying ludicrous, hidden motives for what she writes.
Manufacturing has all but disappeared from Australia and unemployment is on the rise. In Victoria each week, the population of a smallish primary school - around 200 children - is disposed of in abortion businesses each week.
Think of all the adults whio could have been employed to provide for and take care of these children until they began earning themselves.
Teachers, nurses, clothing and footwear manufacturers, builders, electricians, carpenters, publishers, farmers and shopkeepers and on it goes... get the picture?
This is only the economic consequence of low fertility. The social, emotional, medical and psychiatric sequelae are far, far worse.
I have often wondered if the reason houses cost 61/2 times the average salary is because so many double-incomes can compete for the properties. If a wife is forced to work to keep a roof over her head and childcare seems to be a terrible hassle no matter how you look at it, then children will often be viewed either as a luxury or a burden.
Children today deserve our pity. They will inherit a selfish, barbaric, anti-natal society which has destroyed a third of their peers and which will shriek at the way they are cared for in nursing homes - unless they opt for euthanasia.

If low fertility is a social issue, we should address it by encouraging people to have more children, not by forcing them to raise children they do not want.

Just another doomsayer. Fertility should be a matter of choice, not of coercion. The idea of compelling people to have more children is as authoritarian as is the idea of compelling people to have fewer children, and in both cases the underlying reasoning is poor. The grey catastrophe has much in common with the climate change catastrophe. Both are multi-decade predictions of doom, and both call for economically harmful decisions about a future which is very obscure and unpredictable.

Would it not make more sense to make decisions which have benefits for people living now? Is it not true that a strong economy provides more resources to deal with problems as they arise? Posters like Rosarium might also note that housing is made much more costly by the severe restrictions on landholders to develop their own land: Reduce these restrictions and the price of housing would fall.

the birth rate is merely kicking the can of aging population a bit further down the road.
Hasbeen,
My moron boss wouldn't agree with there. He thinks all the boat people will be dutiful taxpayers soon & he'll be able to really enjoy his pension. He is a Labor voter & hopes Rudd will get back in again to continue his "good" work..

"Explicit in such arguments which are promoted by right-wing religionists and nationalists all over the world is the presumption that the human population can and must keep on increasing for forever and a day.
Unfortunately this is impossible on a finite planet. And no amount of clever technological fixes will alter the fact that crunch time will inevitably come - or the planetary eco-systems (that is Gaia) will bite back with a horrific vengeance."

The prophets of doom have been promoting such dogma for many decades. There is no justification for arguing that we have reached the limit for population growth.

Babbette,

Our birthrate is double our deathrate ( ABS data ).

We will grow by an extra 3 million people, just from fertility alone, over the next 30 years.

It only takes 10-15 minutes every 3 years ,to use the preferential system and number on the Senate ballot paper the 110 candidates below the line .
Not a big ask compared to having half one's face or ovaries blown-off in Afghanistan.

By doing this , you can send the only message to the major parties, that they respect .

Every major problem we face from housing, university funding, child neglect, jails, environment, manufacturing collapse, casualization of the workforce, selling public assets, massive public/private borrowings, traffic chaos, growing poverty, social security blow-outs.....(.very happy to dialogue the back stories on all this)...is made catastrophically worse by one design blunder..................POPULATION GROWTH .

By preferencing the Stable Population Party first, then your major party second ( after that, just do the numbering because it won't matter ), we have a chance to turn the place around.

The positive message is that we have designed the mess in, so we can design it out .

Very best Babette ,

Ralph

A "prophet of doom" who really knew what He was talking about.
Which is to say, because he was Consciously Alive as everyone and everything and all of space-time (past, present and future) He could quite literally see where the current (and past) UNCONSCIOUS patterns of human activity were leading humankind and Earthkind.
http://www.dabase.org/not2p1.htm
http://www.beezone.com/news.html
http://www.ispeace723.org/adi-da-world-work \
http://sacredcamelgardens.com/wordpress/reality-humanity
On the hell-deep reservoir of fear sorrow and anger which is patterning our normal dreadful sanity - including dreadfully sane religionists such as Raycom
http://spiralledlight.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/4068
http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/peace_law/index.html
The last reference was written in response to the Kosovo crisis at the request of an on-the-ground high ranking UNHCR diplomat. It was reworked in response to September 11.

Daffy Duck "Explicit in such arguments which are promoted by right-wing religionists and nationalists all over the world is the presumption that the human population can and must keep on increasing for forever and a day.Unfortunately this is impossible on a finite planet. And no amount of clever technological fixes will alter the fact that crunch time will inevitably come - or the planetary eco-systems (that is Gaia) will bite back with a horrific vengeance."

I like reading what "progressives" write for the sheer fact that they always end up showing the utter hatred for human beings they have beneath all their slogans of 'equality" and "egalitarianism"

Ralph Bennett
While our current natural growth is approx 150k pa, our actual deaths double over the next few decades as the boomers become a death bust and our natural growth drop to zero or even negative.

Sorry if the facts get in the way of your narrative.