So, what if the baby bonus was doubled, and also treated as a sort of 'paid leave scheme', a compensation for an interrupted career path ? i.e. women got it,$ 10,000 per child, if they had to take leave from work to have their child, but it would be irrelevant, and unavailable, for those who were not working in the first place ?

i.e. an incentive for every woman to train and get a good education, to join the work-force, and then, when the time was right, to have as many children as she likes ?

Hence: no eugenics, no penalising working women, and compensation for being put at the disadvantage of an interrupted career: sounds like win-win-win.

But not if you want to stay on welfare all your life. Do we as a society want that ?

Just putting it out there.

Joe

Dear Joe,

<<But not if you want to stay on welfare all your life. Do we as a society want that ?>>

Given that the kind of jobs which suit many people were taken over by machines, then if you want to keep those machines, it's better to have people on the dole than to artificially create other jobs that provide no true benefits and at times even cause harm: such jobs cost 10 times as much as the dole per person.

Western societies already support eugenics, Gregory, unfortunately, it is eugenics in reverse.

We live in a society where people with low intelligence who are most commonly a burden on our society our far outbreeding the intelligent who are most commonly the productive who support the non productive. Smart females who pursue careers are hardly breeding at all. Extrapolate forward and you come to the conclusion that our society is doomed unless we reverse that trend. Our present $330 billion dollar dept and ever expanding welfare budget should give you a clue, unless Gregory, you yourself come from the shallow end of the gene pool.

Having a child is a public act. It immediately becomes the responsibility to the entire community to make certain that the child is fed, educated and trained in social skills. But people with very low intelligence are notorious for having kids with no thought to their welfare at all, and the children then become a burden on the rest of society, with the cycle repeating itself with every generation.

We already practice mandatory birth control with inmates in mental asylums because even Gregory can figure out that having such unfortunates breed together is guaranteed to increase mental asylum patients. Paying people with very low intelligence not to breed would go some way towards alleviating the problem.

The smart Chinese are already ahead of the pack here. If there is one thing the Chinese admire, it is brains. China's One Child Policy was never enforced on China's top scientists or bureaucrats, which is one reason why Chinese people are so smart. So you had better wise up Gregory, or learn to speak Chinese while it is still voluntary.

The author is right.
It is an extremely slippery slope for a Government to decide who can breed and who can't, and worse, not support any children born 'mistakenly'.

Someone mentioned China, where they have forced abortions if there is already one child, and there is a huge problem of not enough females in the population due to males being the more popular child. Do we really want to go down that path?

I would worry that this measure would just be the start of Government domination of our lives.

Would they then decide that we should exterminate all those who have turned 65 so they won't need to pay old age pensions, or pay for the increasing medical bills that we all generate as we get older?

What about those people who are born into a 'perfect' family but are disabled or chronically ill?
The Government may want to save money by cutting out the disability pension and exterminating all those who are costing so much on welfare.

Where would all this stop?

So see the problem globally, which it is. Let's say my heart is torn by those "Save the Children" adverts and being very rich, I shipped out boatloads of food to save them. I would feel great for being such an altruistic person and be applauded by many. But what would happen in the real world? Thousands of children would benefit. As soon as they were old enough, they would all go about having sex as people do, even more babies would be born and they would once again be starving, only far more than before! This has been going on for generation after generation, as we in the West refuse to take family planning seriously, refuse to give women in the third world a choice about how many kids they want to have and foolishly only focus on children. The Catholic Church and religious right in America, have alot to answer for.

Yabby, historically the main reason poor people have had so many children is to ensure that at least some of them will survive. And that's still the case in many countries.
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LEGO,
<<We already practice mandatory birth control with inmates in mental asylums because even Gregory can figure out that having such unfortunates breed together is guaranteed to increase mental asylum patients.>>
ITYF it's because they don't at the time have the mental competence to raise children.

You're ascribing far too much to genetics. In reality most stupidity is caused by environmental factors. And genetic engineering has made eugenic arguments moot, as it's almost inevitable that in the future some people will hack their own germline DNA to increase the traits they find desirable – so breeding success will not be the only driver of trait prevalence.
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Joe,
Despite what Tony Abbott thinks, it's grossly unfair to pay more money to those who don't need it than to those who do. And it's quite stupid to pay those who are working not to work while denying the payment to those who are unfortunate enough not to be working.