Speaking of trends Kev, while the Chinese population figures stubbornly resists upward curves, the global shark population plummets alarmingly, while Chinese nonchalantly slurp through the soup of fins from a hundred million sharks PA, in the hope of increasing the breeding rate.

Another animal and a vital part of it's anatomy should be introduced to this subject, a rat: who gives a rats arse if they don't succeed in their twisted breeding programme?

The new purpose of governments is not what is best for the average citizen or what the average citizen wants. The new purpose of governments is what will make the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) bigger. Even the former Dean of Environmental and Life Sciences at Macquarie University hedges towards what makes the GDP bigger.

Dean McCracken finishes with:
“In short, significant success in lifting birth numbers is going to require very attractive incentives being provided by the government.”

In what universe should parents be baby factories to supply the country with workers to keep the GDP increasing every year? Dean McCracken does not even question the idea that governments should be providing incentives to increase the birthrate. I geuss it just goes without saying?? We all agree?? Maybe one day governments were trying to provide a safe and fair environment for their citizens to live in. Not any more. Apparently the primary goal is to increase the GDP, regardless of what the citizens prefer.

It isn’t bad enough that humans are supposed to only care about how much money they can get. We are supposed to believe that if the GDP bets bigger we will all be happier, despite the 15 years increases in GDP while the average wage has stayed flat.

Wouldn’t it be great if we were thinking of policies that would increase wages or make the average citizen’s life easier or more productive. Unlikely.

It is doubly disappointing that the former Dean of Environmental and Life Sciences makes no mention of what happens to the environment when population increases. China has unhealthy air quality impacting a majority of the population and dumps more plastic and other waste into the oceans than any other country in the world. Is that going to be easier to solve with a higher population?

Ericc,

What seems to be happening in China (and will probably happen in all developed countries, even more so, soon enough) is not so much the production of more children for its own sake or in order to increase the GDP, etc., but simply to have enough children growing up to be working people and tax-payers for forty or fifty years, so that the growing number of elderly can be supported - AND so that the generations to come aren't on some downward spiral, with fewer and fewer working people supporting more and more elderly during there rest of this century and beyond.

By late this century, population reduction will probably be inevitable in China. The question is how fast will it decline ? Too fast, i.e. too few young people, working people, to support a slowly growing (at least for a couple of generations) population of older people, non-working people, and its society will face a severe crisis. This will be exacerbated by young, educated people seeking work overseas, leaving a shrinking number of working people to look after a relatively large number of elderly.

Without migration, Australia would also be facing this sort of problem, the problem of stagnant and, soon enough, declining population. I suspect that the Millennials will decide to have even fewer children than previous generations here. May they live long enough to realise the consequences of that decision.

Joe

I doubt that there will be a crisis. I think the ageing population ruse is a trick played by the people who want to scare the average citizen into believing that constantly increasing population is necessary to maintain our way of life. The idea that a 65 year old man with an average of 20 more years of life (women more) is suddenly a burden on the community is silly.

The ageing crisis mongers aren't even taking into account the changes that have already been made. When are wages going to go up because there is a massive shortage of labour. This crisis has been predicted for at least 15 years and wages have been flat for 15 years.

https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/life-expectancy-death/deaths-in-australia/contents/life-expectancy

It is much easier to fix the pension system and the way we offer work to seniors than try to correct climate change, save threatened species, improve the health of the oceans, renew saline and eroded land, regenerate aquifers and slow down the increasing cost of energy, housing and food.

My frustration with this ageing population argument is that when environmentalists say at current rates we will have as much plastic as fish in the oceans in 2050 and the number of wild animals will be 95% less than in 1970, proponents of continuous population growth say Oh you can never tell what will happen in 2050. Then in the next sentence they say if we don't have high immigration and increased birthrates by 2050 there will be only 2 people working for every retired person and there will be an unmanageable budget crisis. When the argument is against them, the future is a foggy netherworld but when it suits their argument the future is a stone cold certainty.