Don’t pay people for sex, subsidise raising the kid!
Countries are trying to engineer a baby boom – here’s why Kiwi experts say they haven’t worked
There are over eight billion people in the world – that’s roughly 1600 times the number of people in New Zealand – yet around the globe alarm bells are ringing we are not reproducing enough.
There are concerns not enough babies are being born to replace the existing population. By the end of the century, the United Nations predicts 23 countries will see their populations halved.
It has governments scrambling to engineer a baby boom.
Weird and wacky ways to bring back what was once feared as a “population bomb” have surfaced with an AI version of Tinder, a sex minister appointed in Europe and many, many ‘baby bonuses’.
Last month, National Party leader Christopher Luxon joked Kiwis, if they wish, should “go out there and have more babies”.
While he was joking, he may have a point.
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Paul Spoonley said New Zealand has experienced one of the most rapid transitions from replacement-level fertility to well below of any high-income country.
In 2012, the country was still at replacement fertility sitting at 2.1 births per woman, but by 2017, New Zealand had sharply dropped well below and has sat at about 1.6 births per woman since.
“There are not enough births to replace the existing population,” Spoonley told Newshub.
“The question is whether the country will become a ‘low, low fertility’ country (1.5 births or below) and my expectation is that it will over this decade. Others think not but we really do not know.”
The fertility rate shows the average number of babies women would have in their life. The replacement rate in New Zealand is 2.1, which is the number of children a pair would have to have in order to replace themselves. In countries with high infant and child mortality rates, the replacement level is much higher.
The latest Stats NZ data shows in 2022, New Zealand’s fertility rate was 1.66 births. It was slightly higher than the two previous years (1.64 and 1.61, respectively) but that was largely reflected in slower growth in the population of women aged 15 to 49 years.
Prof Spoonley said the main reasons for having fewer children such as the “one and done” notion, or none at all, are better educational outcomes for women, more women in jobs and the costs of living.
While these are great outcomes for women, declining populations can create problems. The most common fears are a shrinking workforce and an aging society.
However, works to reverse the population decline have proved largely unsuccessful.
What overseas countries are doing?
Fears of slowing populations are not new, with countries taking good, bad and down-right weird action to make the population arrow tick upwards.
People are so concerned about the population plummeting in Spain that they have appointed a ‘sex minister’ whose job is to get people busy between the sheets.
Head to the south of Europe and Sweden proposed an hour of paid sex leave each week in 2017, it wasn’t brought in but the country was keen to reverse its falling reproduction rate.
But if you can’t find a match to procreate with Japan has got you covered. Its government is funding artificial intelligence matchmaking schemes to help single residents find love.
For some countries, including our neighbours across the ditch, “baby bonuses” were introduced – providing people with cash for having another addition to the family.
Do not pay people to make babies, subsidise the cost of raising that kid!!!
At the centre of the Gender Pay Gap is the biological reality women carry the babies. If we as a liberal progressive society want to ensure everyone has equal agency, then surely recognising biological reality is a starting point?
The first 12months should be maternity leave – or paternity leave, either one, but one of the parents should be paid to stay home with the infant for its first year of life. Who else do you want to look after an infant other than the parent?
Meanwhile, ECE should be nationalised and made completely free for 2 year olds to 5 year olds while all after school care should be free.
Childcare costs fall unevenly and unfairly on women, so why not eliminate those costsaltogether?
Playing the Gender Pay Gap Game even when implemented, doesn’t lead to the outcomes desired.
If women having babies is stunting their pay careers, then subside the cost of having that kid with 12months maternity/paternity leave, Nationalise ECE and free after school care.
Also implement a 4 day working week for all state employees so that people’s quality of life is lifted rather than just wage growth.
The promise of Democracy is you can look in your kids face and know they will have a netter deal of it than you.
Allowing a parent to stay home with their kid for a year, provide free early education care and free after school care would do more to live up to that promise than anything else.
We need to start fight9ing for tomorrow because none of the politicians are.
All we need to do to fund this type of universal upgrade of the social infrastructure is tax the rich!
Nationals 3 biggest donors (Hart, Mowbray and Bolton) have a combined net worth of 15 billion!
The Bottom 50% of NZ has 23 billion.
The top 5% of NZers own roughly 50% of NZs wealth, while the bottom 50% of NZers own a miserable 5%!
IRD proved NZ Capitalism is rigged for the rich and Bernard Hickey calculates that if we had a basic capital gains tax in place over the last decade, we would have earned $200billion in tax revenue.
$200billion would have ensured our public infrastructure wouldn’t be in such an underfunded ruin right now!
You want to lift our population? Subsidise the cost of raising the kids so parents can have the agency of re-entering the workforce without the enormous cost of day care!
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media
My wife and I have 6 kids and yup financially it is like giving yourself an uppercut all day everyday – Working for Families helps to off-set the costs to a degree but we would have been so much better off financially (only) if we didn’t have any kids.
We really look to be moving towards a future when only the very rich and the non-working benefit-dependent end up having kids (probably at a ratio of 1:10) and then what will the future look like?
A Handmaid’s Tale?
Nope – A very sexy wife and a lack of long-term planning.
James, I personally favor an increase of thirty percent in the Working For Families payment. It won’t happen but it is worth contemplating that it is actually needed. If couples have four or more kids in this country, generally speaking, they struggle. I want to promote an economy where this is no longer the case.
Thanks Dan and yup that sure would help . .
Wages are too low. The Arbitration Court was supposed to set the basic wage at the level required to support a full-time homemaker and three children. The quality of the housing stock is also poor, with the average floor space and urban yard sizes being much too low.
Once you restore that level of income, you can add the baby bonuses, universal child benefits and so on.
Also, why should only the rich be able to send little Jimmy off to the boarding house of a G.P.S. grammar school? The Tripartite Model should be thrown out, and every state school should become a non-selective grammar school in the style of the Royal Schools: trivium-based, classical liberal arts education; zero fees and every campus accepting boarding students.
Feminists promoted women in work as higher status than women raising children.
The increased labour supply meant capital could reduce real wages and now it takes two incomes to run a household.
One in five millennials claim to be on the trans spectrum. Chopping off cocks won’t help the birth rate.
Feminists aren’t bad people. But a number of things have worked against them fully emancipating women from being dolly-dillys or the household hegemony.
One is the ‘me first’ ambitious, upwardly mobile in education and wealth ambition of the 1980s. Another is the apparent solvent force of money and rise in status, on caring about ones fellows which seems to apply to all humans when they manage to work their way up the golden ladder. They go up to Cloud 9 and The Golden Rule no longer applies; (a moral principle which denotes that you should treat others the way you want to be treated yourself.)
Once in the middle class they get hooked in to setting goals, and does that include helping other non-family others to overcome obstacles to being capable, human beings with opportunities to be self-realised, humane, interacting positively with others. No, they have a bucket list of personal desires and fantasies for themselves.
Women and men of means want to go overseas on trips, walk the trail of Camino*, jump off mountains with wings attached, and expect to be rescued, nursed and operated on when there is a crash. Meanwhile unlucky (lazy, unambitious, undeserving) people moulder away in their minds and captivity situations.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_de_Santiago
(Note that the some of the extra money that feminists have been able to earn has probably gone to the French Club Med which started in 1950 and now belongs to Chinese interests from 2013.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Med)
I think industrialism reduced wages, not employers hiring women. If you look at the improvements in technology, even in the last ten years, you would see that with our increased technological advances we also have the resulting increase in unskilled jobs and decrease in skilled work.
The workforce in the Victorian era, for example, relied upon women as cooks, cleaners, maids, laundry ladies, etc.
In the early years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth from 1952 to 2022, women were frequently employed as secretaries, receptionists, and more.
These days, yes there are women in every field and profession but that is not necessarily what is driving wages down. The streamlining of economic systems, for example, makes it that much easier for financial speculators, not investors per se, to get ahead. Look at the wealthy currency traders, the hedge fund managers. They are the new merchant bankers.
This essentially enables a system whereby employers can pay what they want to unskilled or low skilled staff.
This is what there are calls for an Asset Tax, a Financial Transactions Tax, Inheritance Taxation.
Personally I would begin with a simple Mansion Tax of one to one and a half percent on the purchase of luxury residential property above a threshold of $2million. That additional $150million in tax revenue per year could go towards reinstating the funding to food banks such as The Salvation Army and also to reopening facilities for those recovering from drug and alcohol dependency.
I think the country needs more than a mansion tax to fund the Sallies.
Make the KPI for the Treasurer & Minister of Employment = “not more than 1000 workers unemployed”. If unemployment exceeds this level the ministers would be sent to the back bench.
Make the homeownership target KPI 90%. Ban landlordism by allowing an individual to own only one home so that most working people could afford to own a home because prices aren’t being bid up by investors and speculators. Use government borrowing power to provide workers with low-cost mortgages. Don’t allow Ryman Capital etc to extract capital gains and rort intergenerational wealth from retirees’ families.
Allow no further immigration until the homeless, children in motels and other citizens in substandard housing are adequately housed.
Well, I agree with this. Definitely paid parental leave, free nationalised ECE, and shorter working week.
And support for low income women and single mothers getting back in the workforce following giving birth. Some research on mothers returning to work, by the Ministry for Women shows that low income women lose out much more than middle and high income women re-pay and status in the workforce.
We should shift to calling it a sex pay gap, because, as you say, Martyn, “At the centre of the Gender Pay Gap is the biological reality women carry the babies.”
But now, Stats NZ measures the pay gap by sex self ID not by biological sex. So it includes males who ID as women, and females who ID as men.
And what do the neolibs think of these ideas Bomber?
Seymour offering to throw his weight behind this? Luxon to be the new Minister of Reproduction?
These are the fuckwits who got us into this state in the first place. User pays.
Personally I like the idea of population reduction. There are far too many apes squabbling over ticks and bananas and throwing faeces at each other. Might give poor old Earth a chance to recover from our ‘progress’…
You cannot have within country population reduction with 100,000 pa immigration.
Population reduction is a very regressive idea and would regress the global economy back to the 1700’s.
Meanwhile TVNZ takes government money to put anti-child propaganda like ‘Young Sheldon’ on our screens.
Seems Mohammed has two settings: Rabid US critic / just straight-out weird . .
Surely with global warming we need less people .The poor need to be encouraged to have less children so they can climb out of poverty and the rich need to have less children to slow their carbon footprint .
Are you blaming the human race on global warming? Because studies have shown the probability of global warming being the result of several environmental factors including our proximity to the sun. I would also dismiss the idea that greenhouse gases are the major contributor to global warming and climate change.
The climate change of late here in New Zealand has actually been the experience of some of the coldest, dampest, chiliest weather in at least half a decade of winters.
Look up at the sky at night. How many stars are there compared with how many there were five years ago.
A baby boom would do wonders for the global economy
If they wanted to, Europe and USA could fill their ill-perceived population shortfall many times over via immigration, they could even target the age groups accepted.
But no, for some funny reason that’s unacceptable.
The sad fact is, the planet is finite and so is its resources and religion is greatest source of denial of this truth. Gotta make more souls for baby jezus or allah or the Great A’Tuin.
Population reduction is a very regressive idea and would regress the global economy back to the 1700’s.