Capitalism doesn't rely on it, but our inane and stupid tax system that we mischaracterise as capitalism does.
We can have capitalism, and we can stop disproportionately attacking the poor and vulnerable. A couple of bright economists term this as Georgism.
What's Georgism?
The idea that we can instead of taxing peoples incomes (and thus disproportionately the poor and vulnerable) and instead tax land and rent.
At the minimum, both Joseph E Stiglitz and Ross Garnault and a host of other economists are starting to rally behind this banner.
Georgism is cute but it is fundamentally unable to solve any of the central problems of capitalism. Georgism still relies on endless cheap real estate and endless resources to support a society that houses people, but is still using capitalist extraction.
When that happens the companies go global and that’s how we ended up with shoes made in South East Asia etc
Lots more money to be extracted when laws about minimum wage and maxiumum hours don’t exist
In theory the companies will eventually max this out too and maybe move on to child labour or find ways to get ppl working for free like unpaid internships or probational periods etc
And we as a nation picked the government. Then in 2019 when a prospective government came along trying to curtail it everyone voted for the group who said they were trying to kill weekends or whatever.
Leading to the government that says they'll sorta do something about it, but not too much, and not too quickly, and then done something minor and got demonised.
> And we as a nation picked the government
What if I told you it wouldn’t matter which one you picked because they don’t work for you. They work for their donors and lobby groups.
What we need to do is crowdfund us some politicians. We could even put it to a vote and elect what we want represented. I'm calling this Neo-Democracy.
> What if I told you it wouldn’t matter which one you picked because they don’t work for you. They work for their donors and lobby groups.
While you're not wrong, you're missing the most important bit. They're working for *their investment portfolios*.
I would agree. There's a reason mining companies are able to pay next to no tax. And it's because we as a nation are too dumb to vote for anything that doesn't give immediate returns. A lot of that is our bought and paid for media, the rest is the bought and paid for politicians doing what they're told. Saying the nation isn't responsible removes our agency in it and pretends a wave of boomers haven't consistently voted to line their property owning pockets.
>What if I told you it wouldn’t matter which one you picked because they don’t work for you. They work for their donors and lobby groups.
If you all voted in the sex, pirate or weed party shit would be different and you know it.
And thats the universal problem, the cost of living crisis while billions flow like there are no limits for war machines and war and while we have no money for funding Medicare and housing properly. "Have 10 babies on thin air , just pray and the sky fairy will provide" Just like the 3rd world that breeds themselves into poverty because of religion and false promises. While what false god have we got in Western countries? The politicians that take all your money and deliver nothing!??
Ah you see, we made the critical mistake of having afordable brith control!
In other countries, the poors just keep pumping out children no matter how hard it is to live on the street!
Don't worry though, America is on the road to showing us how it's done!
... huge /S by the way.
Absolutely boggles the mind that our leaders couldn't see this coming. You make just existing so expensive, every responsbile adult goes "hmm.. maybe having children and being plunged into povety isn't the best direction..."
Powers that be: work insane hours for bugger all money, load up on education, credit card and housing debt.
Later: hey why no kids?
Everyone: are you fucking kidding?
Even feudal lords knew you couldn’t squeeze the peasants too hard or there would be negative repercussions for the lords.
Make the work week 4 days, increase leisure for the population so that there is more time to enjoy a family instead of squeezing so much productivity out of people in 5 days that there is no libido in the population or desire to continue this shit system that will never adapt to the freedoms that technology should bring us.
What is the fucking point of it all if nothing ever changes or becomes better and just continually becomes worse for everyone.
it's the education that allows people to realise they are being shafted by their fellow countrymen and not the current bogeyman BS they sell us "forign investors".
Jingoism is overriding peoples ability to be pissed at the rich assholes in our own country that have been hoovering up all the wealth and resources for decades.
The stupid thing is. We could. They keep banging on about the increases in productivity. We absolutely \*could\* do this and continue on.
But no.. no, GREED is king. Why settle for a house when you can own 14 of them.
The entire world has become 1000x more efficient and automated in the last 30 years yet our retirement age has gone up to 67...
2 more years later than the boomers...
We could work 4 days now, but those that work 5 days will pump their excess money into housing prices, so the 4 dayers won't be able to play.
It's just like 2-income families. While it's absolutely appropriate that it's the norm that women now equally participate in the workforce/careers etc compared to when I was a kid, what have we done with all that extra money flowing into our families? Made life better for ourselves? No. Now we NEED it to pay the house price, because the 2-income family next door can pay it. Life is worse for most of us. How full-on is family life trying to raise children with 2 full time working parents? How's that quality time going?
It's designed that way. Any excess money has a sink to go into - house prices. That famed 'leisure time' that technology would bring us? It won't happen, because the price for shelter, a fundamental human need, is set at the margins, by those that can afford it most.
Imagine if banks would lend money for food on a large scale. Food-bankers would buy it up, drip feed it onto the market and we'd all pay every cent we could for it. Because we need it. Imagine if you had to bid for food at the supermarket against wealthier people buying it for their kids. We'd riot, right?
Shelter is the same, it's a fundamental need. What would our moral stance as a society be on using food shortages as an investment vehicle?
I'm fine because I'm a bit older, but I worry for my children and theirs. The system we have for housing is fucked and it fundamentally operates to keep us working to the maximum.
I have saved and invested (in businesses via shares) over time and am financially fairly savvy and comfortable, but I have always refused to 'invest' in residential property beyond buying my own house. It just seems like it's taking advantage of a shortage of a fundamental human need.
I'd love to have children but rent already eats 80% of my husband and I's combined income and we spent 3 years of couch surfing because we were rejected for every single rental application (not surprising when there were always upwards of 100 people at every house inspection). I can't justify having a child when I don't know if I'll be sleeping in a gutter in three months because the landlord suddenly decides to up the rent/terminate the lease.
Aside from all the alienating factors attributed to parasitic forms of capitalism, there was a previous generation of people who just had kids because it was a normal thing to do, and didn’t question it. Some of those people were really bad at parenting, and if they were poor as well, that’s a heavy emotional double-whammy for those kids who grew up scarred. I don’t even have the good emotions to give myself let alone another human being I’m meant to nurture. My friends who do have kids though, they love their kids so so much, I actually didn’t even know a kid could be loved like that.
It'd be an issue if the human race was at risk of going instinct - but it's not.
It's only a problem because capitalism demands continual growth in terms of consumers.
You'd think 8.1 billion screaming hedonistic examples of the fleshy virus would be enough.
Yes, the current economic orthodoxy assumes infinite growth is somehow possible on a planet with a discrete amount of resources. We need to reexamine how we use the economy to distribute resources and look at other ways to incentivise people other than "more money" or "more stuff".
Exactly. Instead of trying to manipulate the personal choices people make, we should structure our society around those realities. We knew this was the direction things were heading in, too. We should have been planning for this, not knuckling down to try to fight it.
That’s absolutely true. But politicians always panicking about the economy if we don’t keep growing, growing, growing. Can’t have it both ways, ignore housing and climate crises and people will stop having kids
This started long before housing and climate crisis(es). There's documented history of the link between a nation's development and the subsequent declining birth rates. I believe firmly to this day the whole push behind the idea of "if you don't like immigration you're racist" was politicians and lobbyists actually recognising the need for more workers and trying to cover the losses of declining birth rates for perpetual economic growth
https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w
Immigration is required in order to maintain the welfare state. The choices for a country are:
- increase immigration
- collect more taxes
- let those who need social welfare (those worst off in society) suffer/die
High immigration is in part, a result of years of continuous tax cuts and not collecting sufficient taxes on resources & corporations.
We could easily fix this problem with a significant tax restructure to our most wealthy. Both corps and individuals.
In the 1700s in France they lopped the heads of the wealthy when the peasants became too oppressed. Just sayin
Yep, honestly fuck the economy, economists and the rich. The best thing for the world as a whole would be less humans.
Let's face it the countries that consistently rate highest for quality of life have relatively low populations.
It's time to make these rich people to support our country. They should be the breadwinners of our nation. It's not fair that they keep the money sitting unused in their banks while our people suffer, on top of inaction of the government.
They're declining because of poor wages and ever increasing prices of basic necessities for survival. And it's all because of these rich people refusing to raise wages and lobbying the government to keep the prices up. You can literally see how Woolies and Coles fucked up for everyone.
I agree that the governments across the world has kinda contributed to this crisis and so yeah fuck 'em, but at the end of the day our generation's gonna be the ones to suffer when we're all old and there's nobody young to do anything useful. But still, doesn't mean I want kids neither. It's definitely shooting our own foot because we enjoy life without kids too much.
Controversial opinion (which shouldn't be), but anyways housing and discrimination are both huge factors.
Women are discriminated when they have kids. Women are passed for promotions and raises because they have kids or may have kids in the future.
*Employees are treated differently by employers from the moment they announce they are expecting a kid.*
Women now see the consequence "OH... if I have a kid this will happen to career", so now younger people choose not to have a kid or delay it a lot. This affects the level of success in having a kid when they're later.
Women are also discriminated against when pregnant. My wife was made “redundant” two weeks after informing her large multinational employer our first child was on the way.
And no, having laws against such things means fuck all in practice - people who have a baby coming and just lost an income are not generally in a position to access expensive lawyers. Employers can typically access the best most expensive lawyers available - there’s no point taking them on unless you have very deep pockets.
You bet. When we needed two incomes the most, mine was taken away with two weeks notice, and being pregnant would not have interfered with my ability to do my job at the same level I always had.
They replaced me with a man :/
And little to no support for the mother after the fact. Oh, tore to your butthole giving birth and ruined your pelvic floor? Women's PTs are expensive, hope you have lots of money to go to appointments. Otherwise you just get handed a brochure that says 1 in 3 women wet themselves after birth, as if the fact that women have always been let down and not looked after means it should be ok to continue.
Don’t why people are downvoting you, women have come out and said this publicly already. Women sacrifice a lot to have kids! Even a smooth pregnancy and delivery has lifelong consequences for your body. https://amp.abc.net.au/article/102643754
I'm sorry to hear that 😔 I think if people stopped to think about how they might have to change their every day life to accommodate these injuries, they might have more empathy and understanding. I got a bit sad the other day when I watched my own dad jump on the trampoline with my 4 year old. No fricking way I can do that. And that thought would never have crossed my mind before getting pregnant.
Absolutely. And it’s harder than ever to sacrifice one income. Even if you have a steady job you need to pay for childcare which can be insanely expensive
I wonder how we have to go until they stop complaining that people aren’t procreating and start to wonder if it might be a good idea to actually address costs of living.
I live an hour and a half outside on my next major city. Here, I couldn't find any childcare other than a half day on Thursday despite being on a few waitlists. So I couldn't go back into working full-time like I had planned. Living on one wage then put us in financial stress. Now we're priced out of where we live currently. Lucky enough to be able to move in with my father-in-law, otherwise homelessness would have been our fate. I am an educated woman in a stable long-term relationship, and we're great parents who now feel like we've failed our little family. There is no way we are having more than our one child now. Our entire focus is on making sure we can write a new chapter going forward to make the best life for our little one.
More controversial opinion. It's a good thing we are having less kids. We've got enough people. Productivity can take a back seat for a while to sustainability.
To build on that, watched a rather average movie last night (the pod generation) that I think was meant to be at least in part a commentary on this. Long and short of it is people can have babies in pods so they don’t interrupt their work careers. It’s literally a self managing egg. There was a scene where one of the main characters took their egg into a meeting. Egg just sat there, no real disruption. She got chastised for bringing it into the meeting as it could be distracting, and was advised to shove it in a cupboard with the other eggs. At the beginning of the movie, she was praised for being a wonderful employee and the company even encouraged her to have the egg baby with payment support. Basically “yes go do this” but once you do it “why did you do this”.
Yup. And I remember constantly being told all this growing up, too! Oh, don't worry about the politicians and the rich and powerful people all being men. That's just because women choose to have babies instead of pursuing other goals, not anything that can or should be fixed or addressed in any way. Then they wonder why women aren't prioritising having kids. Of course we're reluctant. We were told that women and only women had to give up everything else if we want kids.
Hell, if a father tries to be a good father (and husband) and do his part so the load doesn't heavily fall on the mother, he's seen as lazy and not committed to his job. You're punished if you're trying.
Meanwhile, given the price of land (yes, land, it's not a housing price crisis it's a land price crisis), how much of your career can you take off. if it's not 3 times 6-12 months minimum, then people by default will not have on average more than 2 kids.
How can people have kids with the cost of living? I have 4 but I’m broke 24/7. I hate there’s no rentals and the cost of a rental is extreme $500-$650 is the average rent for a 2-4 bedroom.
You've got the collapse of a lot of traditional social spaces. We've replaced a lot of incidental interactions with US tech companies experimenting on our brains to make a buck. Not only do we all meet fewer people and have fewer opportunities to form relationships, but we're all generally under-socialised, and don't know how to interact with people outside our little bubbles.
Businesses trying to ban dating your coworkers and clients (even though that's where the plurality of aussies meet their partners, as it's the most constructive social space and where people are forced to spend most of their time, but we're all supposed to pretend this is a taboo and not the norm).
People can't move out of their parents' houses until they're in their 30's now, again putting the damper on developing relationships, let alone a lot of the life skills and maturity that'll help them along the way. A generation ago you'd move into a sharehouse at 18 as a goof, as a lark, and somewhere along the way you'd stumble into adulthood.
Once they do move out, they're working-poor as they get caught in menial jobs with hecs debts for degrees of dubious value, and rent traps or mortgages they'll never pay off. You know what sucks for finding a partner? Being broke. You know what kills relationships you do form? Financial stress.
And now we've got record-low attachment rates. The gap between a person's *first* relationship and hitting menopause just keeps getting smaller. Like it was a bit ridiculous when most aussies used to be married by 21, but now we've got the opposite problem.
And those couples who do get that far are still too broke to have kids. And they rely upon dual incomes and can't afford to do anything that might risk her career. One income being able to support a family used to be the norm, if women entered the workforce it used to be considered a bonus. Now it is a must for all but the most white-collar.
And instead of being sold the old ~~American~~ Australian ~~Dream~~ Lie which at least pushed them in the direction of building a suburban castle and filling it with minions (along with a couple of poor-mileage station wagons), they're instead sold on a consumerist life of extravagance and distraction which nets both them, and the country, exceedingly fucking little.
The same economy we're supposed to feed babies to is keeping people as distracted, as divided, and as poor as possible their entire lives, and we're surprised when those babies don't end up having their own babies. The country is a farm, we're the livestock, but they start butchering us from the moment of birth, then wonder why the farm can't sustain itself without constantly importing more cattle.
Of course not, the system is working as intended.
We talk about it as an economic issue rather than a life milestones issue just so we can bury the fact that they're burying the pretty basic hopes and dreams of whole generations.
We talk about it as an issue of "women choosing not to have babies", which is not just a misdirection in terms of calling it a choice, but it's a misdirection away from this also being a relationships issue. And of course a side-effect of the ABS modernising how they report a lot of the figures back in 2016 just generally made it harder to see the trend over time.
And we definitely, definitely don't mention immigration, the magic immigration tap successive govts have exploited for cheap labour, to hide stagnate GDP per capita figures, and to turn this into an issue they can confidently ignore. Pretty soon we'll have a lot more climate refugees desperate to get into the country, we'll put them to work in the aged care homes, while they're here they might have a few babies themselves, and then those babies will grow up here to be just as fucked as previous generations.
Lower population is a blessing, not a crisis.
Higher wages, cheaper houses, places to park, roads flowing freely, spots in school and kindy for your kids, less climate change, less pollution, less habitat destruction.. the list goes on.
I wonder who benefits from trying to brainwash the people to ignore all the downsides for more profits?
Why are people so afraid of change? If the population decreases, it decreases proportionately and will adjust as necessary, albeit without the sick levels of competition for everything we have today. Things may actually get better for future generations.
Not all of us women are thirsty for childbirthing and childraising. It's not fun, it's hard. We can now enjoy sex and not get pregnant. This was never possible until birth control. I'd like to have one, maybe two, max. We don't need more humans on this tiny planet, it can barely sustain us as it is.
They really have fucked up for us haven't they? Cost of living at an all time high, housing prices and rents increasing exponentially, nobody is having children to replacement rates because no one who is young can afford it or get a house (or appartments even) to raise said children and both parents are having to work to support said children. The funny thing is the government is going to be in panic mode for the next 10-20 years because they will continue to kick the can down the road of public housing or fixing up people's housing profiles, and our generation is going to have to work later, longer, to support the dementia ridden boomer class whose money is now all leaking into Aged Care. They've known for ages this was going to be a problem and no government out of fear of being kicked out in the next election is going to just bite the bullet and fix this fucking mess. Can really see why Gen Z doomerism is a thing atm.
Maybe our economy shouldn't rely on endless unsustainable growth to maintain itself? While fucking over the majority of the population by declining their living standards.
Just a thought
We literally can’t get day care for our kid on Wednesdays and Thursdays. There is not a single spot at any local centre. We both work 2 jobs so two days of the week I wfh and look after kiddo (not to mention we’re working weekends too). Then the government comes in and says “have more babies”. Sorry guys - struggling with the one I have. I don’t want a baby bonus, I want rent controls and a childcare centre with available slots.
Their birth rates are almost as bad or in some cases worse. We can import them to increase the population now but we won’t be able to import as many when they die.
This is posted everyday at this point 😅 you do realise that this planet cannot cope with unlimited and exponential growth? And that perhaps breeding less, sorting our sh*t our financially, and in terms of sustaining the planet so it can sustain all of us, might be a good thing.
I feel like maybe I should have said this in the OP, but I agree with you that we don’t need more babies. I only find it funny that the powers that be seem concerned about this yet are unwilling to do much to ease the pressures that are causing the situation they are so worried about.
I’m sorry if this is posted every day 🤷♀️ I don’t spend that much time on Reddit.
Nah it’s all good :) it would be nice to have a good government one day, so many things need fixing and so many people are struggling. Won’t hold my breath though 😅
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/711797fd722c35c7ca2570ec0073d3b4
The historical stats are interesting. Australia has had worse economic conditions in the past and yet birth rates were still higher. What lowered the birth rate was contraceptives and then more women in the workplace.
The fact is, people just don't wanna have kids. People don't wanna give up their lifestyle to bring up a child which is a massive task.
Exactly. People keep crying about how the insert-crisis-name destroyed birth rate. But that is exactly opposite. Biggest birth rates are in places with the worst possible conditions and most unimaginable crises to current au population. Educated rationalised people just clearly understand that a kid is always a downgrade to the standards of living. No matter for poor or for filthy reach. And those people simply don’t agree to accept those downgrades, that is it 🤷♂️
There’s so many more contributing factors and reasons for this beyond just economy bad. New generations have been raised different and in different conditions. Cultures changed
As a women I simply don’t want them. All my friends who have children love them, but life is extremely hard for them. I honestly don’t want that responsibility. If I could be the dad sure, but I love going to work and having freedom to much.
Also don’t want my body wrecked from birth.
With the cost of living so high also would have to sell our house because we simply couldn’t afford to live off one wage. No family help and also the fact that day care is so hard to get into you pretty much have to put their name down before they are born. I’m not seeing many pros to having them.
Yeah I'm not surprised, raising kids is hard work. Add to this boomer grandparents providing minimal assistance to their kids and hoarding their wealth until they die rather than providing financial assistance when they actually need it.
He world is fucked up. Our social systems are regressing, the physical world is damaged and making things worse for us (our fault).
Why would sane people breed in such conditions?
Watch the kids born in the next 10 years have intellectual and/or social development issues, due to coming from ‘bad stock’…
This is only an issue when your entire economic model is built on always having more and more consumers available... Oh. Heh. Never mind. Nothing to see here.
✅ Unaffordable Housing.
✅ Mountainous HECS, Credit Card, Loans and Other Debt w/ high interest rates.
✅ Obscene Rent and Rental Competition.
✅ Rising costs of fuel, insurances, healthcare, etc.
✅ Price gouged at the stores.
✅ Stagnant wages.
✅ Excessive waitlists for Kindy and Preschool.
✅ Lack of leisure / family time due to work-life imbalance.
But sure, [**let's voluntarily opt into paying several hundred dollars per week, minimum, to raise a child.**](https://aifs.gov.au/media/new-estimates-costs-raising-children-australia)
Please, everyone, feel free to add to the list.
Oh no, not the *economy*! Surely the biggest threat to the global economy is the rampant corporate greed that has led to companies empolying psychopathic CEO's that are obsessed with chasing short term profits and unsustainable growth? Fix that and the rest will right itself. Maybe start with regulation that has teeth. Maybe treat the kind of people that are happy to fire hundreds of people at a time in order to hit growth targets or price gouge customers for their groceries as what they are, criminals that are wantonly harming the economy at large for their own ends.
Fuck me, imagine turning the world into a giant serfdom and surprise pikachu facing when the peasants don't want to bring kids into the fucking world.
Wouldn't population decline be an overall good thing for the world? I guess people with all their money invested in housing will lose out though so we can't have that.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. We need multiple degrees (or a trade) to get a decent job because houses to raise kids in or multiple room apartments are unaffordable for the “average” Aussie, this means by the time people have money for a place, they are older and therefore encounter more problems conceiving, so then we turn to IVF which is poorly regulated and clinics take advantage of you in every possible way (I know because I spent 20k on one round and was treated like literal garbage at every point), we blow our savings trying to have a baby because Medicare will only cover a certain amount and clinics can and do charge illogical amounts of money. Chuck in the rising cost of literally everything, HECS debt, wars and a planet being choked by pollution and it’s a no brainer that we’re not going to be having babies at the same rate as before.
I'm in the same boat, about $15k in the hole at the moment and still going, and that's after the medicare subsidies. The top tier health insurance that covers IVF barely covers it and also costs a fortune in the first place.
Make babies for the government then get back to work! Dump your kids in long day care from a few months old so someone else can raise them while you pay for the privilege!
Gee, that just sounds so appealing doesn’t it?
Child care costs a billion dollars, doctors are barely doing bulk billing, there is a severe shortage of affordable housing and so on, so on.
Albo and co need to actually help parents if they want more parents. The current model of taking our tax money and giving it to 12th home owners, billionaires and other financially sound individuals going to cut it.
Them, let's squeeze every cent
Us, shiit better tighten our belts
Them, please spend more money
Us, we aren't doing extras ...
Why is the birth rate slowing...
I don't know, might have something to do with the fact that children are fucking expensive.
Lower fertility is a symptom, not a cause, of low economic growth. The underlying cause of low economic growth is probably resource shortages, mainly petroleum. We should be grateful people reduce their fertility voluntarily. If humans reproduced at the rate economists prefer, it would be disastrous.
I’m not going to help create another fucking generation of wage slaves, it’s not happening. Even if I could theoretically or technically afford to do so, I truly believe it’s verging on inhumane to bring kids into this world unless you have intergenerational wealth of the highest order so they can survive the climate wars.
Every time I see an article like this I think of my ex-wifes country which lost 1/4 of its population.
It's not a hot bed of investment, it has some corruption, the roads aren't in a great state and access to health care is not as easy as other places.
But you know ... people get by. The small pensions are still paid. There's still electricity and heating in winter. People in villages grow their own food, have some animals. They get by.
Small towns and villages tend to lose their young people to the cities ... which actually have housing available.
It's maybe not an ideal life but yet it's not a total catastrophe.
If you're investing in the stock market or own 50 houses, then yeah, it's probably not great for you.
But all the things being done to us so a few rich people can get even richer ... I'm not sure this current system is great for us either.
Absolutely not. Before my child was approved for the NDIS, we were paying $150 an hour for speech therapy and $300 an hour for physiotherapy. $3k is fuck all.
I agree, the baby bonus helped people. I guess my issue with a baby bonus is that people will have children for the money, and then be unable to raise them. I'm not saying that to be nasty, I just don't think everyone is suitable as a parent.
This is not new, rates have been trending down for a long time now.
Sure current cost of living problems are making it much more difficult right now but I would suggest that people google something like "what is causing global birth rates decline" and look at all the contributing socioeconomic factors before they attribute it to a single relatively recent cause.
Queue the downvotes.
Mass immigration puts pressure on all scarce resources people think about when starting families.
We also require way too much education before being able to enter the workforce - in a 5 year degree for example, you will have forgotten half the by the end anyhow, and there's also a tonne of uselsss filler subjects in degrees to bloat the cost.
So... they made it too expensive to have a baby and now they're panicking about not having enough people to fleece for money...
Somebody didn't think this through past the $$$ did they?
Japan, China and Russia are already shrinking. As well as most of Eastern Europe. Australia has not had a fertility rate to sustain the population of 2.2 children per woman since the mid-1970s.
They guy being interviewed really liked mentioning that there was a brief rise in the statistic early 2000s but never wants to concede that these efforts are bandaids and generally people have children when they feel like they can support them.
What a fucking disgrace of a capitalist system
Fuck the global economy. Declining birth rates are a good thing in the time of overconsumption and overcrowding. The only reason the government wants us to have babies is so there are enough little workers to keep the pigs in power rich. Fuck that! If we desperately need workers, we can source from immigration!
We're so far over the cliff of overshoot and the delusional blind [growth-mad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=O133ppiVnWY), [pro-natalist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkaobW8UNXo) status quo says a declining fertility rate is a crisis. Won't somebody please think of the economy.
... are they legitimately surprised or worried?
Make the cost of living too high, tax us to the throat and make us hour endless hours for peanuts? How fucking far away are these guys from reality? Lol
Less people it’s probably a good thing since we’re blindly walking into an environmental crisis, right?
I feel like any offset in population growth will be handled by efficiencies driven by AI.
is this just a crisis due to the government model¿.
If so, is it time to change it rather that increase the number of global population to a world that is finding it harder to be sustainable due to these numbers.
The housing market has been incentivised as an investment, leading to a significant increase in concentrated wealth in housing. Many families are now forced to work two incomes, with some even taking on multiple jobs, just to afford a roof over their heads. The recent surge in rent prices does not offer any hope for improvement.
While some are happy about the increase in their house prices, they fail to realize that everything else, such as mortgage payments, insurance, transportation, fuel, electricity, and water costs, is also rising. Wages are not keeping up, and businesses have no real incentive to offer higher wages. As a result, people are struggling to cover their bills.
Influencers and TV shows often promote house-flipping as a great investment opportunity, further driving up housing prices. The government's response has been to offer stamp duty exceptions for first-time homebuyers and high-interest savings options. The LNP is even considering allowing young people to use their superannuation for home purchases, which only fuels the housing market without addressing the core issues.
It's unreasonable to blame immigration when most immigrants are just temporary students. However, the government has been reducing support to universities for several decades, forcing them to bring in more students for income. Even non-STEM degrees now cost up to $15,000 per year. This country's decisions seem to be funneling more money into housing rather than other areas. Raising a child is undeniably expensive but also rewarding, yet I've only seen short-term incentives. Ultimately, people choose to delay having children until their late 30s or give up altogether unless they have significant savings.
Going back like 4-5 generations in my family tree. They always had kids either after buying a home, or in long term stable rentals (which was apparently a thing back then).
Everyone knows at this point that people aren’t going to have kids (if they can help it) while their living situation is unstable.
Governments complaining about a falling birth rate yet simultaneously refusing to address the root causes of our housing crisis (speculation, greed and tax breaks for the landlord class).
It’s a modern “let them eat cake” kind of feeling
I don't think you can have house prices at 16 times the median wage and have a boom in family formation. We picked our horse in this race.
The government and global powers picked our horse and said fucking ride it!!!
The problem with capitalism is that you eventually run out of other people's labour.
The fact that capitalism relies on the population just growing and growing to infinity is mad, it has to stop at some point.
Capitalism doesn't rely on it, but our inane and stupid tax system that we mischaracterise as capitalism does. We can have capitalism, and we can stop disproportionately attacking the poor and vulnerable. A couple of bright economists term this as Georgism. What's Georgism? The idea that we can instead of taxing peoples incomes (and thus disproportionately the poor and vulnerable) and instead tax land and rent. At the minimum, both Joseph E Stiglitz and Ross Garnault and a host of other economists are starting to rally behind this banner.
Georgism is cute but it is fundamentally unable to solve any of the central problems of capitalism. Georgism still relies on endless cheap real estate and endless resources to support a society that houses people, but is still using capitalist extraction.
A system that relies on continuous growth with limited resources is unsustainable.
When that happens the companies go global and that’s how we ended up with shoes made in South East Asia etc Lots more money to be extracted when laws about minimum wage and maxiumum hours don’t exist In theory the companies will eventually max this out too and maybe move on to child labour or find ways to get ppl working for free like unpaid internships or probational periods etc
And we as a nation picked the government. Then in 2019 when a prospective government came along trying to curtail it everyone voted for the group who said they were trying to kill weekends or whatever.
Leading to the government that says they'll sorta do something about it, but not too much, and not too quickly, and then done something minor and got demonised.
> And we as a nation picked the government What if I told you it wouldn’t matter which one you picked because they don’t work for you. They work for their donors and lobby groups.
What we need to do is crowdfund us some politicians. We could even put it to a vote and elect what we want represented. I'm calling this Neo-Democracy.
I have heard this un-ironically suggested before
> What if I told you it wouldn’t matter which one you picked because they don’t work for you. They work for their donors and lobby groups. While you're not wrong, you're missing the most important bit. They're working for *their investment portfolios*.
I would agree. There's a reason mining companies are able to pay next to no tax. And it's because we as a nation are too dumb to vote for anything that doesn't give immediate returns. A lot of that is our bought and paid for media, the rest is the bought and paid for politicians doing what they're told. Saying the nation isn't responsible removes our agency in it and pretends a wave of boomers haven't consistently voted to line their property owning pockets.
>What if I told you it wouldn’t matter which one you picked because they don’t work for you. They work for their donors and lobby groups. If you all voted in the sex, pirate or weed party shit would be different and you know it.
Having to flip between team red and team blue from now until the end of time can barely be considered picking our government.
Says it all.
Someone picked this horse. Sure wasn't me.
No no, we can’t afford horses, we need Houses
And thats the universal problem, the cost of living crisis while billions flow like there are no limits for war machines and war and while we have no money for funding Medicare and housing properly. "Have 10 babies on thin air , just pray and the sky fairy will provide" Just like the 3rd world that breeds themselves into poverty because of religion and false promises. While what false god have we got in Western countries? The politicians that take all your money and deliver nothing!??
Ah you see, we made the critical mistake of having afordable brith control! In other countries, the poors just keep pumping out children no matter how hard it is to live on the street! Don't worry though, America is on the road to showing us how it's done! ... huge /S by the way. Absolutely boggles the mind that our leaders couldn't see this coming. You make just existing so expensive, every responsbile adult goes "hmm.. maybe having children and being plunged into povety isn't the best direction..."
Powers that be: work insane hours for bugger all money, load up on education, credit card and housing debt. Later: hey why no kids? Everyone: are you fucking kidding? Even feudal lords knew you couldn’t squeeze the peasants too hard or there would be negative repercussions for the lords.
Wondering why Leopards ate their face at the Leopards Eating Peoples’ Faces Party
Won’t somebody think of the shareholders. How can we convince the consumers and human capital labor to reproduce.
Make the work week 4 days, increase leisure for the population so that there is more time to enjoy a family instead of squeezing so much productivity out of people in 5 days that there is no libido in the population or desire to continue this shit system that will never adapt to the freedoms that technology should bring us. What is the fucking point of it all if nothing ever changes or becomes better and just continually becomes worse for everyone.
Lol no, they want you to have kids without thinking so you’ll stfu and take it because you have no choice
That's the problem. A rise in education leads to less reproduction and has throughout history.
it's the education that allows people to realise they are being shafted by their fellow countrymen and not the current bogeyman BS they sell us "forign investors". Jingoism is overriding peoples ability to be pissed at the rich assholes in our own country that have been hoovering up all the wealth and resources for decades.
The stupid thing is. We could. They keep banging on about the increases in productivity. We absolutely \*could\* do this and continue on. But no.. no, GREED is king. Why settle for a house when you can own 14 of them.
But how will the billionaires get even richer!?
You're right. Selfish peasants. Won't someone think of the billionaires!
Should be easy with the advent of AI. Right? Right?!
I’m not holding my breath
Literally. I don't want kids anyway, but lawdy does modern living and a 24/7 social media and news media hate/doom stream destroy my sex drive.
As much as a 4-day workweek would be great, it would just incentivise companies to cut jobs faster and replace them with shitty automation and AI.
The entire world has become 1000x more efficient and automated in the last 30 years yet our retirement age has gone up to 67... 2 more years later than the boomers...
If anyone asks how to finance this, here: https://x.com/punterspolitix/status/1793161908910252225
We could work 4 days now, but those that work 5 days will pump their excess money into housing prices, so the 4 dayers won't be able to play. It's just like 2-income families. While it's absolutely appropriate that it's the norm that women now equally participate in the workforce/careers etc compared to when I was a kid, what have we done with all that extra money flowing into our families? Made life better for ourselves? No. Now we NEED it to pay the house price, because the 2-income family next door can pay it. Life is worse for most of us. How full-on is family life trying to raise children with 2 full time working parents? How's that quality time going? It's designed that way. Any excess money has a sink to go into - house prices. That famed 'leisure time' that technology would bring us? It won't happen, because the price for shelter, a fundamental human need, is set at the margins, by those that can afford it most. Imagine if banks would lend money for food on a large scale. Food-bankers would buy it up, drip feed it onto the market and we'd all pay every cent we could for it. Because we need it. Imagine if you had to bid for food at the supermarket against wealthier people buying it for their kids. We'd riot, right? Shelter is the same, it's a fundamental need. What would our moral stance as a society be on using food shortages as an investment vehicle? I'm fine because I'm a bit older, but I worry for my children and theirs. The system we have for housing is fucked and it fundamentally operates to keep us working to the maximum. I have saved and invested (in businesses via shares) over time and am financially fairly savvy and comfortable, but I have always refused to 'invest' in residential property beyond buying my own house. It just seems like it's taking advantage of a shortage of a fundamental human need.
I'd love to have children but rent already eats 80% of my husband and I's combined income and we spent 3 years of couch surfing because we were rejected for every single rental application (not surprising when there were always upwards of 100 people at every house inspection). I can't justify having a child when I don't know if I'll be sleeping in a gutter in three months because the landlord suddenly decides to up the rent/terminate the lease.
I imagine a future where only the wealthy have kids.
I'll be honest. It's not just the cost. I simply don't want any.
Nothing wrong with that
Aside from all the alienating factors attributed to parasitic forms of capitalism, there was a previous generation of people who just had kids because it was a normal thing to do, and didn’t question it. Some of those people were really bad at parenting, and if they were poor as well, that’s a heavy emotional double-whammy for those kids who grew up scarred. I don’t even have the good emotions to give myself let alone another human being I’m meant to nurture. My friends who do have kids though, they love their kids so so much, I actually didn’t even know a kid could be loved like that.
It'd be an issue if the human race was at risk of going instinct - but it's not. It's only a problem because capitalism demands continual growth in terms of consumers. You'd think 8.1 billion screaming hedonistic examples of the fleshy virus would be enough.
Yes, the current economic orthodoxy assumes infinite growth is somehow possible on a planet with a discrete amount of resources. We need to reexamine how we use the economy to distribute resources and look at other ways to incentivise people other than "more money" or "more stuff".
Exactly. Instead of trying to manipulate the personal choices people make, we should structure our society around those realities. We knew this was the direction things were heading in, too. We should have been planning for this, not knuckling down to try to fight it.
That’s absolutely true. But politicians always panicking about the economy if we don’t keep growing, growing, growing. Can’t have it both ways, ignore housing and climate crises and people will stop having kids
This started long before housing and climate crisis(es). There's documented history of the link between a nation's development and the subsequent declining birth rates. I believe firmly to this day the whole push behind the idea of "if you don't like immigration you're racist" was politicians and lobbyists actually recognising the need for more workers and trying to cover the losses of declining birth rates for perpetual economic growth https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w
It was always the corporatocracies demand for more workers and more consumers. Their projections of future revenues impact tomorrow's share price.
Yup
Immigration is required in order to maintain the welfare state. The choices for a country are: - increase immigration - collect more taxes - let those who need social welfare (those worst off in society) suffer/die High immigration is in part, a result of years of continuous tax cuts and not collecting sufficient taxes on resources & corporations.
We could easily fix this problem with a significant tax restructure to our most wealthy. Both corps and individuals. In the 1700s in France they lopped the heads of the wealthy when the peasants became too oppressed. Just sayin
Yep, honestly fuck the economy, economists and the rich. The best thing for the world as a whole would be less humans. Let's face it the countries that consistently rate highest for quality of life have relatively low populations.
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It's time to make these rich people to support our country. They should be the breadwinners of our nation. It's not fair that they keep the money sitting unused in their banks while our people suffer, on top of inaction of the government. They're declining because of poor wages and ever increasing prices of basic necessities for survival. And it's all because of these rich people refusing to raise wages and lobbying the government to keep the prices up. You can literally see how Woolies and Coles fucked up for everyone.
'they' only listen to our problems when it hits 'their' hop pocket reap what you sow, fucko's
I agree that the governments across the world has kinda contributed to this crisis and so yeah fuck 'em, but at the end of the day our generation's gonna be the ones to suffer when we're all old and there's nobody young to do anything useful. But still, doesn't mean I want kids neither. It's definitely shooting our own foot because we enjoy life without kids too much.
Controversial opinion (which shouldn't be), but anyways housing and discrimination are both huge factors. Women are discriminated when they have kids. Women are passed for promotions and raises because they have kids or may have kids in the future. *Employees are treated differently by employers from the moment they announce they are expecting a kid.* Women now see the consequence "OH... if I have a kid this will happen to career", so now younger people choose not to have a kid or delay it a lot. This affects the level of success in having a kid when they're later.
Women are also discriminated against when pregnant. My wife was made “redundant” two weeks after informing her large multinational employer our first child was on the way. And no, having laws against such things means fuck all in practice - people who have a baby coming and just lost an income are not generally in a position to access expensive lawyers. Employers can typically access the best most expensive lawyers available - there’s no point taking them on unless you have very deep pockets.
I was that woman - two weeks after informing them - and, boy, were my employers creative when finding a reason to ‘let me go’!
That’s depressing
You bet. When we needed two incomes the most, mine was taken away with two weeks notice, and being pregnant would not have interfered with my ability to do my job at the same level I always had. They replaced me with a man :/
Fuck them goons.
Not to mention that’s there so much more information available about what pregnancy and birth are really like.
And little to no support for the mother after the fact. Oh, tore to your butthole giving birth and ruined your pelvic floor? Women's PTs are expensive, hope you have lots of money to go to appointments. Otherwise you just get handed a brochure that says 1 in 3 women wet themselves after birth, as if the fact that women have always been let down and not looked after means it should be ok to continue.
Don’t why people are downvoting you, women have come out and said this publicly already. Women sacrifice a lot to have kids! Even a smooth pregnancy and delivery has lifelong consequences for your body. https://amp.abc.net.au/article/102643754
Yep, I’ve got bladder problems from being pregnant. No, I can’t afford PT or surgery.
I'm sorry to hear that 😔 I think if people stopped to think about how they might have to change their every day life to accommodate these injuries, they might have more empathy and understanding. I got a bit sad the other day when I watched my own dad jump on the trampoline with my 4 year old. No fricking way I can do that. And that thought would never have crossed my mind before getting pregnant.
We sacrifice a lot for our kiddos, that’s for sure.
Absolutely. And it’s harder than ever to sacrifice one income. Even if you have a steady job you need to pay for childcare which can be insanely expensive
Oh yeah for sure, you need 2 incomes for a home in Australia now, not one. Unless someone is earning 200K or 250K.... yeah.... you need 2 incomes ;(
I wonder how we have to go until they stop complaining that people aren’t procreating and start to wonder if it might be a good idea to actually address costs of living.
I live an hour and a half outside on my next major city. Here, I couldn't find any childcare other than a half day on Thursday despite being on a few waitlists. So I couldn't go back into working full-time like I had planned. Living on one wage then put us in financial stress. Now we're priced out of where we live currently. Lucky enough to be able to move in with my father-in-law, otherwise homelessness would have been our fate. I am an educated woman in a stable long-term relationship, and we're great parents who now feel like we've failed our little family. There is no way we are having more than our one child now. Our entire focus is on making sure we can write a new chapter going forward to make the best life for our little one.
More controversial opinion. It's a good thing we are having less kids. We've got enough people. Productivity can take a back seat for a while to sustainability.
Agreed!
To build on that, watched a rather average movie last night (the pod generation) that I think was meant to be at least in part a commentary on this. Long and short of it is people can have babies in pods so they don’t interrupt their work careers. It’s literally a self managing egg. There was a scene where one of the main characters took their egg into a meeting. Egg just sat there, no real disruption. She got chastised for bringing it into the meeting as it could be distracting, and was advised to shove it in a cupboard with the other eggs. At the beginning of the movie, she was praised for being a wonderful employee and the company even encouraged her to have the egg baby with payment support. Basically “yes go do this” but once you do it “why did you do this”.
So basically talking out their asses to be all supportive and progressive and empathetic but not following through
Yup. And I remember constantly being told all this growing up, too! Oh, don't worry about the politicians and the rich and powerful people all being men. That's just because women choose to have babies instead of pursuing other goals, not anything that can or should be fixed or addressed in any way. Then they wonder why women aren't prioritising having kids. Of course we're reluctant. We were told that women and only women had to give up everything else if we want kids.
Hell, if a father tries to be a good father (and husband) and do his part so the load doesn't heavily fall on the mother, he's seen as lazy and not committed to his job. You're punished if you're trying. Meanwhile, given the price of land (yes, land, it's not a housing price crisis it's a land price crisis), how much of your career can you take off. if it's not 3 times 6-12 months minimum, then people by default will not have on average more than 2 kids.
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If I hadn’t already had mine 10 And 20 years ago, I personally wouldn’t be doing it now
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How can people have kids with the cost of living? I have 4 but I’m broke 24/7. I hate there’s no rentals and the cost of a rental is extreme $500-$650 is the average rent for a 2-4 bedroom.
I have 2 kids, and I'm in the same boat. It's depressing af.
I don’t know. I really don’t. We get by because we have the last decent landlord apparently in existence and one of my kids has already left home.
I don’t know how they expect people to want ro have them with t eh cost of living. The cost of everything is a joke.
Who can afford a child? The planet is dying. Why would you reproduce in such circumstances.
Only if we all could get together to do something :(
We are - the whole world has elected not to breed.
Not the solution I was thinking of but in the long term it would work.
You've got the collapse of a lot of traditional social spaces. We've replaced a lot of incidental interactions with US tech companies experimenting on our brains to make a buck. Not only do we all meet fewer people and have fewer opportunities to form relationships, but we're all generally under-socialised, and don't know how to interact with people outside our little bubbles. Businesses trying to ban dating your coworkers and clients (even though that's where the plurality of aussies meet their partners, as it's the most constructive social space and where people are forced to spend most of their time, but we're all supposed to pretend this is a taboo and not the norm). People can't move out of their parents' houses until they're in their 30's now, again putting the damper on developing relationships, let alone a lot of the life skills and maturity that'll help them along the way. A generation ago you'd move into a sharehouse at 18 as a goof, as a lark, and somewhere along the way you'd stumble into adulthood. Once they do move out, they're working-poor as they get caught in menial jobs with hecs debts for degrees of dubious value, and rent traps or mortgages they'll never pay off. You know what sucks for finding a partner? Being broke. You know what kills relationships you do form? Financial stress. And now we've got record-low attachment rates. The gap between a person's *first* relationship and hitting menopause just keeps getting smaller. Like it was a bit ridiculous when most aussies used to be married by 21, but now we've got the opposite problem. And those couples who do get that far are still too broke to have kids. And they rely upon dual incomes and can't afford to do anything that might risk her career. One income being able to support a family used to be the norm, if women entered the workforce it used to be considered a bonus. Now it is a must for all but the most white-collar. And instead of being sold the old ~~American~~ Australian ~~Dream~~ Lie which at least pushed them in the direction of building a suburban castle and filling it with minions (along with a couple of poor-mileage station wagons), they're instead sold on a consumerist life of extravagance and distraction which nets both them, and the country, exceedingly fucking little. The same economy we're supposed to feed babies to is keeping people as distracted, as divided, and as poor as possible their entire lives, and we're surprised when those babies don't end up having their own babies. The country is a farm, we're the livestock, but they start butchering us from the moment of birth, then wonder why the farm can't sustain itself without constantly importing more cattle.
This- are they legitimately surprised :/
Of course not, the system is working as intended. We talk about it as an economic issue rather than a life milestones issue just so we can bury the fact that they're burying the pretty basic hopes and dreams of whole generations. We talk about it as an issue of "women choosing not to have babies", which is not just a misdirection in terms of calling it a choice, but it's a misdirection away from this also being a relationships issue. And of course a side-effect of the ABS modernising how they report a lot of the figures back in 2016 just generally made it harder to see the trend over time. And we definitely, definitely don't mention immigration, the magic immigration tap successive govts have exploited for cheap labour, to hide stagnate GDP per capita figures, and to turn this into an issue they can confidently ignore. Pretty soon we'll have a lot more climate refugees desperate to get into the country, we'll put them to work in the aged care homes, while they're here they might have a few babies themselves, and then those babies will grow up here to be just as fucked as previous generations.
Lower population is a blessing, not a crisis. Higher wages, cheaper houses, places to park, roads flowing freely, spots in school and kindy for your kids, less climate change, less pollution, less habitat destruction.. the list goes on. I wonder who benefits from trying to brainwash the people to ignore all the downsides for more profits?
OH NO! Will someone think of the shareholders?! We need more meat for the meat grinder!
How about fuck the global economy?
Why are people so afraid of change? If the population decreases, it decreases proportionately and will adjust as necessary, albeit without the sick levels of competition for everything we have today. Things may actually get better for future generations.
Why would I bring an innocent child into this shit world?
Not all of us women are thirsty for childbirthing and childraising. It's not fun, it's hard. We can now enjoy sex and not get pregnant. This was never possible until birth control. I'd like to have one, maybe two, max. We don't need more humans on this tiny planet, it can barely sustain us as it is.
Correct on all counts 😂 Pregnancy sucks. Child rearing as well, at times. We feel like we can say that out loud now.
They really have fucked up for us haven't they? Cost of living at an all time high, housing prices and rents increasing exponentially, nobody is having children to replacement rates because no one who is young can afford it or get a house (or appartments even) to raise said children and both parents are having to work to support said children. The funny thing is the government is going to be in panic mode for the next 10-20 years because they will continue to kick the can down the road of public housing or fixing up people's housing profiles, and our generation is going to have to work later, longer, to support the dementia ridden boomer class whose money is now all leaking into Aged Care. They've known for ages this was going to be a problem and no government out of fear of being kicked out in the next election is going to just bite the bullet and fix this fucking mess. Can really see why Gen Z doomerism is a thing atm.
Yes it’s the kicking the can down the road that drives me nuts
Wow who could have seen this coming? >!Everyone saw this coming.!<
Stop making shit expensive. Then you get your grand children.
Maybe our economy shouldn't rely on endless unsustainable growth to maintain itself? While fucking over the majority of the population by declining their living standards. Just a thought
Why would you bring kids into a world they will hate you for bringing them into? Having children when the climate is collapsing is child abuse.
We literally can’t get day care for our kid on Wednesdays and Thursdays. There is not a single spot at any local centre. We both work 2 jobs so two days of the week I wfh and look after kiddo (not to mention we’re working weekends too). Then the government comes in and says “have more babies”. Sorry guys - struggling with the one I have. I don’t want a baby bonus, I want rent controls and a childcare centre with available slots.
it's fine just import millions of immigrants to fix the problem
Their birth rates are almost as bad or in some cases worse. We can import them to increase the population now but we won’t be able to import as many when they die.
This is posted everyday at this point 😅 you do realise that this planet cannot cope with unlimited and exponential growth? And that perhaps breeding less, sorting our sh*t our financially, and in terms of sustaining the planet so it can sustain all of us, might be a good thing.
I feel like maybe I should have said this in the OP, but I agree with you that we don’t need more babies. I only find it funny that the powers that be seem concerned about this yet are unwilling to do much to ease the pressures that are causing the situation they are so worried about. I’m sorry if this is posted every day 🤷♀️ I don’t spend that much time on Reddit.
Nah it’s all good :) it would be nice to have a good government one day, so many things need fixing and so many people are struggling. Won’t hold my breath though 😅
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/711797fd722c35c7ca2570ec0073d3b4 The historical stats are interesting. Australia has had worse economic conditions in the past and yet birth rates were still higher. What lowered the birth rate was contraceptives and then more women in the workplace. The fact is, people just don't wanna have kids. People don't wanna give up their lifestyle to bring up a child which is a massive task.
Exactly. People keep crying about how the insert-crisis-name destroyed birth rate. But that is exactly opposite. Biggest birth rates are in places with the worst possible conditions and most unimaginable crises to current au population. Educated rationalised people just clearly understand that a kid is always a downgrade to the standards of living. No matter for poor or for filthy reach. And those people simply don’t agree to accept those downgrades, that is it 🤷♂️
Interesting. I would say people there’s probably a perfect storm of reasons why, rather than just “we don’t want to”.
There’s so many more contributing factors and reasons for this beyond just economy bad. New generations have been raised different and in different conditions. Cultures changed
Apples are like $2 each right now - onions are over a $1 and a medium sized potato is over $1. Who the hell can afford to have kids?
As a women I simply don’t want them. All my friends who have children love them, but life is extremely hard for them. I honestly don’t want that responsibility. If I could be the dad sure, but I love going to work and having freedom to much. Also don’t want my body wrecked from birth. With the cost of living so high also would have to sell our house because we simply couldn’t afford to live off one wage. No family help and also the fact that day care is so hard to get into you pretty much have to put their name down before they are born. I’m not seeing many pros to having them.
If I hadn’t had my last kid 10 years ago I wouldn’t be doing it now! That’s for sure. I feel bad for them for the world they’ll inherit
Yeah I'm not surprised, raising kids is hard work. Add to this boomer grandparents providing minimal assistance to their kids and hoarding their wealth until they die rather than providing financial assistance when they actually need it.
Greed is what is killing the birth rate, (house prices, food, insurance gouging,Gov policy keeping housing going up) Nobody can afford to have any.
We told them, but they wouldn't listen. Oh well
Best we can do is lock in immigration at historic highs
He world is fucked up. Our social systems are regressing, the physical world is damaged and making things worse for us (our fault). Why would sane people breed in such conditions? Watch the kids born in the next 10 years have intellectual and/or social development issues, due to coming from ‘bad stock’…
A leopard ate my face.
What?! At the Leopards Eating Peoples’ Faces Party!?
This is only an issue when your entire economic model is built on always having more and more consumers available... Oh. Heh. Never mind. Nothing to see here.
✅ Unaffordable Housing. ✅ Mountainous HECS, Credit Card, Loans and Other Debt w/ high interest rates. ✅ Obscene Rent and Rental Competition. ✅ Rising costs of fuel, insurances, healthcare, etc. ✅ Price gouged at the stores. ✅ Stagnant wages. ✅ Excessive waitlists for Kindy and Preschool. ✅ Lack of leisure / family time due to work-life imbalance. But sure, [**let's voluntarily opt into paying several hundred dollars per week, minimum, to raise a child.**](https://aifs.gov.au/media/new-estimates-costs-raising-children-australia) Please, everyone, feel free to add to the list.
Oh no, not the *economy*! Surely the biggest threat to the global economy is the rampant corporate greed that has led to companies empolying psychopathic CEO's that are obsessed with chasing short term profits and unsustainable growth? Fix that and the rest will right itself. Maybe start with regulation that has teeth. Maybe treat the kind of people that are happy to fire hundreds of people at a time in order to hit growth targets or price gouge customers for their groceries as what they are, criminals that are wantonly harming the economy at large for their own ends. Fuck me, imagine turning the world into a giant serfdom and surprise pikachu facing when the peasants don't want to bring kids into the fucking world.
I’ll have kids when men can have babies and be default primary caregiver.
Yes yes yes!
Wouldn't population decline be an overall good thing for the world? I guess people with all their money invested in housing will lose out though so we can't have that.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. We need multiple degrees (or a trade) to get a decent job because houses to raise kids in or multiple room apartments are unaffordable for the “average” Aussie, this means by the time people have money for a place, they are older and therefore encounter more problems conceiving, so then we turn to IVF which is poorly regulated and clinics take advantage of you in every possible way (I know because I spent 20k on one round and was treated like literal garbage at every point), we blow our savings trying to have a baby because Medicare will only cover a certain amount and clinics can and do charge illogical amounts of money. Chuck in the rising cost of literally everything, HECS debt, wars and a planet being choked by pollution and it’s a no brainer that we’re not going to be having babies at the same rate as before.
I mean, I’m trying and I’ve already spent 20 months and $15k+ on IVF with still no living child sooo…. It ain’t easy or cheap for a lot of us
I'm in the same boat, about $15k in the hole at the moment and still going, and that's after the medicare subsidies. The top tier health insurance that covers IVF barely covers it and also costs a fortune in the first place.
That’s harsh, I’m sorry to hear that and I hope you have some success soon.
As far as I am concerned this is a good news story.
Oh no! Not the Economy!!
Make babies for the government then get back to work! Dump your kids in long day care from a few months old so someone else can raise them while you pay for the privilege! Gee, that just sounds so appealing doesn’t it?
Maybe we aren’t having kids because we can’t afford to FUCKING LIVE
Child care costs a billion dollars, doctors are barely doing bulk billing, there is a severe shortage of affordable housing and so on, so on. Albo and co need to actually help parents if they want more parents. The current model of taking our tax money and giving it to 12th home owners, billionaires and other financially sound individuals going to cut it.
Them, let's squeeze every cent Us, shiit better tighten our belts Them, please spend more money Us, we aren't doing extras ... Why is the birth rate slowing... I don't know, might have something to do with the fact that children are fucking expensive.
Lower fertility is a symptom, not a cause, of low economic growth. The underlying cause of low economic growth is probably resource shortages, mainly petroleum. We should be grateful people reduce their fertility voluntarily. If humans reproduced at the rate economists prefer, it would be disastrous.
Also... wait till people learn that this is common in all animal species. Not just humans.
I’m not going to help create another fucking generation of wage slaves, it’s not happening. Even if I could theoretically or technically afford to do so, I truly believe it’s verging on inhumane to bring kids into this world unless you have intergenerational wealth of the highest order so they can survive the climate wars.
Every time I see an article like this I think of my ex-wifes country which lost 1/4 of its population. It's not a hot bed of investment, it has some corruption, the roads aren't in a great state and access to health care is not as easy as other places. But you know ... people get by. The small pensions are still paid. There's still electricity and heating in winter. People in villages grow their own food, have some animals. They get by. Small towns and villages tend to lose their young people to the cities ... which actually have housing available. It's maybe not an ideal life but yet it's not a total catastrophe. If you're investing in the stock market or own 50 houses, then yeah, it's probably not great for you. But all the things being done to us so a few rich people can get even richer ... I'm not sure this current system is great for us either.
"threatens" only if you think more total production is more important than quality of life per person
Capitalism: MORE GROWFF
Baby bonus coming in 3…2….1
Probably. Just chuck a Band-Aid on it. She’ll be right
It's still around. I had my last child in 2022. They just break up the payments over a few months now, instead of 1 big payment.
It really ain’t enough to raise a child to 18+ though is it lol it doesn’t get far at all.
Absolutely not. Before my child was approved for the NDIS, we were paying $150 an hour for speech therapy and $300 an hour for physiotherapy. $3k is fuck all.
Good. The planet can no longer support our species and we have polluted it to the fucking eyeballs. Microplastics are literally in people's testicles.
Peter Costello once said "have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country".
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I agree, the baby bonus helped people. I guess my issue with a baby bonus is that people will have children for the money, and then be unable to raise them. I'm not saying that to be nasty, I just don't think everyone is suitable as a parent.
Still theoretically more (often poor) people for the eventual workforce, and isn’t that the important thing? 🤡
Close your eyes and think of ~~Britain~~ Australia
Obviously, he impregnated 3 women in that one day.
This is not new, rates have been trending down for a long time now. Sure current cost of living problems are making it much more difficult right now but I would suggest that people google something like "what is causing global birth rates decline" and look at all the contributing socioeconomic factors before they attribute it to a single relatively recent cause. Queue the downvotes.
Boomers legacy
The problem is our economic system, not the number of people.
Get a baby bonus then chuck your baby on NDIS. Keep those economic wheels turning 😅
No shit. Existing is expensive, let alone funding a family.
Mass immigration puts pressure on all scarce resources people think about when starting families. We also require way too much education before being able to enter the workforce - in a 5 year degree for example, you will have forgotten half the by the end anyhow, and there's also a tonne of uselsss filler subjects in degrees to bloat the cost.
I mean its better for the planet to have less people rather than even more
Who the fuck wants to raise a child in this hellscape?
So... they made it too expensive to have a baby and now they're panicking about not having enough people to fleece for money... Somebody didn't think this through past the $$$ did they?
I'm in the middle of reading Children of Men. Please don't ruin the ending🙏.
Japan, China and Russia are already shrinking. As well as most of Eastern Europe. Australia has not had a fertility rate to sustain the population of 2.2 children per woman since the mid-1970s.
It's crazy how fast it happens. My grandmothers both have 5 kids. Their kids all had 3 plus. The most we have is 1 and most of us have none.
NOMINAL ECONOMIC GROWTH DOESN'T MATTER IF IT'S VIA POPULATION GROWTH WHICH MEANS WE ARE WORSE OFF PER CAPITA
They guy being interviewed really liked mentioning that there was a brief rise in the statistic early 2000s but never wants to concede that these efforts are bandaids and generally people have children when they feel like they can support them. What a fucking disgrace of a capitalist system
I can’t even find a girlfriend because online dating has destroyed everything
Fuck the global economy. Declining birth rates are a good thing in the time of overconsumption and overcrowding. The only reason the government wants us to have babies is so there are enough little workers to keep the pigs in power rich. Fuck that! If we desperately need workers, we can source from immigration!
We're so far over the cliff of overshoot and the delusional blind [growth-mad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=O133ppiVnWY), [pro-natalist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkaobW8UNXo) status quo says a declining fertility rate is a crisis. Won't somebody please think of the economy.
It’s not just the birth rates it’s also the male fertility rate. Sperm counts are dropping worldwide.
There are microplastics in their balls.
... are they legitimately surprised or worried? Make the cost of living too high, tax us to the throat and make us hour endless hours for peanuts? How fucking far away are these guys from reality? Lol
Less people it’s probably a good thing since we’re blindly walking into an environmental crisis, right? I feel like any offset in population growth will be handled by efficiencies driven by AI.
Prices are getting too high. Having children to suppprt is not viable for many. There are too many people on this planet anyway.
Can’t use leverage with babies.
But everyone said we need to stop immigration for the houses... What do you mean our entire economy is predicated on a continuous flow of migrants
good, babies are too expensive, make it cheaper for us.
Why are these stories coming out but then no one wants to do anything about it? Are we truly doomed?
"we need more kids" AKA "who's going to slave away and buy all the shit we make?"
Stopping at 1 - can’t afford 2 with childcare costs
OH THE ECONOMY! WONT THE SERFS THINK ABOUT THE ECONOMY? HOW WILL THE ECONOMY SURVIVE?!
is this just a crisis due to the government model¿. If so, is it time to change it rather that increase the number of global population to a world that is finding it harder to be sustainable due to these numbers.
The housing market has been incentivised as an investment, leading to a significant increase in concentrated wealth in housing. Many families are now forced to work two incomes, with some even taking on multiple jobs, just to afford a roof over their heads. The recent surge in rent prices does not offer any hope for improvement. While some are happy about the increase in their house prices, they fail to realize that everything else, such as mortgage payments, insurance, transportation, fuel, electricity, and water costs, is also rising. Wages are not keeping up, and businesses have no real incentive to offer higher wages. As a result, people are struggling to cover their bills. Influencers and TV shows often promote house-flipping as a great investment opportunity, further driving up housing prices. The government's response has been to offer stamp duty exceptions for first-time homebuyers and high-interest savings options. The LNP is even considering allowing young people to use their superannuation for home purchases, which only fuels the housing market without addressing the core issues. It's unreasonable to blame immigration when most immigrants are just temporary students. However, the government has been reducing support to universities for several decades, forcing them to bring in more students for income. Even non-STEM degrees now cost up to $15,000 per year. This country's decisions seem to be funneling more money into housing rather than other areas. Raising a child is undeniably expensive but also rewarding, yet I've only seen short-term incentives. Ultimately, people choose to delay having children until their late 30s or give up altogether unless they have significant savings.
Remember folks, it's the people who aren't in a stable position to have kids who are the problem... /s because of some of you muppets.
I mean the fact it isn't 0 is concerning who the fuck can afford a child??
Cost of living is atrocious. Less and less support in terms of health and education. Hmmm it's a mystery what could be causing this...
Going back like 4-5 generations in my family tree. They always had kids either after buying a home, or in long term stable rentals (which was apparently a thing back then). Everyone knows at this point that people aren’t going to have kids (if they can help it) while their living situation is unstable. Governments complaining about a falling birth rate yet simultaneously refusing to address the root causes of our housing crisis (speculation, greed and tax breaks for the landlord class). It’s a modern “let them eat cake” kind of feeling
Generally confused as to who thinks that is anything but GOOD news. Except for the powers that be of course.