Matt Canavan has used his first week as leader of the Nationals to call for Australians to have more children. In doing so, he joins a long list of political leaders around the world who have called attention to the problem of depopulation, and to the importance of demographic renewal.
Critics have responded by reminding Australians of the sexist and racist undertone of this sort of political speech given that calls for Australian families to have more children are rarely accompanied by a genuine commitment to increasing family support and Australia’s immigration intake.
For a segment of the population, whenever politicians say that Australians need more babies, what they are really saying is that Australians need more white babies to be looked after by their white mothers, who, in turn, should ideally be a stay-at-home parent.
Once you add to the mix the fraught relationship between population growth and climate change, it starts to look like depopulation is a problem the right side of politics has invented so that they get a social license to push back against feminist, racial justice and environmentalist agendas.
If only things were that simple. The truth is that depopulation is one of the greatest challenges of our time.
Current demographic trends suggest that by 2100, several major economies could have half of the population they have now. Australia is already reaching uncharted territory with a birth rate of 1.5.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers suggested this much in his budget speech last year when he noted demographic changes as one of the five seismic challenges facing the country.
In a nutshell, the concern when it comes to depopulation is that in the absence of a robust young demographic to support the economy and an ageing population, governments will simply be unable to maintain current standards of living while communities will be left without adequate access to essential public services, including health care and aged care, and a well-funded pension system.
As a result, future generations will become poorer and will enjoy significantly lower levels of human development than current generations enjoy.
Now, I don’t deny that many pronatalist politicians and commentators are not that worried about the future and are simply motivated by nostalgia of a time in our past where we were less multicultural and where women were less empowered. I also don’t deny that sometimes pro-natalism overlaps with climate change denial.
But just because some commentators fail to grasp what is morally at stake or offer misguided solutions doesn’t mean we don’t have a serious problem in our hands.
With population numbers declining so rapidly, we are faced with a serious dilemma: if governments do not actively pursue demographic renewal by some means, there is a serious risk that the rapid transition to a low fertility future will impose unfair burdens on the next generations. But if governments do act, there is a serious risk that current citizens will bear significant moral costs for the sake of demographic renewal.
The moral cost of being told by the government to have more children when you can barely afford it, or when it might have serious detrimental effects to your health (think of the risks and side effects of pregnancy) or your career (think of the motherhood penalty) are significant.
So if we are going to address the problem of depopulation in a way that treats all Australians as free and equal citizens, we need to take seriously the question of whether it is even fair for parents to shoulder so many of the costs of child-rearing when the whole of society benefits from a large enough cohort of young people who will one day pay the taxes and provide the services we all need to function as a society. In many other spheres of life those who benefit from a service are expected to meaningfully contribute to the costs of providing it.
Indeed, if we are going to take the problem of depopulation seriously, we need to ask difficult questions about how to meaningfully support families in all their configurations with the design of family-formation policies that are both legitimate and fit for purpose.
We also need to address the immigration part of the puzzle, given that depopulation is now also a problem for many countries in the global south, and so familiar concerns around the brain drain become even more pressing, requiring an ethical response on our part.
Telling Australians to have more children when many parents and prospective parents feel that current economic settings have set them up to fail simply adds insult to injury. But conversely, treating depopulation as a mere far-right dog whistle discourages us from having the urgent and important conversations we must have if we are going to maintain an inter-age group social contract that benefits all Australians.
Luara Ferracioli is an associate professor in political philosophy in the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney. Her recent books include Liberal Self-Determination in World of Migration (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Parenting and the Goods of Childhood (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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Dr Luara Ferracioli is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney.
