See the highlighted areas in the article below from 2001:
Executive Highlights
No. 58
To populate or not to populate...
Published in The Canberra Times 5 December 2001
The question of legal and illegal immigration is likely to occupy the incoming federal government for some time to come.
One problem is how, humanely but effectively, to stem a possible flood of unwanted visitors; the other is to determine how many legal immigrants we want and the characteristics we would like them to have. This raises the question of increasing our population and the reasons why we might want to do so.
Some elements of the green movement argue strongly against population increase on the grounds that more population will degrade the environment.
Businessmen, on the other hand want a larger labour pool, and while many economists argue that a larger population will increase economic growth, other economists qualify this by saying that it depends upon the “human capital” – the skills and knowledge – that migrants bring with them.
Where that debate will end is anybody’s guess, but the joker in the pack is national fertility rates. Fertility in Australia has been trending steadily downwards since 1960 and is now well below replacement rate at 1.7 births per woman (half the 1960 rate). In the absence of significant immigration, our population will begin to shrink in the next three decades. There are two ways we can stop the decline – by large scale immigration or by raising our fertility rate substantially.
In present world circumstances, we will be facing severe competition for desirable migrants. The problem of falling fertility is now spreading throughout the world – and not only among the developed nations.
Below-replacement fertility now exists in 83 countries comprising just under half of total world population. A rate of 2.1 births per woman is required to keep the population steady in a developed country, and a slightly higher rate in an undeveloped country to compensate for higher infant mortality rates.
In Europe as a whole, the total fertility rate is about 1.4. In Catholic Italy it is 1.2. In France, Germany and Britain fertility is below replacement. In the USA it is still fractionally above replacement, helped by the relatively high fertility of Mexican-Americans and a large immigration programme. This spread of below replacement fertility is unprecedented and is likely eventually to affect the more impoverished half of the world presently enjoying better than replacement-rate fertility.
The medium term future therefore portends deepening, more widespread fertility crises and an increasing dearth of high “human capital” migrants likely to be in great demand by more and more advanced countries. Simultaneously, those countries, including Australia, will be confronted by an ageing national population of wasting human capital and the prospect of declining national wealth and well-being.
Assuming either that we want to sustain our population level or increase it slowly, what should we do?
Immigration , it seems, might at best be only a short-term fix unless we significantly lower our standards of admission. Immigrants from more advanced cultures whom we might deem the more desirable are unlikely to be forthcoming in numbers sufficient for our needs. Such people, youngish and skilled, will be in high demand in their own countries and elsewhere.
So we might have to set our sights lower. But that will be more costly if we import low-skilled, poorly educated people with little knowledge of English.
Other developed countries facing these dilemmas have turned towards measures designed to increase national fertility. So far, the results have not been particularly encouraging, and the reasons are puzzling.
The Japanese, who have been struggling with a declining workforce for several years, have offered financial incentives for families to have children, but to virtually no effect.
France, on the other hand, seems to have had some modest success. Its fertility rate is below replacement, but is closer to it than Germany and Italy. French parents receive relatively generous child allowances, varying with the number of children in a family, but worth several thousand dollars a year. They get about $300 per month for a second child and about $410 per month for each child after that plus other substantial subsidies totalling, for a family of three young children, close to $20,000 per annum. All up, family policy in France costs about $130 billion per annum, vastly more, on a per capita basis, than Australia spends.
Compared to Germany, which has a much less generous family policy than France, the French population is holding up much better. So one might conjecture that without its family policy, France might have had a much more severe population problem.
Are there any lessons here for Australia?
Would we be better off putting resources into a family policy that would make it easier to have children, or into encouraging immigration, and perhaps using financial incentives to lure the well-educated and highly–skilled?
One thing which is notable, but from which we cannot draw firm conclusions about causes, is that throughout the developed world, including Australia, the steady decline in birth rates tracked the rising cost of welfare and the growth of the taxation burden to pay for it, especially on single-income families with children.
As welfare generosity for the aged, for sole parents, for the unemployed and disabled, mounted, the birth rate declined and more and more mothers entered the workforce. Having joined the workforce, the costs for a woman to leave (in terms of income foregone) are now very large. For these taxation and foregone-income reasons, the costs of having children today are many times greater than they were forty years ago when our birth rate was 3.4 children per woman.
If there is a causal connection working here, the financial incentives needed for couples to raise their birth rates would have to be hugely enlarged. The question is whether we can afford to do it. Or can we afford not to do it? If we don’t the options appear to be a less than satisfactory immigration policy or national decline.
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About the Author:
Barry Maley is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. He is the author of Family and Marriage in Australia, published by the Centre.