Institute of Public Affairs Brianna McKee discussing the IPA’s Economic Scorecard research on ADH TV – Reality Bites 25 October 2024.
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Nick Cater:
As you may have seen, the inaugural gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC, in Australia took place this week. Like the event in London last year, which I attended, the really standout aspect of it for me, apart from Jordan Peterson’s jacket, was the session on family policy. This is something that I suppose we always knew was an important part of our policy already, but I think once again, the contributions of ARC this week showed how important this is to our entire thinking about our civilization and the future of our society.
With me is Freya Leach, the director of Centre for Youth Policy at the Menzies Research Centre and Brianna McKee, the research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and National Manager for Generation Liberty. Welcome to you both. You were both at ARC. Erica Komisar was really the keynote speaker on this issue of family policy, and she warned that universal childcare, which is Labor’s policy, it wants to take election, is fraught with danger and may lead to a generation of traumatised children. Freya, perhaps you could outline a bit more what you said and whether you agree with that or not.
Freya Leach:
Yeah, so and Erica really is a leader in this space and her background is as a psychoanalyst and social worker. And what she noticed in her practise is all of a sudden she was getting a lot of kids that had mood disorders, ADHD, were exhibiting aggressive behaviour. And when she started digging into it, she realised there was a really strong link between institutional childcare for children aged zero to three and longer-term developmental impacts, which might manifest as aggressive behaviour, mood disorders, ADHD, etc.
Now, what we’ve had across the west over the last really 20 years is a rapid increase in the rates of kids going into institutional care and mothers particularly returning to work sooner, and that is going to have long, and it already is, having long term impacts on the development of children. So Erica really raised the alarm around this and basically said that this approach of sending kids to institutional care and getting mothers back into the workforce, while it may have short-term economic dividends in terms of higher labour force participation rates over the long-term, the impact that this is having on children on the next generation of Australians is such a heavy price to pay that it is simply not worth it and we need to rethink our whole model for childcare and make it possible for mothers to stay at home with their children for the first three years of their life.
Nick Cater:
Well, assistance for childcare or subsidies for childcare has always been a bit of an election winner, I think particularly for Labour, at least they think it is. But Brianna, I’ll ask two provocative questions, one, should the state, should the federal government be involved in this policy area at all, or should people pay their own way with childcare? Or if we think that there should be assistance for mothers and families with young children, are there other ways of providing it?
Brianna McKee:
Yeah, well, this should be ringing massive alarm bells for Australia because when we look at our family policy, childcare is basically the big focus, and there’s been a massive expansion of it in recent years. And clearly it’s not working, if you look at the latest ABS data, it shows that our fertility rate is at a record low of 1.5 births per children, and our birth rate has been below replacement levels for decades now. We’ve seen that the average age of first births for mothers has risen from about 25 in 1975 to over 30 in 2020. So women are having children later in life and they’re having less of them. And Australia’s response is childcare, and of course the problem with this is it doesn’t actually give women a choice. It’s great for the career woman who wants to get straight back into the workforce, but it’s not good for the stay at home mom. So when the federal government is thinking about family policy, they need to be thinking about, how do we give women a choice?
Nick Cater:
Do you want to add to that Freya?
Freya Leach:
Yeah, and I would also just add that institutional childcare is a last resort for most families. So of the parents that are out of the workforce because they’re giving care to children, only 30% cite child care access as the reason. In other words, 70% of the parents that are not in the workforce because they’re caring for children are doing it because they want to care for their own children. And so really our current approach of subsidising childcare and childcare only means that anybody who wants choice in how they raise their kids, as Brianna said, and perhaps wants to raise them themselves or have grandparents or community groups, they essentially get no support from the government at all.
So really there’s no choice for women at the moment. It is basically if you have kids in order to survive because you basically need two income,. You’ve got to send your kid to childcare and get back to work, and there’s no real alternative to that, which is really bad for families. And also, I mean, it’s not just bad for women, it’s bad for children as well. The long-term impacts of this are disastrous. You only have to look at Gen Z, our generation and the rates of mental illness to know that clearly the current system is not working.
Nick Cater:
Brianna you correctly raise the issue of birth rates, falling birth rates as a major public policy issue, which has not really been debated at all. And yet we’ve known this has been happening for some time. The birth rate in Australia has been falling since the late ’50, would you believe? And it’s not just a first world problem, birth rates are falling across most countries in the world, everywhere except Sub-Saharan Africa, and outliers like Israel. But everywhere else, right across Asia, birth rates are falling way below replacement level. They’re 0.8 in Korea, on which level the next generation will be 40% smaller than this one. We have to deal with this, don’t we? And we have to deal with it with something other than immigration.
Brianna McKee:
No, that’s right. It’s a massive issue right across the western world, in Australia, in Asian countries, it is an existential threat and it deserves much more of our attention than it’s been getting. Migration is a band-aid solution, and in Australia it’s actually doing quite a bit to exacerbate the problem because it’s causing housing prices to rise, it’s causing the cost of living, families also have high education costs, and so migration is a band-aid solution, and it’s actually causing the problem to become greater for families. At the moment, we’re in a per capita recession, so for the individual, they’re not making as much money as they used to, this puts increasing pressure on families. So the government needs to think about policies to address this like family income splitting. The last time we actually had a big focus on family policy was under the Howard government and they had tax credits and the Baby Bonus, so perhaps it’s time to start looking at some of these options.
Nick Cater:
Freya, there’s no simple explanation for why birth rates are falling, is there? Every time you pick on one, like say housing prices, you find an exception and find out why that’s not working somewhere else. So that being the case, this is really a very difficult public policy question, isn’t it? And if we want to address falling birth rates, we’ve got to look at a large number of different ways of doing so right across the area of government policy from taxation to housing policy to education perhaps.
Freya Leach:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And the paradox is that we have never been richer. We have never been more materially comfortable yet. If you ask a young Australian why they’re not having kids or why they’re not having more than one or two kids, they will often cite cost. So there’s a contradiction there because actually as countries get richer, they have less kids, whereas you think it would be the opposite. So clearly it’s not really down to any economic factors necessarily. Housing definitely does play a role, but again, as you said, there are exceptions that where in Israel housing is as expensive as it is here in Australia, and yet their birth rate is about double what ours is. I think really there are a whole lot of peripheral issues centred around economics, but at the heart of the problem is actually a cultural issue. If people don’t have confidence in the future of our country and of our civilization, and if they do not feel that childbearing is something that is honoured and valued in our society, then guess what? They’re not going to have kids.
So if you look at what is the one developed country where birth rates are above replacement rate, it’s Israel. And that is because one, the existential threat from Arab countries trying to invade them, so they need to keep the Jewish population alive. But two, the first commandment in the Bible and something that is central to Jewish life is the commandment to be fruitful. And so a large factor in the birth rate discussion is actually, what does our culture value? And we do not live in a culture right now here in Australia or around the west that values new life, but there is only so long as civilization can exist while it’s not replacing itself. And the problem with migration is that we’re going to also run out of migrants because birth rates are also below replacement rates in a lot of developing countries as well, India, China, Thailand, and the list goes on.
So really, if we do not confront the cultural crisis at the core of this, which is a pessimism, a declines narrative about the west and a devaluing of human life, then we’re not going to be able to turn this around. So we have to address the economic barriers to having kids like housing, like tax settings, etc. But we also have to have a cultural conversation and say, no, the most important thing you can do, whether you’re a man or a woman, is to have a family, is to be active parents, is to create the next generation of Australians. Because without that, there will be no Australia, there will be no west, and what will be left?
Nick Cater:
Look, I invite you both on from your various think tanks to give us empirical evidence to back up answers, but I’ve got to change tack and ask for anecdotal evidence now, from both of you, Rihanna starting with you, so you mixed with a lot of people obviously of your age, tell me how do you see things? Is it that young people or people of childbearing age are not having children because there are external factors, be it housing, be it education coming in the way, whatever it is, or is it that simply they’ve gone off the whole idea of kids?
Brianna McKee:
The people that I interact with, they cite cost as an issue. The cost of housing in particular, the cost of living, the cost of education, but I think even more important than that is the rise of this hostile cultural mindset that is anti-motherhood, anti-family and anti-children. And many people have grown up and they’ve gone to school and they hear this messaging day in, day out that it’s better to be a career woman, that the career is the most important thing, and so they’ve bought into that narrative.
And what we’ve seen is politicians in their messaging always talk about a woman’s contribution in terms of her contribution to the economy. And they use words like penalty and the caring burden and different things like that to describe motherhood, and this plays into a narrative that says that employment is empowerment and that women have a second role in society. So what we need to do, as Freya said, is to elevate the status of mothers and to say, no, this is important, this is good and we want to elevate the status and say we celebrate these women who are having children and having families.
Nick Cater:
Freya, we see a lot of what I call performative childlessness. By that I mean people like Harry and Megan who say they’re not going to have any more kids because it’s bad for the planet. We don’t want to put any more drain on this already strained and overburdened rock that we live upon. Do you think that that is genuinely influencing people or is that just one of those virtue signalling things that doesn’t really reflect underlying motives?
Freya Leach:
I do think it is influencing some people for sure, and the data does back that up, but I think for the average Australian, not the sort of Greenie political activists, the bigger barriers are the cultural… We basically frown upon people with big families. And if you are a woman… So I’ve had people tell me, “I’m getting married at 21,” and people are like, “Why are you doing that? You are way too educated to be getting married, to be having a family, to be doing any of this stuff. You should be out living your best life, hot girl summer, go to Europe, basically spend your 20s partying and living for yourself, and then building a career.” And that is the narrative that a lot of women are told in the media, politics, pop culture. So yeah, I think that is the bigger thing that is going on.
But even if we were to have universal child care, this is the problem. We’ve actually basically maxed out the female workforce participation rate. It’s already around 80%. And if you look at the Productivity Commission’s recent Report on Universal Child Care, if they implemented a flat rate subsidy, which is what Labour is looking likely to introduce as part of their election package, it would cost an extra $8 billion and only generate 7,000 full-time jobs. So it’ll cost around 1.1 million per full-time job. So child care really is not the solution to any of this. The solution is to give more parents choice in how they raise their kids.
And then if we’re talking about birth rates, we’ve got to reframe and re-centre families as being the heart of our country and all policies should be geared around strengthening families. This is a Liberal value as well. Menzies was very clear on the importance of the family. He said, “The health of the family determines the health of the country.” And I think we’ve completely lost that perspective. You can’t just reduce women or anyone for that matter, to just mere economic agents. Their value is so much greater than that. And even if you just measure the labour that they do, the average woman performs around six to seven hours of unpaid labour in the home, even if they’re working full time.
So what you’re asking women to do is to go out and work 37.5 hours a week and then come home and work another 40 hours a week. The average woman is currently working more than a CEO, they’re working around 80 hours, but only half of that is paid. So why do we not value the work that a woman does in the home? It’s completely unfair. And people will cloak it in the argument of, “Oh, this is empowering for women.” How is it empowering to be demanded to work two full-time jobs and not be recognised for one of them and just have people take it for granted? That is not empowering, that is devaluing. And so I think Brianna’s right, I think you are right, we need to stop treating women as second-class citizens, stop devaluing the vital work that they do in the home and actually give it the proper respect it deserves.
Nick Cater:
Amen to that, Freya. And if I could just add, I think the best argument for having children is it’s the first step on the ladder to becoming a grandparent, which is the best job of all, in my view. Brianna, just a complete change of pace, there was report in The Week that said that, “Melbourne was too cold, broke and unbankable.” That was the problem. Nobody wanted to invest in Victoria because the economy was going so bad. Debt is $156 billion according to the most recent budget and will rise to close to 180 billion by 2028. Come on, you’re in Melbourne. I know you’re not from Melbourne, you’re originally from Sydney, but defend the place for me, if you can.
Brianna McKee:
Look, it’s hard to defend the place, Nick, because the IPA released research earlier this year, we gave Melbourne or Victoria an economic scorecard and it shows that it has the highest tax burden, the highest debt burden, and the highest increases in energy prices in the country. So families are fleeing because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live here. Businesses are closing up shop, and yeah, Melbourne is a difficult place to live at the moment, unfortunately. And there’s been a complete absence of political leadership and the state debt is so large that most people who are alive now will not see it paid off within their lifetime and that will put a handbrake on development, on infrastructure, and we’re seeing the effects of that already.
Nick Cater:
Well, Brianna, you can console yourself with the fact you still have The Race that Stops the Nation on Tuesday week, the Melbourne Cup. But thank you to my team, Freya Leach from the Menzies Research Centre and Brianna McKee from the IPA.
