Australia has a near-record low fertility rate. The data found Australian women will have on average 1.6 babies over the next five years sitting below the international average of 2.3. Experts say it could have some significant consequences for the workforce, health-system and cultural make-up.
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00:00 ABS has predicted that this will be a trend that continues for a number of years, they're
00:07 saying about five at least, and that will mean with the demographics that there will
00:13 be a bit of a gap in people able to fulfil the workforce needs. So services will be challenging
00:22 to provide those. We've already got a very tight labour market and then we also have
00:27 a shrinking number of people who are able to work and pay taxes as well. So providing
00:34 services for older people will be an issue and also just having enough tax revenue will
00:41 also be problematic.
00:43 So why is this happening?
00:45 Well we're following other countries around the world in a couple of areas and that is
00:50 that women are becoming more educated, they're tending to want to have time to train and
00:57 get economic security, so they're putting off having children later. And then sometimes
01:02 when they have put off having them later, they then have fertility issues. So that can
01:08 be one of the reasons why. Another area is that they are able to access fairly cheaply
01:18 contraceptive and family planning services and so that also reduces it. And that's a
01:23 very big trend worldwide, but Australia has some unique problems as well.
01:29 And what about the cost of having kids?
01:32 Yeah, so that can be a real issue. So what we're finding is that women are worried about
01:39 a number of things and not having children. So they're worried about the finances, the
01:44 cost of living pressures, not having access to early learning services. And so they know
01:51 that they will have to give up work for longer, and especially if they're in regional, rural
01:56 and remote Australia or in low SES suburbs. So accessing childcare is a real issue. And
02:03 also being able to access reliable services to help them with their income. Accessing
02:10 Centrelink services can be a real issue for them. And also just carrying that extra burden.
02:16 So we still have women doing the lion's share of the child wearing responsibilities, and
02:23 then trying to combine that with a career can be really stressful. And a lot of families
02:30 are finding that the women are quite burnt out and really don't want to take on any more
02:35 of these opportunities to have children if they haven't got the services that are wrapped
02:41 around them.
02:42 And so just how important is it that Australia addresses this and what more can be done to
02:47 boost the younger population?
02:48 Yeah, so well, I think women will have babies and families will have larger families if
02:56 they are supported. So we need really good services. We need really good childcare services
03:03 and access and affordability to early learning. We need to be able to support parents with
03:10 extra payments and give them longer at home if there's no early learning available in
03:15 their area. So we need to also look at migration because that can help fill some of those shortages.
03:23 And then we also need to look at how we complement our workforce with AI. And so we still have
03:30 women and men forward facing so that it's still a human interaction. But in the background,
03:37 we can be using AI in services that are invisible to the user, but are really improving the
03:44 efficiency of what the humans are doing.
03:46 Yeah, I want to pick a couple of issues out from what you said there. First to migration.
03:51 There's a lot of discussion around that at the moment saying there are too many migrants
03:55 coming into Australia at the moment. Australia can't handle it.
03:59 I guess it depends. I mean, we take in refugees and we do. I think we do a good job with that.
04:06 I think we could take more humanitarian refugees, but sometimes they are coming in and having
04:12 very high needs. So we also need to balance that with bringing in skilled workers, migrants
04:18 to fill those gaps. And so there is a problem because we don't have the housing. We don't
04:24 have the housing for people who already live here. And so much more needs to be done in
04:29 that area and looking at ways to revamp some of the empty buildings we have around, some
04:33 of the empty offices and ways to get around housing some of these workers that will be
04:39 wanting to come to Australia.
04:40 And Marg, you mentioned AI there. What about doing what Japan has done and focus on getting
04:45 better at having an older population rather than being singularly focused on boosting
04:52 the fertility?
04:53 Yeah, well, I think there needs to be a few different ways to address it. There's not
04:58 one solution that will work, but you can have AI interacting with humans. However, there
05:05 always needs to be that human touch and even animal touch, having therapy animals within
05:10 aged care facilities and having enough of the human interaction combined with the AI
05:18 to make sure that people are still feeling that human nuanced connectivity. And that's
05:24 really important for mental health. And so is involving animals like such as dogs that
05:30 can be such a boon for some of these elderly residents.
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