The challenge: procreate or perish

Last year, The New York Times featured the headline: "Singapore, hoping for a baby boom, makes sex a civic duty". The report continued: "Here in strait-laced Singapore, it's the new patriotism: Have sex.

"Alarmed by its declining birthrate, this tiny city-state of just four million people is urging its citizens to multiply as fast as they can."

"We need more babies," proclaimed Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong.

Another article in the Straits Times, which featured the headline "Let's get on the love wagon", included tips for having sex in the back seat of a car, with directions to "some of the darkest, most secluded and most romantic spots for Romeos and Juliets".

I am not advocating procreation as a civic duty for Australians, simply highlighting a smart country that has recognised the importance of sustaining its population and taken steps to address its declining birthrate.

Australia must also start addressing this serious issue.

The Singapore Government is offering cash to couples who have second and third children. It is also spending $50 million over five years to educate the public on family life.

Australia's population is ageing rapidly. One reason is that Australians are living longer. In 1901, the average life expectancy was 55 years. Today it is 76 for men and 82 for women, and that is expected to increase.

Another reason is that the great post-war baby-boomer generation is about to enter retirement and, in 15 to 20 years' time, will become the old-age generation.

This is what I call the numerical ageing of the population. The real problem, however, is structural ageing caused by the decline in Australia's fertility rate.

For more than two decades, our fertility rate has been below what is required to sustain the population. It is currently 1.7 babies per woman, and is expected to drop to 1.5.

There are limits to what governments can do about boosting fertility rates, but it is important we do something.

We ignore the falling fertility rate at our peril. Every year we fail to tackle it is a precious year wasted, so far as future generations and the economic welfare of the country is concerned.

We know that the number of new entrants to the workforce is expected to decline from 170,000 a year today to an average of 12,500 a year between 2020 and 2030. That will have major consequences for the economy and where we find workers to provide services for an ageing population.

We need a twin approach to our ageing population; one that deals with the consequences of ageing and another that starts to address the causes.

The British academic Catherine Hakim, in Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century, classifies women's, or families', work-lifestyle preferences into three categories: 20 per cent are home-centred, 20 per cent are work-centred, and the remaining 60 per cent are adaptive.

Hakim states that the 60 per cent group is "very responsive" to government social policy, employment policy, equal opportunities etc. If that is the case, that is further argument for beginning to tackle the fertility issue, as opposed to seeing it as too hard.

Importantly, Hakim also states that economic policies should reflect the fact that women are not a homogenous group and families' situations will change in a lifetime.

Too often, the voices in this debate reflect only the work-centred group. Families do want to be adaptive. For example, surveys of families show time and again that one parent likes to be at home for the first few years of their child's life. They might then want options for part-time work and so on.

We need to test any policies to deal with Australia's ageing population against three policy objectives: Does it help promote a work/family balance? Does it increase the fertility rate? Does it promote retirement savings and income, particularly for women?

Providing paid maternity leave will not affect the work/family balance, will have little, if any, affect on fertility rates and will do nothing to enhance retirement savings and income for women.

We also need to address the issue of workability, which is a particular issue for "adaptive" women with young families and older workers.

Workability is about providing optimum conditions for people to enter and re-enter the workforce, regardless of their age or other circumstances, such as their family life. Both employers and employees have responsibilities in this area. Employers can provide more flexible work hours and child-friendly workplaces and work practices, while employees must keep updating their skills and knowledge.

As well as encouraging childless couples to have children, the real emphasis must be on encouraging families that have one or two children to have another.

There are at least two obstacles to bigger families: the financial cost, and people simply running out of time.

With people marrying later, that is going to be a huge challenge. If you want to tackle the declining fertility rate, you have to make it more attractive for people to marry in their 20s.

How do we create the conditions under which people will marry earlier while still allowing them to meet all their other aspirations?

In relation to the financial costs, Hakim takes up the idea of paying parents a home-care allowance for the mother, or father, who stays at home full-time to care for children.

She says the money can be regarded as a wage for childcare at home, as a partial replacement for savings forgone, or it can be used as a subsidy for purchased childcare services that enable the parent to return to work, either part-time or full-time.

As Hakim states, few welfare states offer a home-care allowance to parents, but the idea is popular. She mentions a successful scheme in Finland introduced in the 1980s that allows parents to choose between publicly provided child-care services and a cash benefit for child care at home.

A similarly generous French scheme, introduced in 1986, is also popular, Hakim states, because it fits the preferences of adaptive women as well as home-centred women, rather than being targeted at a single group.

Hakim states that even modest home-care payments to mothers attract an immediate, positive response because they provide public recognition for the parenting role, and renew its social value by providing the mother with a minimum "salary" for their work.

Hakim argues it is possible to design policies to offer advantages to women and men generally, rather than to narrowly defined subgroups. "The challenge for politicians and policy makers in the 21st century is to design policies that are neutral between the three preference groups."

Whatever choice Australia takes, it will only be a start. To do nothing is to walk away from our responsibilities to the future.