What's with the fertility panic?

Of course, there's no denying that childless working women in our 30s, even as a new target group for populist pathologising, have life pretty damned easy compared to, say, asylum seekers locked up in the desert, or anyone living in Lakemba at the moment with hummous in their fridge.

But we can probably get much more constructive answers to questions about the downsizing of fertility down under - and to broader questions about population - if we start to realise that all these human target groups have something in common.

In the meantime, there's a silent revolution beginning. All around Australia, women of a certain age are folding up newspapers and pulling the plug on broadcasting appliances. We are slipping out of our office clothes into something much more comfortable. We are putting our spare time to good use by reviving faded skills from the time of our grandmothers. We have an important message to send to the nation. We are icing it on to home-baked cakes, we are hand-embroidering it on to bedsheets, we are sowing it into chamomile lawns.

Everywhere, the message is growing: DON'T PANIC.