Carried over from the anti-intellectual thread: http://ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1164078969

Is the baby bonus really working - is it increasing the fertility rate, or is there some other cause? And is it even a good thing?


It's funny, with all this talk of a baby boom I can't find a nice graph of our fertility rate anywhere. I did find a table of births per 1000 people, which indicates our birth rate is actually going down:

Crude Birth and Death Rates for Selected Countries
(per 1,000 population)
  Birth rate                                                          Death rate   
Country  2006 2005 2004 1990  1985  1980  1975  2006 2005 2004 1990  1985  1980  1975 
Australia  12.1 12.3 12.4 15.4  15.7  15.3  16.9         7.5 7.4 7.4 7.0  7.5  7.4  7.9 

source:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004395.html

I've had to pull this together from three sources, two ABS web pages and an SMH article. I could only get a consistent figure for the actual number of births. The first set of figures are for the calendar year (I think) and the last two are for the financial year ending june that year. The last set is from the SMH article.

How many births go unregistered, and would the money change this?

Year  Registered Births (x 1000)

1993      260.2      
1994      258.1      
1995      256.2      
1996      253.8      
1997      251.8      
1998      249.6      
1999      248.9      
2000      249.6      
2001      246.4      
2002      251      
2003      251.2      

1999      250      
2000      249.3      
2001      247.5      
2002      247.4      
2003      247.4      
2004      254.6      

2005      255.6      
2006      264.3      

Or, as a nice giraffe:

I think the ABS has figures on how many of the births were to unwed mothers. It's like 30% these days.

John Howard made it sound like this was a world first, however the Germans also have a system that offers up to 7200 euros, which is about to increase to 25200 euros (about $33000) on January 1. It is spread out over 1 year and is proportional to their former salary (over 2/3). There is some concern that parents will take steps to delay labor that could put their babies at risk.

In fact you can blame feminism for this. The last decline of population you could blame poverty.

Great article on population sustainability. You are correct but do you believe in restricting technology as the answer?

http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking-news/baby-bonus-is-a-waste-of-money-academic/2007/04/18/1176696900954.html

The federal government's baby bonus is being wasted on babies that would have been born regardless, says a Queensland academic.

The baby bonus, currently a payment of $4,000, has been offered to mothers upon the birth of their child since July 2004, and will rise to $5,000 from July 2008.

"You're paying mothers the same amount for every child, including the first one, whereas clearly a lot of people would have had the child anyway, so it's not very well targeted in that sense."

The economics lecturer suggests the government offer little or no payment for first children and increased payments for each subsequent child, similar to Singapore's baby bonus program.

"If the baby bonus was restricted to second or third children, or at least paid a smaller amount for the first child like the Singaporean model, it could have the same effect at the margins at much less cost to taxpayers," he said.

In any event, Prof Guest believes the baby bonus is not needed.

"We just don't need to increase the birthrate in Australia ... because there's no foreseeable chance of Australia's population actually falling," he said.

"Australia's on an increasing population path."

He argues a baby bonus-fuelled population boom now would offer future economic benefits at a cost to current generations.

Where is his facts regarding costs to current future generations? Everything that the Howard government has done has been aimed at consolidating the future for this great country.

I think that's a bit naive. Everything he has done has been aimed at getting re-elected. Handouts like this are a bad idea. He should have lowered taxes instead. That would have 'consolidated the future' far more effectively. The population situation did not warrant this huge expense. There are far more real and imminent threats to the country.