Early last month, family services minister Amanda Vanstone released a discussion paper calling for incentives for Australian women to have more children. The reason? At 1.75 births per woman of child-bearing age, Australia's fertility rate has fallen below the "replacement" level of 2.1 — Australia's women are not having enough babies to provide for a work force to look after the "baby boomers" as they hit old age.
But before all the women reading this column rush out to do their bit and increase the population of dinky-di Aussie-born citizens, stop and think about this for a minute.
Isn't this the government that has slashed immigration levels? The government that accuses migrants of taking "Aussie jobs"? The government that has expressed a wish to be able to just turn around boat loads of refugees and send them back? And it's not as if immigration minister Philip Ruddock disagrees with Vanstone. In a little-publicised policy speech to the Australian Centre of Population Research in October, Ruddock addressed the "worrying" question of falling fertility rates, and suggested a few "solutions".
The most obvious solution — opening up the borders to those fleeing political persecution and economic misery is explicitly ruled out both by Ruddock and by the Family and Community Services (FACS) discussion paper. Why? Well FACS give us three reasons.
The first is that most "source" countries of skilled migrants are also experiencing falling fertility rates. Thus any increase in immigration will be predominantly unskilled. The paper does not explain, however, why it is more efficient to train Australian-born children than the children of unskilled immigrants.
Secondly, FACS tells us that "immigrants also age" — unlike Australian-born babies who presumably reach working age and stay there forever.
Thirdly, and now we get to the real stuff, FACS explains that increased immigration is "politically and culturally unsustainable". This is a polite way of saying they want white babies. Underneath the rhetoric about cultural sustainability is the desperate desire to make sure that Australians of Asian and Middle Eastern origin remain a minority in this country; Potts Point never ends up like Parramatta, or Toorak like Richmond.
By remaining isolated and marginalised sections of the community, non-English speaking migrants provide a super-exploited pool of labour, and also serve as convenient scapegoats for the rage of white workers increasingly under attack by government-driven austerity.
To accuse the Australian population of being unable to tolerate increased immigration is breathtaking hypocrisy from a government which has gone out of its way to stigmatise migrant communities as hotbeds of "un-Australian" crime, and refugees as bludgers and queue jumpers.
And migrants aren't the only ones rejected as potential breeders. Despite Australia's fertility "crisis", Prime Minister John Howard has not changed his position on allowing lesbians and single women access to fertility treatments.
All of the "solutions" mooted by Ruddock and Vanstone have one thing in common — "encouraging" women out of full-time work and back into the home. Ruddock laid the "dilemma" clearly enough. "It is apparent", he said, "that the decline in fertility rates over the past few decades has been associated with significant increases in educational and labour force opportunities for women."
"It would be prudent", he continues, "for us to consider the potential impact of all policies on the fertility rate."
Vanstone gets more specific. Besides the "carrot" of improving child care (whatever that means. She seems to think that the government's cutting of funding and increasing the quality gap between cheap and expensive child care has "improved" it), the FACS paper recommends further changes to the tax system to reward those who have children and punish those who don't.
To pretend that this facilitates "choices" for women is offensive. The only choice it facilitates for many women is that of giving up on full-time work and an active social life outside the home; to give up on the chance to study at university and do the family thing later, as surviving outside a nuclear family becomes harder and harder.
So the refugees will continue to be harassed back to the Third World, while Australian women are forced into ever greater amounts of domestic work to keep the population growing. The solution that is not even considered by the paper of course is the most humane of all — put up company tax rates, and force the corporations that exploited generations of workers to fund their retirement in dignity and comfort. But that would involve putting the needs of people before corporate profits, and capitalism just can't stomach that.
BY ALISON DELLIT