The main cause of the falling fertility rates is the increased empowerment of women. In Australia, greater numbers of females are likely to participate in higher education and in the workplace. This certainly impacts on the delay of the marriages as well as the maternal ages for first-child-birth. In addition, there are less secure marriages, evident in higher divorce rates and expanded and easy access to family planning. The most underlying reason is the higher coats of housing and raising a family (economic concerns), leading to make married couples have only one child or not to have babies.
The population policy goals
The major objective of the Australian population policy is to help promote policies that
will initially lead to stabilization of Australia’s population by encouraging near replacement
fertility rates.
The methods used to achieve the population policy goals
In order to encourage females to have a baby, a range of family payments is delivered by the government to assist families with cost of living pressures associated with raising a child. Also, the government is committed to improving maternity services through the national maternity services plan. The government’s Economic Security Strategy is delivering financial relief to families of up to $1,000 for each dependent child in 2 million families.
Furthermore, the government spends $3.2 billion each year to assist families with the cost of child care. The government allocated $1.6 billion over four years to reduce the burden of child care costs by increasing the child care tax rebate from 30% to 50% of out of pocket expenses and increasing the maximum amount of payment from $4354 to $7500 indexed per child per year.
Evaluation of the population policy
Even though the Australian governments have allocated its budget to encourage married couples to have babies, the fertility rates are likely to stagnate between 1.6 and 1.7, meaning that the population policy has failed to achieve the main objective attempted to make the fertility rate near replacement fertility rates, 2.1 births per woman. As mentioned earlier, the actual and perceived costs of raising children in Australia still remain high that people cannot afford and this is thought to be a main reason that fertility rates are not increasing. However, the fertility rates are expected to rise slightly about to 1.85 births per woman in 2050 as people living in the countryside are still doing agricultural works and this leads them to desire to have big families to support their businesses and there is a tendency to have greater allocation of budgets by government, leading to fewer burdens to raise babies.
Despite the fact that there is possibility that the population policy will resolve the current population problems, some scientists are opposed to the population policy as they anticipate there would be environmental predicaments. Most of all, greater populations increased by the higher fertility rate will certainly cause overcrowded cities, transport congestion, food crisis, increase in waste products and water shortages in the near future. Additionally those problems will lead to impacts on the global warming more severely by increasing the amounts of carbon dioxide emitted. Moreover, as there is likely to be greater number of population, demands for houses are more necessary so more spaces are needed to construct houses, leading to the deterioration of the environment and species extinctions are likely to occur as their habitats would be shrunk and damaged.
However, The Australian government believes the immigrants from various nations are the key to keep the Australian population young. Since there are greater number of ageing of population and less number of young people, immigrants are considered economic assets and they also contribute a significant economic growth to Australian economy. Despite the fact the immigrants are working labors, the Australia government have attempts to cut the number of immigrants as it has realized that many immigrants are occupied the workplace that indigenous Australians are likely to have less opportunities to get jobs.
Furthermore, the government has tried to deal with the ageing of population at the same time, attempting to increase the fertility rates. In response to the ageing problems, the Australian Government has provided leadership by developing the which provides a framework for responding to the opportunities and challenges of population ageing. Also, local government, in partnership with the Australian Government, is well positioned to have a positive and crucial impact on the growing older population through its 1) intimate knowledge of the local community and identification of the diversity of older people planning and 2) provision of services and programs that are flexible and locally appropriate to the needs of older people.