New statistics about Australia's plummeting birth rate appear to confirm what demographers have been saying for months – the cost of living and housing crisis are prompting people to re-think having a family. Official figures show the fertility rate has hit a new low of 1.5 babies, per woman.
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00:00New South Wales, far and away, accounts for the largest drop-off in births across the
00:07country.
00:08Almost 6,000 fewer babies were born in this state alone in 2023.
00:12That accounts for almost half of the 13,000 fewer babies born across the country in the
00:18reporting period.
00:20The fertility rate dropping to 1.5 per woman, the lowest ever since the Australian Bureau
00:25of Statistics started recording this data.
00:28If we have a look over the long run though, it's where we see that this low has been trending
00:33down for a long time.
00:35After the peak in child fertility rates of 3.55 in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we
00:43see a consistent downward trend with a few small spikes, but none to mitigate those much
00:49higher levels.
00:50We're now at a much smaller level.
00:52One reason we are hearing from people on the streets here in Sydney is that the cost of
00:57living has been a major prohibitive factor for some people wanting to have a family.
01:01We're just trying to sustain ourselves and to add a baby and a family to that, that's
01:06going to really stretch the budget quite a bit.
01:10Are you keen to have several kids or are you worried about having multiple kids?
01:13Maybe about, on a big family, maybe like three to five kids, hopefully.
01:20But one expert demographer, Dr Liz Allen, says while housing affordability is a major
01:26contributing factor, it's not the only as fertility rates hit rock bottom.
01:31This is not a decline happening necessarily by choice.
01:36Young people are unlikely to achieve their desired family size.
01:42We're not talking oodles of children here, we're talking one or two.
01:46The hurdles, the barriers needed to pass to really have a family, a much wanted family,
01:53are just insurmountable now.
01:55We've got housing affordability, we've got job insecurity and economic insecurity more
02:00broadly, we've got gender inequality and climate change that are really at the front of mind
02:07for our young people.
02:09Federal Government for its part is trying to arrest declining rates of fertility among
02:14the population.
02:15It says its work around childcare is important to making having a child more affordable.
02:21We get that Australians are doing it tough, and certainly housing affordability is front
02:25and centre in that, because it's the most significant cost that people by and large
02:29have in their household budgets.
02:32The problem, however, for the Federal Government is multi-pronged and multifaceted.
02:36It's not just childcare that they need to look at to encourage people to have children.
02:42As well, it's a problem that takes some time to work upon, and there won't be any quick
02:47solutions to improving or increasing the fertility rate among Australians.