The race to reproduce
As birth rates decline, nations are incentivising their citizens to “do it for your country”.
Apart from moving its immigration settings, there is not a lot New Zealand can do to influence the size of its population, even if it wanted to. New Zealand’s total fertility rate (TFR) is about 1.88 births per woman and although this is higher than many OECD countries, with Europe being described as “the continent of the empty crib”, it is still below the TFR of 2.1, known as the “replacement rate”, which maintains population size.
From a global perspective, this is not unusual. From 1990 to 2019, the global fertility rate fell from 3.2 to 2.5 births per woman. Today, close to half of the world’s population lives in a country in which lifetime fertility is below the 2.1 rate.
Of the nearly two billion increase in world population expected by mid-century, most will take place in less-developed regions. Those countries with the highest fertility rates are in Africa, with Niger topping the list at
7.1 children per woman, followed by Somalia at 6.1.
But even in sub-Saharan Africa, says the United Nations, TFR dropped from 6.3 to 4.6 births per woman between 1990 and 2019.
The combination of low fertility and increased longevity is resulting in rapidly ageing populations in many
countries. Facing a diminishing ratio of the working-age population to the elderly population, two-thirds of the countries in Europe have introduced policies designed to increase fertility rates. The incentives range from tax breaks and cash to housing incentives, longer paid parental leave and discounts on public services. In February last year, Hungary announced a raft of new policies intended to boost the birth rate while still remaining hostile to immigration. These include a tax holiday for women who bear four or more children; a loan of about $50,000 to families, cancelled if they have three children; and cash incentives for large families to buy seven-seater vehicles. As for the growing number of people choosing to not have children, according to the Financial Times, László Kövér, speaker of the Hungarian Parliament, has suggested childless people are “not normal” and “stand on the side of death”.
South Korea, Singapore, France, Australia, Canada and Poland have all offered “baby bonuses” per child. The Czech Republic offers mothers 70% of their salary during maternity leave for 28 weeks. Berlin recently announced that all of its child-care centres will be free.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has promised tax breaks for bigger families, and a one-off payment for families with two or more children, worth nearly $12,000, will be extended to first-time mothers. Welfare benefits will be paid for children aged three to seven in lowincome families and free school meals will be provided for the first four years of school.
With one of the lowest fertility rates in the EU, Italy, too, has put its hand in its family-friendly pocket. In 2015, it introduced a payment scheme of €800 ($1470) per couple per birth.
To “cure” singleness, local governments in Japan are now sponsoring matchmaking events. In South Korea, the Government has tried to boost flagging fertility rates with extended parental leave entitlements and more prolonged access to early-childhood education and care services. In China, more than three years after lifting its one-child policy, some provinces are tightening access to abortion and making it more difficult to get divorced. Chinese online travel company Trip.com Group offers a range of benefits to support parents, including taxi rides to and from the office during pregnancies and bonuses when employees’ children reach school age. Last year, it announced that it would begin subsidising the cost of freezing the eggs of “some” managers (the country still bars single women from the procedure).
Elsewhere, parents-to-be are being nudged into having more children as part of their patriotic duty. Ad campaigns in Denmark and Singapore encourage young couples to “do it for your country”.
Some of the initiatives have found success. The Japanese town of Nagicho increased its fertility rate from 1.4 to about 1.9 in 2017 by offering new mothers a “gift” of 300,000 yen ($4700), as well as subsidies for children’s care, housing, health and education.
But overall, increased fertility is not so easily won.
Nordic countries used to have high fertility rates, due in part to favourable parental leave and childcare policies. Now these policies don’t seem to be having as much effect as one would expect, says Anna Karlsdóttir, a researcher for the Nordic Council of Ministers. Recent figures show Finland’s average fertility rate is now 1.4 births per woman, compared with 1.9 in 2010. Norway is just behind at 1.56 children, compared with 1.96 in 2010. “We’re heading towards a situation like in China,” Karlsdóttir says in a press statement, “even without a one-child policy.”
And once fertility falls below replacement level, says Tahu Kukutai, a professor of demography at the University of Waikato, it is difficult to reboot. “In countries with very low levels of fertility, such as Singapore, Korea and Italy, fertility has not increased, despite considerable efforts to encourage women to marry and have more babies.”
New Zealand’s fertility rate is higher than many OECD countries, with Europe being described as “the continent of the empty crib”.
is more difficult for those on a short-term visa. The result will be a growing number of people caught in a temporary-employment treadmill – good for employers, perhaps, but falling far short of worker security and community investment.
But the focus remains on highly skilled migrants vying for fewer places. In 2016, the Government’s two-yearly residency programme planning range was dropped from 90,000100,000 to 85,000-90,000 migrants. While waiting to confirm new residency settings, the present Government set an interim range of 50,000-60,000 for the 18 months between July 2018 and December last year. Overall, the number of approved residency applications has plummeted, halving between 2015 and 2019 for those applicants already in New Zealand on temporary visas and falling from 2900 in 2015 to 1190 for those from outside New Zealand. At the same time, applications have continued to climb. At the end of last year, more than 35,000 people were waiting for a residence decision, the highest number since 2011.
Do the maths, immigration adviser David Cooper tells the Listener. “There are more people in the queue than places available. If the Government sticks with the same number, or reduces it, what are they going to do with all these people in the queue? It’s a train wreck waiting to happen.”
Cooper says it’s wait and see on what effect the expected economic downturn prompted by the Covid19 outbreak will have on immigration.
“There’s no immediate impact but that may change. Most of New Zealand’s migration is being driven around jobs. If unemployment increases there may be migrant workers who have been here for quite some time who suddenly can’t renew their work visas because there will be New Zealanders available who could do that job because they’ve lost their own jobs.”
In the meantime, the number of people in New Zealand on student and temporary work visas has soared.
At the time of the 2013 census, there were about 161,000 people in New Zealand on a work or study visa. By 2018, that figure was 263,000 and there are now about 290,000. “So, in the five years between the two censuses, 100,000 of population growth is not for people with longterm residency rights but people coming to study and work on temporary visas,” says Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis at the University of Waikato. “This means nearly 6% of people in New Zealand are on temporary visas and among 25- to 35-year-olds, nearly 20% have temporary status.”
Some, including an estimated 30% of international students, will go on to apply for residency, but this promoted pathway is long and looks set to become longer. This adds uncertainty to employers and prevents those in the residency waiting room from applying for certain jobs, buying homes, getting a bank loan or simply settling down.
“We should be thinking about the implications of having such a large number of people on temporary status for long periods of time,” says Collins. “You do not have a lot of rights when you are on a temporary visa. Take a Filipino dairy farmer with two kids – they become part of the community and they boost the local school roll, but their long-term status is not secure. That raises some pretty thorny questions about how we treat people and communities.”
It also raises some thorny issues for local government.
SHORT-TERM GAIN
“Successive governments have played a population ponzi game,” says Dave Cull, president of Local Government New Zealand, “where they welcome extra people and that has stimulated the economy and the Government has gained a higher rate of GST and PAYE, but they haven’t put that money back into the infrastructure needed to service those extra people. The whole thing is out of whack.”
Cull says councils are expected to plan 10, 20 or 30 years ahead, “but we don’t do that as a country. As a country we need to ask ourselves, do we want the population to go up at all and if we do, shouldn’t we plan for it? And who will pay for it?”
Infrastructure New Zealand chief executive Paul Blair agrees there is a funding mismatch. Local government has only 10% of the country’s tax take “but is responsible for delivering more than a third of New Zealand’s infrastructure, including urban water, transport and housing”. He recommends recycling a larger chunk of money from central Government to regional bodies “in order to get good things happening”.
Rampant house-price inflation seems one legacy of New Zealand’s significant population growth, and perhaps an indication of
“If the Government sticks with the same number, or reduces it, what are they going to do with all these people in the queue? It’s a train wreck waiting to happen.”
short-term thinking. Migrants who come to fill job shortages contribute to the economy, but also add costs to it.
As the rate of natural population growth declines and a growing number of retirees move on to fixed incomes, costs to taxpayers will keep increasing. New Zealand’s birth rate is at an average 1.88 births per woman. This is higher than most other OECD countries – parts of Europe, East Asia and North America have had below-replacement fertility rates for decades – but still below the 2.1 total fertility rate that keeps the population on an even keel.
Once fertility falls below replacement level, says Tahu Kukutai, professor of demography at the University of Waikato, it is difficult to reboot. “In countries with very low levels of fertility, such as Singapore,
Korea and Italy, fertility has not increased, despite considerable efforts to encourage women to marry and have more babies.”
As seen around the globe, low fertility, fewer women entering child-bearing years and a potentially growing trend towards childlessness lead to a rapidly ageing population. Already, nearly 750,000 New Zealanders are aged 65 or over, up 40% from a decade ago. On current projections, by 2050, between a quarter and a third of all New Zealanders will be in that age bracket.
When Natalie Jackson was born in 1950, the age structure was like a pyramid – a large base of newborns narrowing to a small point of older people. “Now, most of us older people are still here and the birth rate has dropped by half.” Even the “baby boom echo” – small surges in the number of births as women born in periods of higher fertility begin having children – won’t offset the increasing numbers of over-65s and the inversion of that age pyramid.
In a microcosm of Europe’s situation, small towns are already seeing this as young people decamp to the cities (of the extra 1.2 million people expected to live in New Zealand by 2045, 60% are likely to end up in Auckland) and rural people retire to nearby towns. Already, Kāpiti and Thames/Coromandel have more deaths than births.
A “social atlas” put together by Jackson and the University of Waikato’s Lars Brabyn
“We bring in lots of labour but we don’t think about their wives, their children, their mothers, their fathers.”
Rampant houseprice inflation seems one legacy of New Zealand’s significant population growth.
uses data going back to 1976 to project population changes across the country. Between 2023 and 2043, the number of regions experiencing growth from both natural increase and net migration is expected to fall dramatically. By 2040, there will be large areas of the country where natural increase fails to offset net migration loss. Some areas, particularly on the West Coast and in Northland and the central North Island, will have a decline in both these population drivers.
Again, it is a difficult trend to reverse
unless New Zealand sees an increase in migration and redistribution away from Auckland and other main centres.
Kukutai points to Japan, a country with very low fertility and one of the highest life expectancy figures in the world. “That creates extreme population ageing. The proportion of people in key working age groups has really shrunk over the decades. We are nowhere near Japan, but at territorial authority level, an increasing number of local authorities are moving into a zone where retirees outnumber children and the proportion of working population is getting much smaller. So it is not so much how many more teachers we’ll be needing. It is more about how many schools will be closing and how many retirement homes will be built.”
BUILDING A POOL
We can boost our population of highly educated and skilled migrants but global competition for those “pre-packaged and ready to work”, says Jackson, is growing. She says those countries that will succeed in the migration stakes are those that tweak their policies to bring in younger families not necessarily to go straight into the workforce but, like post-war migrants, building a pool “that we will be able to tap into in the future”.
How many people? Anticipating future population growth is a near-impossible task. A 2002 Treasury working paper predicted the New Zealand population growth rate would move into negative figures some time around 2040, with the population peaking at about 4.75 million. Ten years later, a paper from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research said a population goal of 15 million by 2060 was feasible. “The only way you could get to that would be to double the birth rate and quadruple the migration,” says Jackson.
“You are not going to have four to five children a family. Even with a lot of migrants coming in, about two-thirds are temporary and a lot are students – they are not having children. Of those who go on and apply for permanent residence – we’re talking about highly educated people with student loans who need to get out and work – they are not going to have large numbers of children.”
In trying to plan future infrastructure needs, says Blair, you are just about always wrong. Take Auckland’s rapid march up the popularity stakes. “That surprised us and we have not invested in infrastructure. And to be successful you need to invest before that population arrives – retrofitting in and around people is incredibly expensive and disruptive and slow.”
Lees-Galloway is reluctant to pick an “arbitrary cap” for New Zealand’s population.
But calls persist for a population policy. For Blair, it would lay out what we want life to be like for the “average Kiwi” in 2050.
“Using Government language, what sort of well-being will people have at that point – socially, culturally and environmentally? I’ve got three kids – what lifestyle do I want them to have when they are my age? What would happen if 100,000 New Zealanders turned up from Australia at Auckland Airport to come and live? At eight million population, maybe we would have higher
GDP but maybe negative environmental effects. We should have a broadly agreed view that lasts longer than a three-year electoral cycle. Once we have that vision, we build a case for it.”
Kukutai is wary. The very term “population policy”, she warns, has been tainted by white-nationalist ideas of population replacement and “this whole anxiety around the disappearance of the white race”. What we need, she says, is not a big zero target but a more considered approach to policy and planning based on a nuanced understanding of demographics. As she points out, while our overall birth rate lingered on 1.73 births per woman, Māori and Pacific fertility was higher – Māori fertility is at an average 2.31 babies – and the populations more youthful, so giving an “inbuilt momentum” for population growth.
“So in the not-too-distant future, 80% of tamariki in Gisborne will be Māori – how does that impact on regional wellbeing? In Gisborne, there are major issues related to equity but there is also incredible opportunity – if you think of declining fertility and structural ageing, Māori and Pacific children will become increasingly important as our future economic engine. So what are we doing to invest in those young children? These are the things that need to be accounted for. It is not about the big numbers any more. It is understanding that Aotearoa has changed tremendously from what it was 20 years ago – ethnic diversity has exploded, our regional polarisation has deepened, our indigenous population has not only grown but also become dominant in some parts of Aotearoa and is structurally very young.”
‘NEW ZEALAND IS OUR HOME’
Plan or no plan, the next million milestone, says migration expert Richard Bedford, emeritus professor at the University of Waikato and the Auckland University of Technology, will take longer and will hinge on migration. “If we have sustained net gains of 40-50,000 a year, we will meet six million by the middle of the century. But we have never had sustained net migration of that level. If you look back over the past 30 years, our net migration has gone up and down like a yo-yo.
“Six million, eight million – we have projections that can get us there but we don’t talk enough about what sort of society we want. We bring in lots of labour but we don’t think about their wives, their children, their mothers, their fathers. We don’t need a magical number, we need a massive change in people’s attitudes and behaviour. Migration isn’t just about labour – it is about people’s lives.”
Joy Yallop knows that. Eighteen months after arriving in New Zealand, she became homesick. Her twin sister was getting married in Spain so Yallop and her husband flew back, and while in England and Spain told their friends and family that they were likely to move back home. Then they returned to New Zealand, “and life was just amazing”.
“Once we got back here and saw our close friends and got back to work, we realised that we actually loved it out here and going back to England might not be the right choice, but we could always visit them.” On the third Christmas after the couple migrated, they returned to the UK. “We absolutely loved it but by the third day, James said, ‘You know, I’m ready to go back,’ and I said, ‘I totally agree with you.’ And we realised that New Zealand is our home now and we’ll never go back for a winter Christmas again.”
The term population policy has been tainted by white-nationalist ideas around the “disappearance of the white race”.