PM’s Department Report validates what family advocates already know: The consequences for a society that rejects the child are becoming clearer.
By Anthony Barich
Australia’s dramatically declining fertility rate is jeopardising its own economic and social future and its ability to care for its aged, according to a major Federal Government report.
Families in Australia: 2008, published by the Prime Minister’s Department to help guide Federal Government family policies, said that living together before marriage reduces the chances of a long-lasting marriage and that divorce psychologically damages children.
The percentage of couples without children will overtake the percentage of couples with children by 2026 as the most common form of family. Meanwhile, by then, couples only will constitute 44 per cent of families.
Longer-term, this will severely impact on the demand for care, which, the report said, is likely to increase in the future as Australia’s population ages.
The proportion of Australians aged 65 years and over is expected to almost double by 2051, to 26 per cent of the population, or more than seven million people.
“Combined, Australia’s low fertility and ageing population have major implications for future caring in Australia,” the report said.
“For families themselves, there will be increased pressure to provide further informal care to the frail aged and family members with disability. More broadly, there will be increasing pressure to provide additional aged care and services for frail aged Australians and those with disability.”
Over the next 25 years, the number of younger people is expected to form a smaller proportion of the total population and older people a larger proportion.
“There is some concern as to whether there will be a sufficient labour supply to support an ageing population,” the report said.
The Commonwealth Treasury, in the Intergenerational Report 2007, notes that ‘in 2007 there are five people of working age (15-64 years) to support every person aged 65 and over. By 2047, there will only be 2.4 people of working age supporting each person aged 65 and over’ (Commonwealth Treasury, 2007).
While recent research notes that Australia has a high fertility level compared with many other developed nations, and only small migrant intakes are required to address labour supply issues with an ageing population, the report conceded that the “relatively lower levels of fertility of the last 30 years may also affect the country’s ability to care for its ageing population”.
“Smaller family sizes mean fewer children to help care for aged parents. Increasing childlessness means that greater proportions of older people will not have children to assist in their care. This trend will likely see a demand for increased government services and an increase in the number of working-age women and men caring for older parents as well as very young children, who may struggle to balance their work and caring responsibilities. There is also likely to be increasing demand for flexible work arrangements, child and elder care, and leave to balance work with family responsibilities.”
Overall, the proportion of people living with a partner, married or de facto, has declined since the 1980s, which the report says is linked with the population ageing, a greater rate of separation and divorce and fewer people forming long-term relationships in the first place.
The report said that the rate of relationship breakdown is higher for de facto relationships than marriages, as de facto couples are three times as likely to end their relationship within a five-year period as those who are married.
“It should be recognised, however, that there is a significant variation in the nature of de facto relationships, ranging from couples testing their commitment prior to making a decision about marriage to couples intending to have a long-term commitment,” the report said
It also said that the age at which people marry is increasing, partly as a result of more people living together before marriage, while it also attributed lower marriage rates to an increase in de facto relationships.
There are seven times more single mothers with children under 15 than single fathers.
A key change for Australian families, it said, is the decline in average household size, from 3.6 people in 1954 to 2.5 in 2006 – a trend that is expected to continue gradually, which the report attributes to lower fertility rates (the number of children women have on average) and the fact that more people are living alone.
More are living in de facto relationships than in the past, relationships are more likely to break up, and marriage bears a less direct relationship to having children, the report said.
There has also been a “substantial” increase in the breakdown of marriage, which the report attributes to the substantially simplified divorce procedures that followed the introduction of the Family Law Act 1975. Before this, the crude divorce rate was one per 1000. By 1976 it had rocketed to 4.5 divorces per 1000, “as the backlog of divorce applications was cleared”. Since then, the crude divorce rate has hovered between about 2.5 and three divorces per 1000.
This has had dire implications for children. A “substantial minority” of children had experienced change in living circumstances because of divorce.
Most commonly, when parents separate, children spend some time in a mother-only family, and some, later, go on to live in a step or blended family with one of their parents, the report said, and that many studies have highlighted concern about the effect family disruption has on children.
“On the whole, children who have experienced such transitions have poorer social and emotional outcomes in childhood and later life, compared with children who have not experienced such transitions,” the report said, while adding that the differences are not large.
“Contact arrangements after separation that allow for meaningful, supportive relationships to continue are important for the wellbeing of both the children and parents.”
In 2006, de facto relationships were a more popular choice than marriage for people in their early 20s, but for those in their late 20s onwards, marriage was more common, which the report said suggests that marriage is still the preferred eventual arrangement for people in long-term relationships.
More families were delaying having children or not having children at all.
In 2003, 41 per cent of all first births were to women aged over 30, compared with 28 per cent in 1993. Around one-in-five women of child-bearing years can be expected not to have children.
In 2004, the top-ranked factor for both men and women was whether they could afford to support the child.
This trend will affect Australia’s future labour supply and its capacity to care for older people.
“As the population ages, the difference between numbers of births and deaths will decrease,” it said. “The number of births, however, is projected to remain higher than the number of deaths until the end of the century. It is projected that by 2047 there will only be 2.4 people of working age supporting each person aged 65 and over, down from five people in 2007.”
The report said that the 2006 Census suggested there are about 26,000 same-sex couples, making up less than one per cent of all couple families, but warned that this was likely an under-estimate as some couples may not have chosen to identify as same-sex in the census.
There were also about 14,000 grandparent-headed families with children under 18 in 2006-7, while 7000 families contained one or more foster children.
Only a small number of children are adopted each year- 568 in 2006-07 – and adoptions have decreased considerably since the 1970s and are now largely made up of adoptions of children from overseas.