Christopher Luxon has a point: New Zealand needs more people – Stuff

Breakfast

The National leader spoke to Breakfast about the party's plans to cut tax for some Kiwis and its new policy on mental health.

ANALYSIS: National Party leader Christopher Luxons throwaway comment about Kiwis needing to have more babies has brought population politics - a sometimes uncomfortable, rarely discussed topic into the public domain.

His deputy Nicola Willis said that Luxons off-hand comment encouraging people to make babies at an infrastructure conference on Wednesday was no more than a joke. She confirmed that the number of children people have was not her partys business.

But his comment did, in fact, make an important point. New Zealands falling birthrate, akin to the rest of the Western world, has hit record lows and raises important, long-term economic questions. New Zealand does not reproduce at replacement rate.

In one way, Luxon was stating the obvious: There are only two ways to grow a population: importing people or birthing them.

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Successive governments have failed to come to terms with the ways an ageing, expensive population will change every corner of society, put pressure on already-groaning infrastructure, and simply exacerbate any shortage of workers.

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Christopher Luxon has waded into population politics. (File photo)

New Zealand, in common with the rest of the west, has also struggled to begin any deeper reflection needed on the fundamental issue behind the decline: choice.

The factors which steer peoples family planning choices, such as extremely high housing costs, childcare costs, and the high cost of living, are not tipped in favour of childrearing.

Luxons pitch on the cost of living although light on details at this stage does acknowledge this matter and he has successfully placed it at the centre of the political debate. Chris Hipkins is also scrapping for this territory.

But it is broader.

All our problems go back to housing, says Susan St John, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland and child poverty campaigner.

We hear anecdotally all the time, couples are delaying starting a family because theyre renting, they cant save a deposit. If they do have a child the family can get caught up in all sorts of poverty traps. We have to have two incomes for low income families to pay the rent.

Underlining this all, St John said, is the subliminal message that childrearing is not valued, and women should get back to work as soon as possible.

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Much of societys social ills come back to the housing market, Susan St John says. (File photo)

If parents follow these cues, they must drop their baby off at day care, while they work long hours in order to keep their foothold in the job market, and meet mortgage and daycare costs.

And this is where it gets tricky in a real-world sense. Children can get sick every few weeks, so parents will too, and will have to take days off work to recover. When they are at work, they are run down, harried and exhausted. It hardly looks appealing.

Why cant we be a bit more relaxed about women being out of the workforce for the years their children are young? St John says.

At the same time we are ignore that investment in the next generation who are going to be the ones who determine the standard of living older people can expect, and whether there will be enough skilled people All the people who give older people a better quality of life.

The Labour government has a number of economic incentives for families, such as the Best Start payments. In this years Budget, it promised to match KiwiSaver contributions made by a persons employer for paid parental leave recipients.

National also has a childcare policy, with more to come.

But neither Labour nor National is suggesting any kind of policy which would transform the economy and better plan for the future.

Infometrics chief executive and economist Brad Olsen said young people have been starting every life stage later than previous generations.

They have been getting into debt, going to university, taking longer to get into relationships, have children get into a house - all of that. People are also having fewer kids as well.

At some point in the next 30 years more people will die every day than be born, he said, while swathes of the population will retire.

Easing this will take some forward planning in terms of population strategy and a national skills plan to map out what essential roles and skills the economy will be short of. And, how these might be transferred from one generation to the next.

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Christopher Luxon has a point: New Zealand needs more people - Stuff