Australians are having fewer children and this is driving our birth rate to record lows and contributing to the development of a society and institutions that are not sensitive to children. Also of concern is the disproportionate number of children now being raised in single income households and in households where neither parent works.

WAYNE SWAN argues that we must modernise family policy at the national level to prevent the Australian family from becoming an endangered species.

The family is the most important of all social institutions. It shapes the morality of society by shaping the values of individuals, and it determines the success of the economy by having a profound influence on the potential of the individuals that it nurtures.

But despite its singular power to shape our future, the family is declining in its influence. Fewer Australians are having children and our birth rate is at a record low. There are now more couples without children than couples with children. Those households that are having children have lower incomes than others, and many struggle without any work at all. Society is becoming a less child friendly place: those who can afford to exercise choices are opting not to have children; those who can't are raising children with fewer resources.

Governments seem oblivious to what is at stake here. Far from assisting families to raise children, they are implementing policies that increase the costs of children - and these costs hit low and middle income families the hardest. Despite its rhetoric to the contrary, the current federal government has put enormous pressure on family budgets by cutting child care and school funding and then introducing a new tax on all of the items that families buy. A consumption tax hits families hard with because families consume more. The government's pursuit of further industrial relations deregulation will not deliver more family-friendly workplace policies but will undermine what few existing policies there are in place. The failure to introduce welfare to work programs has left 800,000 children in jobless households. Despite the importance of investing in the early years of childhood, the government has failed to introduce a national approach to early intervention, preferring instead to leave this vital area to the states and territories.

We need to take a new approach to investing in families. We need to understand why so many Australians are not having children and introduce policies that reduce the cost of raising children. We need to pay particular attention to the rising number of children being raised in low income families, particularly sole-parent families, and find ways to help parents balance work and family. We need a national early intervention program that provides parenting skills to new parents and offers parenting support locally. We need to build on our current network of child care centres and kindergartens to involve children in stimulating environments earlier, because we know the true value of an early education later in life. We need tax and social security policies that provide financial flexibility, particularly when children are young. We need to find ways to help entire suburbs that are falling behind and explore the possibility of pooling resources, including from the different levels of government.

If we don't make this leap, we will become the kind of society where children are hidden away in declining suburbs, in poor schools, while their parents work longer and harder to support an ageing population. Preventing the Australian family from becoming an endangered species is the most pressing issue in social policy today.

Declining birth rate - cause for alarm or sign of progress?

The number of babies born each year has been declining since 1991 and now stands at 252,000, the same as it was eight years ago in 1989. Women now bear on average 1.78 children, down from 1.84 eight years ago, and the median age of mothers having their first child has risen to 27.1 years. This is not the lowest birth rate in the world, but is heading that way. The birth rate is forecast to continue falling, with the proportion of the population aged under 15 being forecast to drop from 20 to 15 per cent over the next 50 years. Already, the number of couples without children has overtaken the number of couples with children. There are now 2.15 million couple families without children compared to 2 million couple families with children. (ABS 1999a, 1999b)

Is the fact that fewer families are having children cause for alarm or a sign of progress? There are some who say that as a society becomes more educated families choose to have fewer children, presumably to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by a decent education. There are others who say that it is precisely because the costs of children are so high, and because society does not offer parents the choice of both work and family, that many families are pushed into making deferring child bearing, or giving up entirely. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, although there is certainly enough evidence to indicate that many parents pay a high price for parenthood, suggesting that the declining birth rate is more a cause for alarm than a sign of progress.

Witness the evidence of insensitive and discriminatory treatment of pregnant workers presented to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC 1999) in the preparation of their report, Pregnant and Productive. Witness the recent Steggles case where the company refused to address the child care needs of a woman whose shift had just been moved to very early in the morning. As our working lives swallow more and more of our time, the hours left over at the end of each day for family are shrinking. At the same time, parents are driven to the workforce to pay for the rising costs of raising children, particularly the cost of child care, education and health. Parents are caught on a treadmill; working harder and longer to earn the money needed to raise children, and having less time to spend with them. It is not surprising some couples are looking for an easier way.

In addition to the costs for individual couples, there are costs for society of a declining birth rate. As the proportion of the population over 65 grows, an extra burden is placed on current workers to finance the care of the elderly. The fewer of these workers the greater the burden on them. This raises an issue of intergenerational equity. Why should current workers have to shoulder a greater burden than others? And if they refuse, would government be forced to think the unthinkable and further constrain income support and services to the aged.

This is a situation no government wants to be in and one way to take the pressure off is to lift the birth rate. This is the underbelly of the current population debate. What we should be talking about is a balanced approach to increasing our population; one that recognises the importance of supporting Australian families to have children.

Plight of low and middle income families

At the same time as fewer families are having children, children are becoming more concentrated in lower and middle income families. Sixty per cent of all children are raised in families with incomes below $50,000. The growing number of children raised in one-parent families are pulling this average down. One half of these children live in families earning less than $20,000 a year. One in five (5,800,000) children are now raised in jobless households. What is so disturbing about these figures is that they have been getting worse during a period of high economic growth. Clearly, this growth is not trickling down to many of these families. They are falling further behind. 

If we look at where these families live, an alarming picture emerges. More and more are living in the outer ring suburbs or in regions like the northern coast of New South Wales and the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in Queensland. More of them are growing up in rural and regional areas than in the cities (unpublished data 1999). These are also the areas where jobs are declining and where the unemployment rate has not fallen, despite the progress that is being made at the national level. This concentration of low income children in declining suburbs and regions compounds the disadvantage of children. Not only is there very little income to support children, but also schools, health, and other services in the area are likely to be below standard.

What is the government doing?

Far from ameliorating these alarming trends with new policies, key decisions taken by the federal government have made matters worse. Cuts to services, combined with the new taxes that have been introduced, have increased the cost of raising children. When you cut health, education, child care and labour market assistance, families bear the brunt. Similarly, when you introduce a new tax on consumption, families, who consume the most, bear the brunt. The changes to industrial relations are reducing, rather than increasing, the ability of employees to bargain for family friendly policies.

The net effect of the such policies, even with the tax cuts, have raised the costs of raising children for low and middle income Australians. The real winners from the changes have been single people and couples without children on high incomes. This is the point made repeatedly by Professor Peter McDonald but it seems so far to have gone unnoticed in the general media. It is a very serious point because it means that actions taken by this government are more likely to drive the birth rate even lower.

It is not just the increased costs of raising children that is the problem with the current government's approach. The government has also reduced the opportunities for families to get ahead, particularly those who are dependent on welfare. It has withdrawn most of the welfare to work programs that existed to help families get jobs. It has cut the Jobs, Education and Training Program which Labor initiated to help sole parents get work. It has cut child care which families depend upon to be able to work. It is in the process of destroying the Education Entry Payment and the Employment Entry Payment - the few programs that exist to reward people on social security for working and studying. It rejected Labor's tax credit - the one serious policy that would have reduced the poverty traps that are preventing so many families from taking up job opportunities or extra work.

The net effect of this has been to increase the dependency of families on the government. The opposite should have been happening. We should have been seeing a decline in dependency over a period of such strong economic growth, but we have witnessed the opposite.

For many, the government's so-called commitment to families has been a disappointment. Rather than reducing the costs of having children and supporting families to become more independent, government policies have raised the costs of children and kept many families dependent on welfare. The announced new directions, such as the social coalition and the National Families Strategy, are largely cosmetic.

This agenda has been a distraction, as it was intended to be. The broad social coalition incorporating government, business and the community already largely exists, but there are limits to what such an alignment can achieve when the key partner (government) fails to show leadership. The key measures - tax breaks for private firms who give to charity - is tinkering at the margins. The National Families Strategy is little more than a patchwork quilt of existing pilot initiatives. These pilots do little to dent growing inequality and poverty because their budgets bear no relationship to the size of the issues this country needs to tackle. The government has missed the opportunity to modernise family policy.

Looking forward: the view of Labor

The Labor Opposition is arguing for an overhaul of the way family policy is designed and delivered. What is required is a new and ambitious goal in family policy supported by a raft of new policy approaches. We need to aim to stabilise the declining birth rate through policies which reduce the costs of raising children and which help develop institutions that are more child friendly. 

To achieve this goal we need new policies including a focus on early intervention, more flexibility in the delivery of financial support to families, the introduction of further tax relief for families, and welfare reform targeted at families dependent on government benefits for their main source of income. If we do not go down this path, we will become the kind of society where children are hidden away in declining suburbs and in poor schools while their parents work longer and harder to support an ageing population, or don't work at all.

Stabilising the birth rate

A legitimate goal of family policy is to stabilise our declining birth rate. The birth rate is forecast to continue to decline in future years. By defining a new goal for family policy it is elevated to the position that it deserves on the national policy agenda. Family policy is not just about providing support to families; it is about delivering the kind of population growth that will make our nation stronger and will enable our nation to continue to enjoy rising living standards into the future.

Family policy is about building the kind of nation that knows how to nurture children; that knows how to invest for the future. We must articulate our social and family policy goals before we embark on further economic changes. This is the only way we will be able to cope with rapid change as a society, and avoid significant social dysfunction.

Role of government

Elevating family policy to the national agenda requires the government to play a strong role in designing and implementing family policy. It also implies that national government should take the leadership because increasing the birth rate is a national issue. It should not be left to the states and territories and it should not be left to the private sector.

The national government must re-appraise the role it plays in a modern society and shift the social policy focus from compensating the victims of economic reforms to policy making where economic action complements our social goals.

Reducing the costs of raising children

At the heart of a new family policy must be measures to reduce the costs of raising children. New ways must be found to boost the family budget. New ways of compensating families need to be implemented - ways that don't make the poverty traps inherent in the system even worse. This means we need to look further than simply increasing social security payments. We need to look at fixing up the interactions between the tax and social security systems. By providing a tax cut to low income working families, a tax credit can both boost family incomes and reduce poverty traps. By providing a greater incentive to work, tax credits can also encourage families on welfare to move into the workforce. Tax credits are an essential part of reducing the costs of raising children.

As one of the major costs of raising children, child care needs to be made more affordable than it currently is. We also need to look at ways to make social security income more flexible so that parents can afford to stay at home when children are babies. One option is to offer a family's future entitlement to family allowance (the basic rate) up front, to be paid in higher instalments over two years. This would enable one parent to stay at home with newborn babies.

Developing institutions that are child friendly

We need to recognise that providing additional financial resources is not enough. What many families want is not more money, but more time to spend with children, as the recent survey by the Australia Institute showed (Eckersley 1999).

Government has a role in guiding business to implement more family friendly workplaces. This is one area in which the current government's obsessive and narrow industrial relations agenda is potentially so damaging. The government likes to talk about flexibility in the workplace, but the news from the coalface is very different. It tells of parents working longer and longer hours, more and more unpaid overtime, and all the time fearful of their jobs if they don't comply.

Just one in ten enterprise bargaining agreements contain a family friendly measure. Stronger legislative action is needed here, and a good start would be implementing the amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act recommended in the recent Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report Pregnant and Productive.

Reconstructing welfare

Urgent action is required to reduce the numbers of families dependent on the government for their main source of income. The social security system will have to change. Simply making payments, allocating budgets - no questions asked, no care given - does not address the core problems facing families. That is yesterday's approach to yesterday's circumstances.

Responding to modern challenges requires a smarter approach. We need an active system that lifts people up, rather than keeping them down. We need labour market assistance targeted to families that can address health and welfare needs at the same time as labour market needs are considered. Many families face multiple disadvantages in getting back to work and we need services that can work with them.

We also need to consider pooling the resources that governments provide to disadvantaged areas. In many cases large sums of money are going into areas for very little result. If we can find a way to get more out of the welfare dollar by investing it more wisely, particularly in education and training, then we should be trialing these new ways.

Early intervention

The most significant change required is the reorientation of family support to the early years. We need to improve the early years for children by improving the skills of their parents and children's access to more stimulating environments. We need to get parenting skills into the home and children into stimulating programs in the community at an early age. And we must focus our efforts on those communities where children are currently falling behind.

We already have in the community a variety of different agencies that are there to help families and children. We have child care centres, health services, schools, local libraries, Centrelink, Job Network services, and a range of agencies run by not-for-profit organisations. What we need to look at is building on the strong and most trusted agencies so that Early Childhood and Parenting Centres are available in communities where children will benefit. These Centres should not just offer help on site. They should operate home visiting services, link in with the local library for reading help for parents, and offer help over the phone and the Internet. They should be strongest in those areas with the largest concentrations of children.

One option to encourage parents to participate in parenting skills is to link Parenting Payment to participation in Parenting Skills programs. When a mother registers for Parenting Payment she and her partner could become entitled to ten free home visits from a trained nurse and an early childhood educator. There has been controversy around this idea because of the very real issue of what we do when parents refuse to participate - particularly when we know that their children are at risk. Parenting skills programs are not much of an investment if the families who could really benefit the most from them do not get access.

In some cases, a stocktake of local capacity will uncover quality state government initiatives. The New South Wales and Queensland governments are leading the way with programs such as Families First and the Positive Parenting Program. We need to build on these exciting new initiatives with a national approach that does not crowd out state action and overcomes Commonwealth -State roadblocks.

If governments can help families in the first three years of a child's life we stand the best chance of ensuring that they succeed in life. If we wait, it may not matter how much money we pump into a family, we will only really be providing a band-aid. We cannot really prevent problems in the long-term unless we intervene early on. And yet currently, the parenting skills funding is worth just 0.00036 per cent of total funding for one social security payment - Parenting Payment. The government is investing next to nothing in early intervention.

Conclusion

If action is not taken now to support families, the birth rate will continue to decline and families will continue to decline. Over time, society will become less and less sensitive to the needs of children and children that are being raised will continue to suffer lower incomes and reduced opportunities. As today's children are tomorrow's workforce, and tomorrow's workforce generates the wealth that we all share in, if we cut investments in children then sooner or later we all suffer. Getting family policy right is thus crucial to the future prosperity of the nation.

This article has argued that we need a new goal at the heart of family policy - stabilisation of the birth rate - and that we need new policies to reduce the costs of raising children. These policies should not just focus on easing the financial burden through tax credits and more affordable child care, but they should also focus on changing institutions, particularly the workplace, to give parents more time with children. The dramatic increase in welfare dependence among families means we also need special labour market assistance targeted at jobless families, and the excellent results achieved by early intervention programs overseas provide a strong argument for introducing such measures here.

These are the kinds of directions we need to be debating in Australia, but instead we have a government offering distractions like the social coalition. We cannot afford distractions like this because the stakes of ignoring the need to support families are too high. This is the point that the government has missed and the reason why Labor is so committed to forging a new agenda in family policy.

References

• ABS (1999a), Australian Social Trends 1999, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, Catalogue No. 4102.
• ABS (1999b), Children, Australia: A Social Report 1999, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, Catalogue No. 4119.
• Eckersley, R. (1999), Quality of Life in Australia, Discussion Paper No. 23, Australia Institute, Canberra.
• HEROC (1999), Pregnant and Productive: It's a Right Not a Privilege to Work While Pregnant, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Canberra.
• McDonald, P. (1999), Submission to the Senate Inquiry into the GST and testimony, Canberra.
• Unpublished data (1999), Department of Family and Community Services data, Canberra.

Wayne Swan is Labor's Federal Shadow Minister for Family and Community Services. Recent speeches include: 'Making families stronger: Labor's new directions for family support' (May 1999); 'Reconstruct or wreck: Labor versus the Coalition: the future of the family' (July 1999); 'Investing in children: why we must dramatically refocus the way governments invest in families and future generations' (August 1999); and 'Cooperation, not competition: a new foundation for the development of social services in Australia' (November 1999). These speeches are available at Wayne Swan's Website: www.swanmp.org