Could the government convince you to have babies?
Tokyo's local government is introducing a dating app to combat falling birth rates.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said this year’s federal budget was one for mums, but did he deliver?
“Whether it is a bigger tax cut for more than 90% of women, paying superannuation on paid parental leave, wiping HELP debt, or funding wage increases in aged care and childcare, the women of Australia will be big beneficiaries of the budget.”
Fascinatingly, almost all of these changes benefit all people equally - not mothers more-so. The framing is uniquely Labor in an election year. They are appealing to an audience they won in 2022 with, simply due to Morrison’s failures with women. It wasn’t a hard won voter-base. Now, they need to offer more than the bare minimum to stay.
Now, it’s all of our responsibility to see through the spin and focus on what we actually need to feel comfortable having more children: easing the cost of living crisis, pay equity, affordable childcare, and arguably most importantly - getting men out of the workforce instead of shaming mother’s for struggling to choose/manage/determine how to exist within it.
The value of women’s work, and the choice around whether to become a parent is a central pillar in my new book (which comes out in November, bit of a tease). Not because I think I have any expertise around motherhood, I don’t, but because these are the messy, ‘controversial’ conversations I want generation Z to be having five minutes ago as we look to the future of feminism and how we can shape it.
In Annabel Crabb’s bestselling book, The Wife Drought she asked:
“Why, after all these decades of campaign, reform, research and thought about how we can best get women into the workplace, are we so slow to pick up that the most important next step is how to get men out of it?”
The question is vital globally, as new data from this year shows that by 2050, 75 per cent of countries will fall below the population replacement birth rate of 2.1 babies per female, according to The Lancet Medical Journal. While birth rates in the poorest countries in the world will remain high in vulnerable conditions, wealthier nations will face questions of how to resource and support an ageing population.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia’s ‘fertility rate’, the number of births per woman, was 1.63 babies in 2022, compared to 1.93 in 2012.
Our federal Treasurer exclaiming that birth rates could be higher, and labelling the budget as benefitting mothers is an attempt to do what many other global leaders are already exploring: how do we convince people (read: women is the language they’re using) to have more babies?
Introducing, Tokyo’s newest dating app.
Announced last week and coming out later this year, the fee-based platform will see users undergo an intense setup process in which they will be required to submit documents to establish they are legally single and sign a letter which stipulates their willingness to get married.
It doesn’t end there though, the application will also require users to provide evidence of their annual salary, at least fifteen items of personal information and involves a mandatory interview with a platform operator.
Is this where taxpayer funds should be funnelled? Or is it the local government of Tokyo providing a safe space that ultimately benefits their vision of the population prosperous future?
Japan’s aging population has already seen the nation begin testing the use of artificial intelligence bots as support services for their future elderly cultural makeup. This is one of the key consequences of a population that cannot sustain itself: a workforce that cannot resource itself and the burden of an older social demographic.
While trying to balance not giving away too much about my new book and still getting into the grit of the discussion, the fundamental problem is the undervaluation of women’s work.
Feminism fought to get women into the workforce, without giving up any of the domestic and caring responsibilities that men (and the economy they created) have never valued or been compelled to take on.
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