Abstract
Australia’s population grew rapidly during most of the nineteenth century, based on high fertility and policies that encouraged immigration. From the beginning of the twentieth century through the end of the Second World War, the birth rate fell sharply, and net migration was close to zero. After the Second World War, the government initiated policies to increase Australia’s population through both fertility and immigration. Since the 1970s, after a baby boom driven largely by a tempo effect, fertility has fluctuated in a narrow band between 1.73 and 1.96 births per woman, while life expectancy has increased steadily and immigration has reached an all-time high. Over the past 60 years, the Australian government has introduced, modified, and in some cases withdrawn a range of programs to benefit families with children. These have included support for a basic wage, equal wages for women, cash payments to families based on the number of children, tax deductions for expenses related to children, and support for institutionalized childcare. Policy goals have included improving equity across income groups and first discouraging and then supporting the labor-force participation of women. Increasing fertility is no longer a stated policy objective. Today, Australia’s population policy effectively is policy about the size and nature of the migration program.
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Notes
- 1.
Many of the author’s ancestors arrived in Australia as poverty-stricken assisted-passage immigrants between 1839 and 1854.
- 2.
Australia’s population trebled in the single decade, 1850–1860, as a result of the Victorian gold rush.
- 3.
Australia’s social-welfare system is based on a system of guaranteed “safety-net” payments made by the government from consolidated revenue rather than upon a social-insurance system. Its development is described in Castles and Mitchell (1993).
- 4.
In the minority, John Curtin, later war-time Prime Minister of Australia, supported the introduction of child endowment along with the only female commissioner, Mildred Muncio.
- 5.
Fertility reached a peak of 3.55 births per woman in 1961 and a trough of 1.73 in 2001.
- 6.
All dollar amounts in this chapter are Australian dollars. From the time the Australian dollar was introduced in 1966, its value has fluctuated widely against the United States (US) dollar, but in recent years, the Australian and US dollars have been close to parity.
- 7.
The tax-free threshold is the income level below which no income tax is payable by an individual. The threshold had remained at about $5,000 to $6,000 for decades before it was increased to $18,200 on 1 July 2012.
- 8.
Those with a family taxable income of $75,000 or more in the six months following the birth of the child do not receive the payment.
- 9.
A few weeks previously, the payment had been announced as an Opposition policy initiative.
- 10.
Among 34 OECD countries, Australian has the fifth lowest tax-to-gross-domestic-product (GDP) ratio, only higher than Mexico, Chile, the United States, and South Korea.
- 11.
The Prime Minister can be replaced at any time if a majority of members of the two houses of Parliament from the Prime Minister’s party vote for another Member of the House of Representatives to become Prime Minister.
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McDonald, P. (2015). The Evolution of Population and Family Policy in Australia. In: Rindfuss, R., Choe, M. (eds) Low and Lower Fertility. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21482-5_8
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