Sat, May 29, 2004 page9

• Baby bonus: Lie back and think of the bank balance

  Boosting birthrates by giving cash for babies is bad policy, with laughably low sums showing the bean-counters' moral blindness

  • By Hilary Burden / THE GUARDIAN
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  You should have "one for your husband, one for your wife and one for your country," says Australia's treasurer/prime minister-in-waiting. He's not speaking Australian, referring to the nation's favorite drink. These are the new fertility rules.

  Along with other Western politicians concerned about the global ageing population crisis, Peter Costello, a father of three, wants more than votes -- he wants babies. What's more, he wants net profit: more babies than it takes simply to replace two parents. And he's prepared to pay for it. From July onwards, the Australian government is to pay an un-means-tested A$3,000 (US$2,153) for every newborn, rising to A$5,000 by 2008.

  It's not just an Australian concern. Every EU country (old and new) is below the population replacement level of 2.1 children. Italy has already addressed the problem with "the Berlusconi baby bonus" of 1,000 euros (US$1,227) for all women giving birth to a second child by the end of this year. And in Laviano, a tiny hilltop town southeast of Naples, the local mayor has offered a further 10,000 euros in an effort to stop young people leaving to find jobs and keep his town from disappearing.

  But when a big country like Australia (population 20 million), renowned for its harsh immigration policies, offers incentives for babies, it smells more like bad attitude than real need: A$3,000 is both too much and not enough.

  It's too much because it would be cheaper to buy the whole nation a free round rather than tell adult couples to tuck up in bed and procreate as if there were no tomorrow and no yesterday. What does Costello think the past 30 years has meant for women, if he now implies we must be happy with our laundry and our little ones?

  It's too much because if I were 15, naive and poor, putting a few grand in my bank account by getting pregnant a couple of times might seem an easier option in life than either work or study. It's too much because there are already children in line from other countries who could be paid to have a better life in a safer, less densely populated country. It's too much because older people who are already born could be more productive if we cared more.

  But more than anything it's not enough. If being paid to have results-based sex for the sake of your country is the deal, isn't this just another form of nationalized prostitution?

  I'm not a parent, but any parent will tell you the offer is verging on offensive, and not what having babies is all about.

  Just do the math. In the UK, the cost of a child's life was recently calculated as ?164,000 (US$301,268), with the average cost of the first five years alone being more than ?20,000.

  If the principle of paying people to reproduce is a good one, then ?1,200 is a cheap bribe.

  "You'll have to make up for some of your friends that aren't even replicating themselves," Costello told Australians in his ninth budget. To non-self-replicants (the new word for non-parents?), this man is not addressing the reasons why people are having fewer children.

  We in the West are having fewer children, later in life, for as many reasons as there are individuals: we don't want them, we haven't met our life partner, we can't afford a mortgage and a child, we prefer freedom and choice over and above family, we're still travelling, we can afford to look after our aging parents but not more children of our own.

  Having to spell out the many scenarios that inform the choices of modern life to a bean counter who would crush them because he thinks they're a luxury means we're witnessing a government losing touch with reality as well as the cost of living.

  Life is far more complicated than that. Maybe families are the future, but it's not necessarily how things are working out. Divorce rates, cohabitation, single parenthood, the rise of happy singles, domestic violence -- it's all much more subtle than a birthrate graph that should read 2.6 children per family and rising instead of 2.1 and falling.

  Paying people to have babies is a cack-handed, retrograde, imperialist policy. How different is it from eugenics or the white Australia policy of the 1960s? What is it if not another way of saying, "We want more people like us, not people like you?"

  Not only that, it's a wham-bam man's view of solving the problem, equating having babies with all the emotional intelligence of a quick shag and a notch on the bedpost, with all the satisfaction of an orgasm yet none of the responsibility of what follows.

  A numbers game is not what having babies is all about; and it's not what not having babies is all about, either.
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