THE PRESS MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1984. Changes in population

Press, 27 February 1984, Page 20

THE PRESS MONDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1984. Changes in population

There is more than a little that is inevitable about population trends. After a baby boom there will be a demand on kindergartens, schools, and tertiary education institutions. Just as certainly, the enlarged, youthful population will reach the time of looking for jobs, and eventually retire, grow old, and die. The demands will grow along the way for special medical and housing needs. One of the present trends is for the size of the older population to increase and for the younger population to be smaller. The trend has been brought to the fore again by the Population Monitoring Group of the New Zealand Planning Council. The group’s report draws out the implication that an ageing population will rely more and more heavily on support from the rest of the population. The trend is world wide; the Population Monitoring Group documents the position for New Zealand in “The New Zealand Population: Patterns of Change.”

Because population composition has such a profound impact on the development and economic well-being of a country, it would seem important for the country to have something like a population policy, and something more than policies that simply respond to the shifts in demand. In fact, nothing resembling a population policy surfaces in Government thinking. Three factors control the size of the country’s population. One is the birth-rate, another the death-rate, and the third migration. Medical advances have made it possible for people to live longer.

Birth-rates are generally not easy to manipulate in an advanced Western society unless it is made difficult to have access to contraception or abortion. A few countries, including China and Singapore, penalise people for having more than a prescribed number of children. Some countries pay bonuses to mothers who have many children. These attempts at population control differ from the general attitude in New Zealand of accepting that people will make their own decisions on the number of children that they will have. Family planning, not population control, is the accepted practice. The individual, not the State, determines the birth-rate. There is, as the report notes, a high incidence of unintended pregnancies, a high proportion of them among teenagers. The report comments on a lack of knowledge among teenagers on the prevention of pregnancies, and remarks that the effect on fertility is at least in part the outcome of legal policies.

Presumably this is a reference to the legal obstruction to conducting educational courses in sex education. However, the legal obstacles are there for moral or possibly religious reasons because it is held that the responsibility lies with parents, or because of a lack of confidence in the ability of the teaching profession to handle the matter competently or with sufficient regard to differing social attitudes towards sex education; The law has nothing to do with population control or the encouragement of population increase. In any event, the incidence of unwanted or ex-nuptial

births, and the trend in their numbers, points just as much to older parents whose sexual knowledge may be assumed to be adequate to prevent pregnancies if they are not wanted. Even if a government were to attempt to influence the size of the population by encouraging or discouraging births, psychological factors may also play a part in determining how many children are born. The effect that the widespread unemployment throughout the world has on birth-rates is something that may become obvious during the next few years. This attitude towards family sizes is a simple extension of expectations of living standards that tend to govern family sizes even in times of prosperity.

The only certain way that the government of a country such as New Zealand can influence the size of the population is through migration, mainly immigration. In recent decades, New Zealand’s immigration programme has been related to the goal of full employment and to the needs for people who have skills that are seen to be lacking. It has been related to labour needs, not to any view of adjusting the pattern of age groups in the population or to any notion of the ideal population size for New Zealand. As the Population Monitoring Group comments, it is possible to change the age composition of the population by migration. In other words, assuming that New Zealand could attract migrants, it would be possible to increase the size of the younger group in New Zealand who would contribute, for some years, to the support of the older group.

The Population Monitoring Group does not advocate this, but surveys some of the policies affected by the trend in the population towards ageing. Peggy Koopman-Boyden, of the sociology department of the University of Canterbury, who is convener of the Population Monitoring Group, has carried out research on the changing trends of family composition and the effects that this might have on housing and medical needs. What the report does not do, and could not be expected to do because it lies outside the scope of a report on population, is to consider the effect on unemployment of the process of taxing the work force to pay for the needs of an ageing population. Those who are unemployed themselves may draw from the tax pool and, although the trend towards higher participation in the work-force by women is observed; the extent to which part-time workers earn enough to contribute to the tax pool is hard to calculate. In any welfare state, the shifts of population between being tax producers and tax consumers are critical to the apportionment of wealth and to the creation of wealth. No less important are the distribution and extent of the physical resources on which the population can work and the economic conditions in which values are put on the product. In relation to these resources, the population can almost always be too great, or too small for the optimum benefit. New Zealand’s problem is not just the total number of people, but their age distribution.