Disrupting demography: population collapse and rebound

The expression 'demography is destiny' was used by the Commonwealth Treasurer Peter Costello in 2003 when launching the first Intergenerational Equity report in order to concentrate the mind of the electorate on the consequences of an ageing population on government revenue. In a subsequent speech he elaborated on this, stating that the percentages of age groups within the population had changed from 1962 to 2002, and were predicted to change by 2042, for those aged under fifteen years from over 30 per cent to less than 20 per cent, and then less than 15 per cent; and for those over sixty-five years from 8.5 per cent to 12.7 per cent, and then around 25 per cent (Costello 2004). The effect of this change on the ratio of people aged between fifteen and sixty-four years to those aged sixty-five years and over fell from 7.3 in 1975 to 4.5 in 2015, and is predicted to fall to 2.7 by 2055 (2015 Intergenerational Report). The emphasis given to this demographic shift by government and media obscures the opposite direction of change for the nation's Indigenous people, and suffocates discourse on its effect on parenting and hence the health and wellbeing of children. The financial imperatives for the commodification of allo-parenting in mainstream society through daycare and after school care facilities also plays a role in silencing discussion about the effect on Aboriginal children and child-rearing practices of the rapid shift to the pyramidal shape of the population profile such that half the population in remote Aboriginal Australia is sub-adult. Given that one of the three fundamental prerequisites of human parenting is the presence of allo-parents to fulfil the needs of cooperative parenting, then the absence of sufficient close female kin to assist in caring for the babies and children of young Aboriginal mothers goes unseen. In this chapter I describe the events that led to this present situation