New Zealand is approaching an “unheralded” new reality where those over retirement age outnumber children under 14 - but our huge migration numbers are distracting us from its looming impacts.
The comments follow an announcement from Stats NZ that we have experienced our lowest natural increase in population since World War II - in 1943.
Statistics released in early February showed there were 19,071 more births than deaths in 2023. In 1943, there were just 17,562 more births than deaths.
Population expert Paul Spoonley told the Herald New Zealand was experiencing “replacement level” fertility rates until about 10 years ago, and since then the decline has been “quite rapid”, and was exacerbated by our rapidly ageing population.
We had dropped from 2.1 births per woman to 1.56, he said. The trend follows much of the other high-income countries around the world, some of which have been dealing with such a decline for decades with little success in bringing numbers back up.
“We are actually inverting our population profile,” said Spoonley, a Distinguished Professor at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey University.
“It used to be that the younger age group are easily the biggest . . . we will move in the next few years to be an old age dominant population.
“That’s unheralded. That’s a completely new demographic reality.”
We would become a country where people aged over 65 outnumbered the 0-14 year age group, which Spoonley said was “very unusual”.
“We simply won’t have available enough people in those prime working ages and so the question will become ‘where do you get your workers from?’”
Spoonley believed the population shift was “inevitable” and that New Zealand and its government needed to confront the issue.
“What is concerning is that we’re really not thinking about how things ought to change or how we need to change to respond to this new population.”
Questions included how to fund facilities for people and how to ensure adequate investment in young people when more money would be going to superannuation and health care for the ageing population.
Spoonley said in the next two decades Auckland would experience “major growth” of an extra 500-700,000 people. Other regions would experience population stagnation or decline.
The thing that was different in New Zealand compared to other countries facing the same issue was our huge immigration numbers. Spoonley said 80-90 per cent of Aotearoa’s population growth in recent times came from migration.
“In 2023 New Zealand grew by 2.8 per cent whereas the annual average population growth for the OECD is 0.4 per cent. New Zealand grew at seven times the average for the OECD. That is very high.”
Immigration allowed us to “top up” our numbers, but was not a fix, and the growth in the population was “diverting attention” from the issue that not enough people are being born and staying in New Zealand.
“It’s just not clear to me what the approach of the new Government is going to be.
“We are entering a quite different phase and it’s a phase that we really haven’t encountered before . . . I think we really need to have a conversation about that.
“From 2020 to 2030 we are going to see a very different New Zealand emerge . . . it seems to me a very important decade and it’s one that’s going to change New Zealand fundamentally.”
But Kiwi parents say it simply isn’t feasible to have more children, with some swearing off having kids altogether due to environmental concerns and the high cost of living.
Government policies to help people afford to have and care for children include mostly free maternity care, free doctor visits for children aged 13 and under, 26 weeks paid parental leave, and other financial subsidies such as the $69 per week Best Start payment.
There is also 20 hours of free ECE childcare for children over 3, and free education for children at state schools.
But for parents who spoke to the Herald, other factors such as high rents and house prices, expensive groceries and hefty power bills were still a large barrier to being able to have another child.
Christchurch woman Zac Barclay said she would have loved to have two children, but could not currently see a way for that to happen.
Barclay was just weeks away from giving birth to her daughter, Lydia, when her then-wife announced they wanted to transition to living as a man.
The pair now live apart but have a close co-parenting relationship for Lydia, who is due to turn 1 this weekend. Barclay’s ex takes part in Lydia’s care and pays $80-100 voluntary child support per week.
“The cost of living is insane, and I know it’s much worse in places like Auckland,” she said.
“I’m on a good salary, I get a little bit of Working For Families, I’m not going without, but it’s still really hard. The bills and price of things just keep going up.”
Barclay had always wanted two children, but with her current circumstances and finances, can’t see that happening, particularly as she did not receive any funding for fertility treatment the first time around.
“It’s so hard sometimes. I think about how she would be with other kids. She’s a very social girl, she’s very bubbly, she just wants to make friends . . . she loves the babies at preschool, she pats their heads. She would just be such a good sister.”
Barclay said another child might be a consideration if she owned her own home and had a partner, but then there were still the costs of fertility treatment and general high living costs to overcome.
Meanwhile Waikato couple Jean and Kieran Yern have two children, but have had to let go of their dream of having “at least four” kids, saying they would not be able to give the children as good a quality of life if they had more.
They have 9-year-old Olive and 2-year-old Riley. The family pays low rent to live on a farm that Kieran works on, and Jean works several jobs including teaching te reo Māori. She said they both are paid well, but even so it would be too difficult financially to have another child.
“I come from a family of seven and I’ve seen the beauty of having big families,” Jean said. “I’ve seen it and I love it, and I would love that for my girls and myself.”
She said there would “forever be something missing” and that there was a hole where the rest of her dream family should be.
“We work hard, we hustle, we work full time.”
The couple said if daycare were free for working parents it would make a “massive” difference, and that if all wages were to rise when minimum wage went up, it could help financially. Kieran said it felt as though minimum wage was “catching up” to him despite years in the job.
Jean said they were “very grateful” for the children they did have, but wished they could have more.
“We have so much love to give . . . it’s just something we can’t afford. It’s our decision as adults to make.”
Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.
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