Latest baby boom in Oz

By Alex Brooks | November 28, 2009
Latest baby boom in Oz

Next time you're stuck in the pram jam at the café you can blame Australia's baby boom, with our country experiencing the largest number of births since the end of the second world war.

Women aged in their late 30s are driving the nation's new baby boom, while more women are having children in their 20s, paving the way for a return to larger families, the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show.

A record 296,600 births were recorded last year, 11,400 or 4 per cent more than in the previous record year, 2007. The overall fertility rate last year edged within a whisker of two babies a woman -- a far cry from the low of 1.73 in 2001 that, along with a rapidly ageing population, prompted fears of long-term economic stagnation. The total fertility rate -- the number of babies a woman can expect to bear during her reproductive lifetime -- reached 1.97 last year, up from 1.92 in 2007. Not since 1977 has the birth rate been above 2.0.

How old are today's mums?

Women in their 30s accounted for 55 per cent of the increase, the ABS said. "The fertility rate for women aged 35-39 years continued to increase, reaching 70.9 babies per 1000 women in 2008,'' the ABS report found. "This was the highest rate for women aged 35-39 since 1948.'' So for once the headlines are right: we are in a baby boom. It won't be nearly as big as the post-war boom - where the fertility rate hit a peak of 3.5 babies in 1961 - but the fertility rate has been rising sharply for five years. Why is it happening? Well, you'd have to be a very simple soul to believe it's because parents are responding to the incentive of the $5000 baby bonus - children are hugely expensive. Australia has one of the fastest growing populations thanks to the rising birth rate and increasing immigration, but even that's not enough to make up for our ever-ageing population numbers.

What the experts say

According to demographers - the experts that study population shifts - the arithmetic explanation is not that parents are deciding to have more kids, but that they're deciding not to leave it so late to get started on a family. Foreseechange's Charlie Nelson says it's things like changes in the timing of child-bearing that do most to influence the annual fertility rate. The post-war baby boom occurred because, between 1945 and 1972, women started their families earlier and earlier.

After 1972 the trend reversed and women started their families later and later. The advent of the pill and the legalising of abortion probably had something to do with these trends, but so did the higher levels of education attained by women, and by women's desire to get established in their career - and maybe in home ownership - before starting a family. This trend to delay child-bearing continued until the early 2000s, and now it's starting to reverse with the older women quickly squeezing in a baby while the younger women choose motherhood at an earlier age.

States with more babies

Roughly one third of all Australian babies - 94,700 - were born in NSW, where births are rising faster than in any state other than Western Australia, increasing 5.8 per cent between 2007 and 2008, compared to the national increase of 4 per cent. "It has taken people by surprise," the Australian National University demographer, Peter McDonald told an Australian newspaper. "It's putting strain on schools, childcare centres and maternity wards at the same time as our population is ageing."

Women aged 30 to 34 led the way, producing 128 babies per 1000 - more than any other age group, and the highest rate since 1961. Women aged 35 to 39 produced more babies per 1000 than at any time since 1948. The real catch is that even though there will be more babies, they will still be outnumbered by older people as the Baby Boomer generation born in the 1960s enters retirement.

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