Our fertility rate is declining, and families aren’t the apple pie picture they used to be, so why do our politicians keep talking as if nothing has changed?

In February this year, New Zealand experienced its lowest natural increase in population in 80 years.  

Data released by Stats NZ last week showed the total fertility rate was 1.53 births per woman. In the mid-1950s, during the “baby boom”, Pākehā women had, on average, 3.8 live births, while Māori women had almost seven.

Women are having children later than ever before. The birth rates of older mothers increased as those of younger mothers decreased until about 2010. According to Stats NZ data, both are now falling. Our population is also aging and fast. Writing for the Sunday Star-Times recently, Nikki Macdonald described what’s happening now as the opposite of a “baby boom”, calling it “New Zealand’s baby bust“.

As a household unit, families with kids have been in decline since 2010 when childless or empty-nest couples replaced the “iconic families of Mum, Dad and the kids as New Zealand’s most common kind of household.”

As economist Shamubeel Eaqub pointed out in a LinkedIn post recent data that shows a growth in households of families with children is predictable because of very strong net migration in recent years. “A large chunk of migrants tends to be in family formation ages or migrate with families”, he wrote.

Stats NZ projections that assume medium fertility rates, mortality and migration forecast that of the 2.27m households that may exist by 2043, 1.7m will be families, while just over 564,000 would be classified as single-person households or other multi-person households. Of the 1.7m households classified as family households, 37.7% of them will be couple-no-children households, while 16.9% could be one-parent families. 45.4% are projected to be two-parent families.

Last week, finance minister Nicola Willis invoked one of this country’s most beloved and politically mythologised constituencies, the “Kiwi mum and dad”. Discussing recommendations from the Commerce Commission on the banking sector, Willis supercharged the already popular national sport of Australian-owned bank bashing by tripling the number of “Kiwis” involved in one potential solution to the complicated issue of increasing competition in the sector. Willis said she wants to “create a pathway that would allow Kiwi mums and dads via their KiwiSaver accounts to beef up Kiwibank.”

The bill, which facilitated the selling down of 49% of the government’s ownership in three electricity gentailers and 20% of its stake in Air New Zealand, had, in part, been pitched to the public by then finance minister Bill English and state owned enterprises minister Tony Ryall, as a way of increasing opportunities for “mum and dad investors”.

Treasury later revealed that companies, trusts and institutional investors took part in the “mum and dad investor” retail share offer for Mighty River Power.

Wanting to highlight the use of “Kiwi mums and dads” as the spoonful of sugar that helps unpalatable medicine go down, especially when it comes to asset sales, Cunliffe said he’d looked through the bill to find a definition of a “Kiwi mum and dad”. 

“Was it going to be the case that if you had not had children, you could not buy a share? There is no definition of ‘mums and dads’, because that was always public relations spin,” he said.

Three years later, Cunliffe seemed to forget he’d pointed out what he viewed as political trickery and settled back into the comfortable arms of sticking up for New Zealand’s most put-upon and aspirational subset of voters in a speech in the House about the brightline test. “So who are the beneficiaries?” he asked. “Well, I can think of some. It certainly is not Kiwi mums and dads, because they are going to be paying more for their mortgages and slave for 50 years, not 30.”

As someone without children, it’s only honest to say that hearing the phrase “Kiwi mums and dads” occasionally stings the small and sensitive part of me that is sometimes sad about not being able to have kids. That sting is smaller than the eye twitch I get because a swathe of the voting, homeowning and KiwiSaver-holding population have been erased or are expected to lump being lumped in as “Kiwi mums and dads” when they are neither a mum nor a dad. The non-homeowning, unable-to-save-a-lot population doesn’t even seem to exist, especially when it comes to opportunities for improving their lot via property investment, wealth generation and retirement savings schemes. Even if they are mums and dads, they’re apparently not “Kiwi”.

Based on the repeated use of “Kiwi mums and dads”, politicians of almost every stripe still view this group as a homogeneous and highly desired block of swing voters who are, most importantly, hardworking and ideologically deserving of opportunities to grow their wealth. They bear many burdens and harbour many aspirations about owning quarter-acre sections and chunks of our vital infrastructure. Talking about them as the beneficiaries of certain policies softens the hard edges of big company sell-offs. If you work hard enough for the right reasons, you too can participate in the great New Zealand economy for your gain and the sake of future generations. Your desires are less selfish. The amorphous “Kiwi mum and dad” helps politicians mask inequalities that contribute to the uneven way wealth is obtained and distributed and blur uncomfortable truths about class in this country.

It also helps to obscure some truths about our economy. New Zealand’s fertility rate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The replacement rate is the number of births women need to have on average for the population to replace itself in the long term, with no migration. “No migration” is unimaginable for our economy. Yet, we continue to politically dance around any long-term position about its role and our obligations to those who come and work here. As it stands, some of these potential “Kiwi mums and dads” get a later start on the road towards being the politically imagined “Kiwi mums and dads” because migrants on temporary work, student or visitor visas cannot have a KiwiSaver until they transition to resident-class visas.

Politicians seem to love talking about families as long as they conjure up benign and comforting fiction. The reasons for our declining fertility rate, the factors influencing people’s decisions to have children, and the consequences of change in the makeup of our population are not benign or comforting. We urgently need grown-up conversations and ideas about population, productivity, immigration and economies of scale. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug, and after a period of rapid change and upheaval, there’s comfort to be found in thinking about the good old days and the notions of stability represented in certain ideas of family. To stare down our challenges and realities, though, we need to remove the rose-tinted glasses that only show us the mums and dads of generations past and the politically convenient present and deal with what’s real.