Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What are the greatest issues facing us as a society? I would say our birthrate is actually a good litmus test on the confidence and optimism of our nation. We want Australian families. We need Australian families, and we want and need couples to raise little Australians. On that front, we are failing miserably. Our birthrate year on year has declined, and we're doing very little to stem that decline. The government's own department records birthrate in freefall, and it's expected to continue to decline. We've prioritised very high levels of immigration over natural increase by birth. In 2023-24, we had a natural increase of 105,000 little Australians, which is births less deaths, and a net overseas migration of 423,000 people. In 2025-26, our natural increase is expected to decline to 99,000. By 2065—and this is what should make every one of us deeply concerned—when we are, according to government data, expected to have a population of 41 million people, we will have a natural population increase of just 69,000 new little Australians, and that's for a population of 41 million people. We have very little time to turn this around, and I believe that there are some levers that the government can pull and they must pull hard to arrest this decline.

In 2023, we had a fertility rate low of 1.49, and then that has dipped further. New data from the Centre of Population says that in 2026 it is expected to decline to 1.42 children per couple, the lowest it has ever been—lower than during the Great Depression and lower than during World War I and World War II. In the early 2000s, the Howard government saw this and were concerned by this, and they implemented a raft of measures and actually asked the Australian community to have another baby. That saw in 2005-2006 an increase in just that one year of 2.4 per cent. We need to do that again.

Why are couples not having families? Many couples in my community tell me they simply can't afford to have a family. Nearly half of young Australians cite the expense of raising children as a major obstacle. Over half of Australians under 35 have delayed parenthood due to cost pressures, and child care in Australia consumes well above OECD average share of household expenses. Child care is inflexible. Many young people say to me: 'I don't want to have children for them to grow up in a childcare centre and for those places to be the ones that see the first steps and hear the first words. I want to be able to raise my own children where one of us can stay home.' Now that choice is considered a luxury.

We have no meaningful tax incentives for families with children. We do not offer income splitting, nor do we have any tax offsets. Income splitting would allow a family's tax burden to be divided and collected across two spouses. This creates a fairness because the same family income can have two very different tax bills. For example, one family with a whole family income of $200,000 where both are earning $100,000 each can have a combined tax bill of $41,000, whereas the same income of $200,000 as a family where one member is at home raising children and the other is out earning the $200,000 pays $56,000 in tax, a nearly $15,000 difference. This is unfair. Thirteen OECD nations allow income splitting, including the United States, France, Germany, Poland and Spain. If we want to arrest the decline, this is one measure that we can do. This is saying, 'We value families. We value families being created in our nation.'

Out-of-pocket expenses for child care, whether it's day care or vacation care, are a legitimate work expense, yet we do not allow families to claim this on their tax return. We should do everything we can to support families to thrive. Income splitting and ensuring that out-of-pocket childcare expenses can be classed as a work related deduction are two measures that would really make a difference to young couples who want to create a family—or perhaps they have one child, and they can't imagine being able to afford a second child.

The second issue we must address urgently is housing affordability. This is the biggest lever we can pull and one that I think we can do very swiftly. House prices have skyrocketed over a decade and so has our population. In 2016, the median house price in metropolitan South Australia was $494,000. In January this year, it's $996,000. That's nearly a million dollars. The average new mortgage in South Australia is around $600,000. Those monthly repayments sit at around $3,600. And, of course, we've just had an interest rate rise. You can't have those mortgage repayments and have a family. There just isn't the financial bandwidth. Both couples must be working full time and only covering their own expenses.

We've had successive governments constantly create policies that increase housing demand and do not reduce it. The government's latest solution was to create a subprime disaster in the wings for first home buyers through the five per cent deposit scheme. This policy, according to the government's own data, was expected to increase house prices by 0.5 per cent. The reality is the demand has surged, and prices have surged, and the government's own modelling was proven false. Just recently, in the Guardian it was reported, 'Hot competition for cheaper Australian homes has powered a relentless "up-crash" in prices despite rising interest rates'. And, 'Inner-city one-bedroom units in Brisbane have risen close to $20,000 each week, making sales prices from as recent as January irrelevant.'

This was bound to happen: when you add a further demand lever without taking away a demand lever—such as the very high numbers of migration since COVID—you are adding fuel onto an already lit fire. We must take the heat out of this insanity, and the only sensible and logical way to do this is to reduce migration numbers immediately. This means both permanent migration and temporary migration. The government says that the rate of permanent migration hasn't changed, at 185,000 each year, but realistically that rate is too high when we look at the fact that just 36,294 new dwellings were completed in 2025. In 2000, our net permanent migration rate was 74,000. That is a much more sustainable figure. This is not about people coming from any particular country; this is just saying that the demand is overwhelming. The supply is not there, and we are squeezing ordinary, everyday Australians out of housing. That's not even to mention the 2.98 million temporary visa holders in Australia, which is a new record across ABS quarterly stats.

Every person needs somewhere to live, so that's fuelling demand, particularly in the rental market. In September last year, 736,000 of those 2.98 million temporary visa holders were student visas, over 225,000 were graduate visas and just under 400,000 people were on bridging visas. Cutting migration down to prepandemic levels, stripping 100,000 out of our permanent migrant numbers would allow housing prices to slow and trigger immediate relief for the nation's battered renters and first home buyers.

FoundIt's modelling showed that aligning migration with building completions would strip two to three per cent off national home prices growth annually. It's going to slam the breaks on runaway prices, and it will also address that structural vice of squeezing the entry-level housing market. Stripping roughly 100,000 people from the intake to return to prepandemic levels—that's not a huge ask; that's not a radical thing to say—would allow compression of growth without causing a catastrophic housing crash. Right now in Australia, we have fewer young couples having babies and we have fewer families. Families are the foundation of our nation. We must address what I see as a crisis. How can it be that in 2065, when we will supposedly have 41 million people living in Australia, we're going to have fewer than 70,000 new Australians, when we take births away from deaths? We must do more.

We must create policies in this place that are pro-family, and we're not doing that at the moment. I urge the government to look at making income splitting a reality and to look at the foundations around whether that's increasing family tax. There is a whole raft of things we can do that says to young couples, 'We want you to have a family, we know you want to have a family and we're going to do everything we can in this place to make that a reality for you.' That should not be an unattainable dream in Australia in 2026, but, very sadly, right now it is.