Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Alan McDonald: EMA Head of Advocacy & Strategy on natural population growth hitting the lowest point since World War II
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Birth rate stats our natural population, that's birth minus death.
- 0:04Speaker 1: The growth rate the lowest since the nineteen forties, that's
- 0:08Speaker 1: when all the men were away fighting a world war.
- 0:10Speaker 1: So the replacement rate we need two point one. We
- 0:14Speaker 1: are at one point five, and that's down from one
- 0:16Speaker 1: point seven. Alan McDonald, MA, head of Advocacy and Strategy,
- 0:19Speaker 1: joins me this morning.
- 0:20Speaker 2: Alan, Good morning, Ryan.
- 0:22Speaker 1: Why is this a problem for I mean not just
- 0:24Speaker 1: for the country, but for our workforce.
- 0:27Speaker 2: Well, you need to replenish your workforce and that's young
- 0:31Speaker 2: people and obviously with that low birth rate and it's
- 0:34Speaker 2: been low, well below two point one for quite some time. Now,
- 0:39Speaker 2: fifteen twenty years down the track, where are all our workers.
- 0:43Speaker 1: We won't need them because of AI.
- 0:45Speaker 2: Right, No, that's not true. The thing with AI is
- 0:50Speaker 2: that it's going to disrupt, it's not going to replace.
- 0:52Speaker 2: And that's true of just about every major techniccological advance
- 0:56Speaker 2: we've had. If you go back to the steam engine
- 0:58Speaker 2: and the ladlites, you know who broke up machinery because
- 1:02Speaker 2: they feared they would lose jobs. But what will happen
- 1:05Speaker 2: is that the workplace will shift, but there'll be the
- 1:09Speaker 2: interface between the technology and people. So we're still going
- 1:12Speaker 2: to need the people, and.
- 1:13Speaker 1: We've seen governments the world over try and tackle this.
- 1:16Speaker 1: China's trying, Japan's trying. Career is trying. Nothing seems to
- 1:20Speaker 1: be working. What do you do.
- 1:23Speaker 2: Well, despite what some political parties think, we're probably going
- 1:28Speaker 2: to have to go to the immigrant pool. That's one thing.
- 1:31Speaker 2: I mean, as you noted, the incentive kind of stuff
- 1:34Speaker 2: doesn't work. They've tried it most recently and Hungary. I
- 1:37Speaker 2: think where you've got your tax free if you had
- 1:39Speaker 2: three children, and the birth rate actually dropped and increased.
- 1:43Speaker 2: So it is something that's recognized around the world. And
- 1:46Speaker 2: we have the second or third fastest aging population in
- 1:49Speaker 2: the world as well. So I think one of the
- 1:52Speaker 2: things we're going to have to look at is retraining
- 1:54Speaker 2: our older people to fill the gaps in the workforce
- 1:58Speaker 2: in different areas through the back down of the chains.
- 2:02Speaker 1: They've even tried things weird things like in China they
- 2:05Speaker 1: increased the tax on contracept but they increase the tax
- 2:08Speaker 1: on condoms as one way trying to fix this problem.
- 2:11Speaker 1: That didn't work.
- 2:12Speaker 2: Okay, Well, Winston's spoiling a baby bonus, isn't he.
- 2:16Speaker 1: That's why five k I, you got three of them, Okay,
- 2:21Speaker 1: retrain the older people and bring in the migrants.
- 2:25Speaker 2: Well that's that's what's going to happen. Otherwise, yes, you
- 2:29Speaker 2: will be right. We're just going to have to use
- 2:30Speaker 2: technology to replace things. But that everything says that doesn't
- 2:34Speaker 2: work either.
- 2:35Speaker 1: Allan McDonald em a head of Adovacy Research.
- 2:38Speaker 2: For more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge, listen live
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