Australia is enjoying a baby boom. Why?

In what he says below Bernard Salt tries desperately to avoid giving credit to the policies of Australia's previous conservative government. Salt says the boom is mostly due to prosperity. But the birthrate rise did not coincide with any obvious leap in prosperity, even allowing for some lags. But the big leap did coincide with the introduction of monetary rewards for having babies. So I am inclined to think that the rise is almost entirely due to the Howard/Costello baby bonus payments and that Rudd's likely scrapping of the payments will largely end the baby boom

Big news during the week: Australia is in the grip of a baby boom. New figures confirm that 285,000 babies were born during 2007 - up 19,000 over the previous 12 months, and up 50,000 from the number recorded in 2001. Australia's fertility rate now stands at 1.93 births per woman. Japan, for example, can manage only a paltry 1.1. The yen might be rising against the Aussie dollar but we can still beat the Japanese at breeding.

Babies are everywhere. But why? During the Great Depression the birth rate plummeted. People do not breed when they are uncertain about the future. But this also means that during times of prosperity, such as the past 18 years, the birth rate rises. Although this increase was far from immediate. It took the whole of the 1990s for Australians to get used to the idea that prosperity was here to stay, for a while at least. As such the birth rate didn't do its hockey-stick up-turn until 2002 - some two years in advance of the baby bonus.

The baby bonus merely accelerated a rising trend, which I think reflected a broader confidence in the future. Australians were already well on their way to "having one for the country" before former treasurer Peter Costello popularised the notion.

There is also the argument that Gen X women who had delayed having children in the 1990s to concentrate on careers suddenly switched priorities at about this time. And to some extent you also have to admit that babies really are infectious. One person has one and before you know it everyone is having a baby. Even celebrities are doing it. Role models such as Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett show that motherhood and glamour are not mutually exclusive. (Are you reading this, Kylie?)

Other factors have also contributed. Medical advances in IVF, and especially in the care of later pregnancies, have given older women the confidence to have children.

A firm and rising birth rate is a federal treasurer's dream. After all, this is an investment in the taxpayer population base in the late 2020s. (A rising tax base makes politicians look good economic managers.) Although it must be said that a rising birth rate can also place pressure on the labour market since more women come out of the workforce to have children, adding to the immediate skills shortage.

But the future of the current baby boom must be questioned with the likely onset of recession in 2009. The figures released this week relate to births in 2007. This time next year the figures will reflect the 2008 trend. And most babies born in 2008 will have been conceived amid the euphoria of prosperity but will be born into a period of uncertainty. Oddly enough the fluctuation of the birth rate over the next two years will be one measure of how seriously Australians regard the current economic crisis.

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A crazed basher free to work with kids

The notorious Leftist VCAT again. If the guy had said anything critical about Muslims he would have been finished. But bashings and insanity are no problem. This should be appealed to the Supreme Court

A court has granted a convicted killer described as "brutal, vicious and cowardly" a licence to work with children. The man spent three years of a five-year sentence in jail for the race-based gang killing of a Samoan teen. But the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal has overturned a Justice Department ban, allowing him to work with children.

Despite the Sunday Herald Sun obtaining the killer's name and image, we are gagged from using them. We are also banned from showing a photo of the fresh faced youth he killed, or identifying the young people's groups the killer works with.

The Justice Department refused him a permit to work with children after checks revealed his past. But a tribunal judge overturned the ban when the killer - a youth worker - appealed against the department's decision.

Before being convicted of manslaughter, the man was convicted of possessing and using cannabis and cultivating and trafficking cannabis and amphetamines. His most recent conviction was in 2002 - after being released on parole from his manslaughter sentence - after he tried to buy amphetamines from an undercover cop.

In her decision, VCAT judge Marilyn Harbison said that in 1995, the man was drinking with a group in Frankston who mistook a family out for ice cream for a rival ethnic gang. "After some preliminary heckling, a fight ensued. In the course of the fight one of the members of the family group was attacked viciously by the group," Judge Harbison said.

The killer and three other main offenders punched and kicked the man, before one of the other offenders stabbed him. ". . .(The) applicant hit him several times viciously with a stick whilst he was lying on the ground," she said. Judge Harbison said the victim died of his stab wounds, but a pathology report found he could have just as easily died from the repeated kicking and punching. The victim died in hospital.

Summarising the Justice Department position, Judge Harbison said: "How could a man who had committed such a violent act be entrusted with the care of children?" But she concluded there was "no unjustifiable (sic) risk to the safety of children from this applicant". The killer had schizophrenia, but it had not contributed to the killing.

She also noted the applicant was remorseful, was in a long-term relationship, had a child and wanted full-time work to set up his family. She said the man's family gave evidence that he was devoted to youth work and wanted to warn others off drugs, alcohol and violence. The sentencing judge in the manslaughter trial described the gang's actions as "brutal, vicious and cowardly". The Justice Department would not comment, but warned identifying the killer would breach an order made by VCAT.

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The faddist hatred of salt has had a worrisome side-effect

Iodine deficiency was long ago thought to be dealt with adequately by putting iodine in table salt. Your salt container probably says "iodized" somewhere on it. There is iodine in sea salt naturally as well. But the report below reveals that iodine deficiency is now showing up. Obviously the totally unwarranted hatred of dietary salt has had the intended effect of reducing consumption of it and the unintended effect of reducing iodine intake

AUSTRALIA'S top food regulator Food Standards Australia New Zealand has ruled that iodine must be added to all bread by September 2009. Food Standards Australia New Zealand is responding to its Australian Total Diet Study, which found that about 43 per cent of Australians have an inadequate iodine intake. It estimates this will drop to no more than 5 per cent after iodine-fortification of bread.

The ATDS is conducted about every two years to ensure the Australian food supply is safe and nutritious. "Insufficient iodine intake, particularly in groups such as pregnant women, babies and young children, is of great concern," Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Ageing Senator Jan McLucas said. "Mild to moderate iodine deficiency can result in children having learning difficulties and can affect the development of motor skills and hearing. "In extreme cases it can result in severe intellectual disability."

Women aged 19 to 49 need between 100 and 200 micrograms of iodine a day but the study found 70 per cent were not getting enough. Ten per cent of children aged two to three years are also not getting enough iodine.

Ninety-six types of food were tested in a "table-ready" state for the trace elements selenium, chromium, molybdenum, nickel and iodine. The survey found that selenium intake also needed further investigation. FSANZ chief scientist Dr Paul Brent said that the agency had taken a new approach to producing a world-leading total diet study focused exclusively on nutrients.

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Brain-dead Greenie assumptions underly Australian climate proposals

China and India have ALREADY said: "No deal"

You don't have to be a Treasury modeller to work out that if the developed world signs up to a global climate change deal next year and the biggest emitters in the developing world agree to follow suit soon after, then "carbon leakage" isn't going to be a huge problem. Carbon leakage is the spectre raised by many emissions-intensive trading industries - such as LNG, cement and aluminium - that they will be forced offshore if made to bear a domestic carbon price when their competitors overseas pay none.

If their competitors overseas are already paying a price, or are clearly going to have to pay one in the relatively near future, then long-term investment decisions won't be influenced by the international price differentials. That, effectively, is what the comprehensive Treasury modelling released yesterday assumes. Given the stated intentions of the European Union and both US presidential candidates, this assumption may prove right. Given the back-pedalling by some EU members and the political ramifications of the present economic meltdown in the US, it might not be.

If it does prove right, then the news from this ambitious modelling exercise is good. The costs to Australian businesses and households of the proposed emissions trading scheme seem manageable. Electricity price rises of between 17 and 24 per cent are not insignificant. But translated into an extra $4 or $5 on the average weekly power bill they don't seem impossible either, particularly with the compensation the Government has already promised.

The upheavals in Australian industry will also be significant, with some sectors thriving and others shrinking. And there will, of course, be major changes in the way we generate electricity, this being one of the main points of the exercise. But if the carbon price ratchets up slowly and structural adjustment money is available for sectors and regions hit hardest, these difficulties don't seem insurmountable either. Kevin Rudd made it pretty clear on the 7.30 Report last night that a slow rachetting up is exactly what he has in mind. The Prime Minister sounded like a thesaurus reciting the entries for cautious: "calm", "cool", "sober", "practical". He was going all out to be reassuring. And the modelling makes the economic case for acting quickly clear. The environmental case for rapid action already was.

But the big unanswered question is where we will end up if the assumption is wrong, if Copenhagen fails, if the outcome is messy. Surely we have to take into account the possibility that the pressures of the global economic crisis will mean isolationist short-term self-interest prevails over a multilateral solution in the interests of all.

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