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Jenny Nicholls on a professor’s warnings about our aging and bloating population
There are too many boomers, but not enough kids. New Zealand is aging fast, but unevenly. In provincial cities, shops are empty and bungalows are hard to sell. Meanwhile, Auckland swells like Violet, the blueberry addict in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It is in stark contrast to the demographic trend abroad, which points to large cities shrinking. In a decade or so, Auckland is likely to host around 40 percent of the country’s population, which will require “dazzling” levels of civic funding.
Demographics, the composition of populations, matter. As an expert in the field, Massey University professor Paul Spoonley presents a wealth of disturbing data in his portrait of who we are. New Zealand.
Our own composition of the population happened quickly. “The past,” he writes, “is not a good indicator of the future. The demographic transition [in New Zealand] it is so profound that there is little in our historical responses to guide us … in 2017 there were more people over 65 than under five; this has never happened before in high-income countries. “
Population projections in the past were too flawed, Spoonley argues, to help formulate useful social policy. In 2004, New Zealand was predicted to contain five million by 2050. In fact, we got there four months ago; only 30 years before. “How did we get so wrong with those forecasts?” I ask Herald general business editor Liam Dann in January, in an article on New Zealand’s unexpected population boom.
Chapters with titles like “Ok Boomer,” “The Rise or Fall of Regions,” and “Modern Families” contain a lot of disturbing demographics. A concept that could be loosely understood, the national yoke of life-transforming education debt, perhaps, is explained in breathtaking numbers.
Spoonley writes: “Since 1992, 1.3 million New Zealanders have taken out student loans and have borrowed a total of NZ $ 26.6 billion. Currently, more than 700,000 New Zealanders have some level of debt related to fees. The average debt is $ 16,125 and more than 100,000 have past-due student loans. “This book is full of numbers of great importance. They rise and recede and, creeping back, threaten to overwhelm us. In 1989, the average rate of tertiary education was of $ 516. In 2016, it was $ 6,938.
Education debt, says Spoonley (born 1951), “has been a major factor in prolonging the transition from dependent student to independent adult, stifling the opportunity to establish relationships, buy a home, etc.” New Zealand millennials (those born between 1981 and 2000) entered adulthood with massive levels of educational debt as homes increased in value and jobs became, not only harder to come by, but less unionized, less safe and less lucrative. Lunch break? What is that?
The book is marketed as a wake-up call. There are some very scary things here, but we might wish Spoonley had left her scholarly prose hanging in the closet and pulled out her megaphone more often. A phrase that is not atypical: “The demographic changes under way are so unprecedented that they challenge normative views on key social and cultural institutions.” Sounds serious! It hurt?
“Spoonley presents climate change as something that worries millennials”
Spoonley explores recent arguments against “unrestricted immigration,” including Ranginui Walker’s point that New Zealand’s first immigration policy was Te Tiriti or Waitangi. His own views on immigration could be analyzed from paragraphs like this: “One of the enigmas of modern demographics is that at the very moment when many countries need to address stagnation and possibly population decline, immigration it is often considered one of the least desirable options. There is good evidence that migration contributes to economic and social vitality in various ways, and to population growth ”. Immigration, he says, is “one of the most powerful tools in the demographic toolkit as societies respond to the very different demographics of the 21st century.”
Yet it is strange that climate change is mentioned so fleetingly in a book on demographic ebbs and flows. I’m sure it’s not his intention, but Spoonley presents it as something that worries millennials, one of those quaint definitions of being a millennial, rather than an impending apocalypse that will drive migration sooner. Understanding this does not require youth or activism. It requires not being dead for the last twenty years. It requires being able to read a newspaper.
At New York Times this year, environmental reporter Abrahm Lustgarten wrote: “New research suggests that climate change will cause humans to move in unprecedented numbers… People are already starting to flee. In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rains and drought have made farming difficult, the World Bank points to more than eight million people who have moved to the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of people from rural areas have moved to the coasts and cities amid drought and widespread poor harvests. If the flight from hot climates reaches the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a large reallocation of the world’s populations. “
New Zealand has always been the lucky country, and our luck has stood like a rubber band hurting ping, keeping the door closed against Covid. But, says the professor, New Zealand, post-Covid, even post-Boomer, risks becoming a place millennials and post-millennials will not want to live in. We need our politicians to understand these demographic issues, to explain to all of us, to use them in decision-making, he argues. It will not be easy. We need new economic models, new ways of thinking and, sorry, super retarded. Or will it be poor old New Zealand, nothing new about it, with all the problems of an aging population – rural poverty, urban decay, ugly and politicized immigration debates – and a chronic shortage of workers.
New Zealand by Paul Spoonley (Massey University Press, $ 39.99) is available at bookstores nationwide.
* ReadingRoom reviews appear supported by Creative New Zealand *
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